The rebel nuns of the Kloster Goldenstein convent, just outside Salzburg, Austria, were late. “They will come. But it’s a big building, and they aren’t so fast these days,” their translator told me. “So, please don’t leave.” But I had nowhere else I’d rather be than anticipating the arrival on to my screen of several slow-moving, so-called rebel nuns.
I understand why everyone wants a piece of them. A little prurience is par for the course when it comes to reclusive all-female religious communities (though the Goldenstein nuns are part of a religious order that does not live under claustration). In this case, though, it’s also just a really good story. In December 2023, three nuns in their eighties were sequestered to a care home against their will. Actually, this detail is up for debate: the sisters insist it’s true; the spokesperson for the abbot who manages their convent argues they agreed. The abbot’s defence for uprooting them: according to Church rule, orders cannot continue with fewer than six members. For over 20 years, Sisters Regina, Rita and Bernadette were the only members of their community. This echoes the decline in women entering religious orders in the Catholic Church across the world.
It was soon obvious to all who visited how unhappy the sisters were in their new environment. And so, in late 2024, some of their former pupils confected a plan to bring them home. This September, they picked the sisters up in an Opel sedan and drove them over to their former residence, where a locksmith was on hand to break them back in to their living quarters.
As the Goldenstein nuns appear in frame, my screen glitches. Their faces are blurred and abstracted until the pixels settle and I have before me two elderly women garbed in full skunk-coloured habits, so that their faces seem to float, neckless. Sister Bernadette is the oldest of the rebel nuns at 88. She talks a lot more than Sister Rita, 81, who sits to her left, smiling. Sister Regina, 86, is otherwise engaged.
At first it felt awful to want to protest the new path set out for them by their superiors, the sisters told me. They tried so hard to submit to their fate. But Sister Rita, particularly, was tremendously homesick. When I asked what made her so homesick, she began to cry. She’d missed her daily tasks at the convent, the sense of purpose it afforded her. She missed the brio of the schoolchildren who breathed life into Goldenstein. All three of them struggled to live among so many unbelievers. It became harder to pray or even feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, after decades spent in a place that had felt so obviously infused with the holy – any time there’s a rainbow in the area, they tell me, it hangs directly over Goldenstein. Their suffering echoes so many people’s experiences in care homes. Once the rituals and habits out of which your life is constructed are abolished, you may come to feel like a shadow of yourself.
They now believe that what was done to them was not right. They made a promise to remain at the convent until the close of their mortal lives. This covenant was broken without their consent. Sister Bernadette and Sister Regina were taken from the hospital where they’d been recovering from illness to the care home, in their pyjamas, under the illusion that they were going back to Goldenstein. The sisters would not give me further details about those who orchestrated the move. We want to keep the media focus on the sisters, who have “no bad feelings against the people who did this to them”, the translator explained to me, and also there is a legal case ongoing.
The final vows a nun must take in most religious orders are those of poverty, chastity and obedience. What fascinated me about the Goldenstein nuns’ story was how their plight required them to question and then resist Church authority, thus exposing the vital distinction between obedience to God’s unconditional will and obedience to man, who is saddled with his endlessly fallible and corruptible human heart. Their insubordination towards patriarchal authority has a precedent in the history of female religious orders. In Bologna in the 17th century, one community of nuns’ refusal to obey episcopal orders, which they deemed worth resisting, became so inflammatory that they ended up assaulting the clergy member who came to their convent to “make them see reason”. In 16th-century Siena, one convent requested and then received papal exemption from enclosure, so that they might go out into their city to perform charitable acts. Their liberation was brief. Soon the Church authorities had them permanently locked up in their convent again, fearful of these women becoming too free.
I asked the nuns what their first day home was like, and this time it was Sister Bernadette’s turn to cry. After almost two years of neglect, it was full of rubbish. They’ve spent the last four weeks (between all the interviews and usual acts of prayer) with the help of their former students, restoring Goldenstein to its former glory. Every day there has been a miracle, Bernadette said. Sometimes there are five miracles in one day. They can’t know what is ahead, for who can, but they pray for more Catholic women to become nuns. “Without prayers, without nuns,” they said, “it would be the end of the world.” And, while the extinction of nuns was not on my list for possible apocalyptic triggers, I am reassured by the fact of their continued existence within the varied landscape of contemporary Christianity. These resilient, unusual communities of women who, in this case at least, attempt to speak truth to power through their faith.
[Further reading: Britain’s digital delinquents]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor