Force of habit

Nuns who broke back into convent missed old home

- Kate Connolly Elsbethen

Sister Bernadette recalls how she once struggled to wake her pupils at the Goldenstein convent boarding school. "They would plead with me: 'Just five more minutes' snooze, Berna'," she chuckled.

More than 50 years on, the tables have been turned, with former pupils taking it in turns to wake the three remaining nuns at the convent.

"Sister Bernadette in particular likes a lie-in," said Christina Wirtenberger, one of their carers.

Sisters Bernadette, 88, Regina, 86, and Rita, almost 82, are still recovering from the shock of having run away on 4 September from a nearby retirement home where they had been placed - they say against their will - and broken back into their former convent, the imposing Schloss Goldenstein, in Elsbethen, just outside Salzburg.

The nuns' superior since 2022, the provost Markus Grasl, from nearby Reichersberg Abbey, has accused them of breaking the vow of obedience they made when they entered the order, by illegally occupying their castle home, and said they were living in "conditions too precarious" for their ages. Placing them in more suitable accommodation, he said, was a necessary act of care and had been negotiated with the sisters in advance.

But the nuns dispute this and are sticking to their guns, building up an international fanclub as they do so. More than 50,000 people are now following them on social media, where the octogenarian religious rebels share a stream of insights into their daily lives.

Wirtenberger, a retired advertising director, who started boarding at the school in 1970 as a 10-year-old, led the action to rescue the nuns. When they were placed in a care home in late 2023, they were promised it would only be a shortterm stay, she said. "When they were still there nearly two years later, and all of them so unhappy, our anger spurred us into action."