Texas nuns dismissed from religious life after lengthy feud with bishop, Vatican

CNA Staff, Oct 29, 2024 / 14:05 pm

A group of Texas nuns has been dismissed from religious life after a lengthy feud with their bishop over the governance of their monastery.

Mother Marie of the Incarnation, the president of the Association of Christ the King, said in a letter to the Diocese of Fort Worth on Monday that the nuns of the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Arlington, Texas, have been dismissed from the Order of Discalced Carmelites and “reverted to the lay state” after more than a year of sustained defiance of their superiors.

The dismissal caps a bitter and divisive feud between the Carmelite nuns and Church authorities ranging from Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson to the Vatican itself.

The controversy began last year when Olson launched an investigation into the monastery amid allegations that Reverend Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach had conducted an affair with a priest.

The nuns in May 2023 filed a lawsuit against Olson over the investigation, claiming violations of privacy and harming the physical and emotional well-being of the sisters. Olson eventually dismissed Gerlach from religious life.

In April of this year, the Vatican declared that the Association of Christ the King in the United States of America would oversee the “government, discipline, studies, goods, rights, and privileges” of the Texas monastery.

The nuns, however, defied the Vatican order, going so far as to associate with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist group that is not in full communion with the Catholic Church and has a canonically irregular status.

‘Our only wish is that they would repent’

On Monday, Mother Marie of the Incarnation said the nuns’ repeated defiance included denying the authority of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life as well as denying the authority of their bishop and of Marie herself as their superior. She said the nuns also committed “unlawful formal association” with SSPX. 

These violations were “exacerbated by their illicit expropriation of the juridic person of the Carmelite monastery,” Mother Marie wrote. 

The nuns “entrusted to laypeople” the property of the monastery, she said, which “had been entrusted to them by countless benefactors, for the purpose of serving Christ in the Church through the Discalced Carmelite life.”

The nuns’ dismissal from religious life was brought about “by their own actions,” Mother Marie wrote. 

“I ask for your continued prayers and sacrifices on behalf of these seven women,” she said, adding that “our only wish is that the dismissed members of the Carmel would repent, so that the monastic property could again be rightly called a monastery, inhabited by Discalced Carmelite nuns, in good canonical standing with the Church of Rome.”

In a brief statement accompanying the announcement, Olson echoed Mother Marie’s call for prayers for the dismissed nuns, while also directing that Catholics refrain from attending Mass at the monastery. 

He also requested that the faithful “not offer financial support” to the nuns. 

In a letter last month, Olson had responded to reports that the nuns had reinstalled Gerlach as prioress in an illicit election. The bishop described the move as “scandalous” and “permeated with the odor of schism.”

In her Monday letter, Mother Marie noted that a Carmelite nun “vows to live according to the rule and constitutions of the Order of Discalced Carmelites.”

The nuns were given the opportunity to reunify themselves with the Church, she noted, but they “have chosen otherwise, and their choices have brought upon themselves the different status which is now theirs.”

This article was updated on Oct. 29, 2024.