Carmelites leave Peru for Spain after threats from ‘land traffickers’

Bishop Casimiro López Llorente of Segorbe-Castellón in Valencia welcomed the nuns as a ‘gift from God’ to his diocese.

A community of 10 Carmelite nuns from Peru moved to Spain, leaving a deprived quarter of Lima where land-traffickers threatened to kill them.

The Discalced Carmelite community in Manchay were harassed for four years by traffickers who seized part of their land used by the nuns to breed livestock. On one occasion, traffickers seeking more territory threatened to set the monastery ablaze with gas.

A former parish priest from Manchay told Peruvian reporters that they also demanded the community pay them a “quota”. Around 40 murders are committed per year by contracted hitman in the neighbourhood in south-east Lima.

“The Carmel is about silence, prayer and life in community. All of that was under threat there,” said Sr María Cándida de la Eucaristía, the prioress of the community which moved to eastern Spain last month

On 13 August, the nuns settled in the monastery of St Joseph and St Teresa in the city of Onda, Valencia, after their move was approved by the Archbishop of Lima Cardinal Carlos Castillo and the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life.

Bishop Casimiro López Llorente of Segorbe-Castellón welcomed the nuns, as a “gift from God”.

“God never abandons us, even in the times where vocations in general and particularly to the consecrated contemplative life have entered the desert,” he said at a Mass to welcome the Carmelites.

He thanked the volunteers who had worked “tirelessly” to prepare the monastery, occupied by Poor Clares until 2022, for the nuns’ arrival.

Bishop López said the Carmelites would pray “with and for” the local community, adding: “Let us also learn to pray with them, to value their presence as a fount of spiritual life which will be fecund for the whole diocese.”

Six local convents have closed in recent years. Three years ago, the Poor Clares of Onda left to join a larger monastery in in Alcalá de Henares, central Spain.

The mother superior from Alcalá attended the Mass at the end of August with the two last Poor Clares to live in Onda. “We are profoundly joyful that this house remains the dwelling of the Lord. Today we feel united in prayer and mission to the Carmelites,” she said.

Alluding to the “pain” of closing the monastery in 2022, she continued: “We never lost hope that God would find a way of ensuring it did not stay empty.”

The Mayoress of Onda Carmina Ballester told the nuns: “Onda feels blessed by your presence.”

Tongues of fire – a former cloistered nun recalls Pentecost

UNVEILED: From the cloister to the coalface – being a nun today

Stay updated — add us as a preferred news source on Google: