The Plot to Free the Nuns

The three surviving sisters of the Austrian chapter of the Canonesses of St. Augustine never cared much for their new retirement home. The rooms were small. They missed their old garden. For the first time in 60 years, they were asked to eat regularly with men.

Less than five miles away lay their former home, an abbey in a castle built in the Middle Ages. Nearby is a cemetery, and on a wall there are engraved the names of the sisters who had lived, prayed, taught and died at the abbey since their order moved in nearly 150 years ago. The surviving sisters — Sister Rita, Sister Regina and Sister Bernadette, who use only their religious names — were meant to be the final three on the list. This was where they wanted to be.

And so at a gathering of former students who loved them, a plan was hatched to free the nuns.

“From the very beginning,” Sister Bernadette said in an interview, “I wanted to go home.”

Much is in dispute about the sisters’ story, which has ballooned into a news-and-social-media sensation. Were they forced to move from their old convent? Was it unsafe? When they broke back into their former home — which they did — did they also break the law?

The Roman Catholic Church is a cultural force in Austria, but it is losing nuns. Its count of nunneries fell to 102 in 2024, from 120 in 2010. In 2010, there were 4,200 nuns in Austria. Last year, there were 2,417.

Sister Bernadette is now 88. There were 35 nuns when she joined the abbey at Goldenstein Castle in Elsbethen, just outside Salzburg, in 1955. The nuns lived together in one part of the building on the grounds and taught school in another. Over time their numbers dwindled. For nearly 20 years, it has just been Sisters Bernadette; Rita, now 81; and Regina, now 86.

In 2022, a new manager took over their convent: Markus Grasl, an abbot whom, coincidentally, they knew when he was a teenager. Citing a church rule that orders must have at least six living members, the abbot said nearly two years ago that the nuns had to move. One day their cars disappeared.

The abbot referred questions to his spokesman, who said the nuns agreed to move out. The nuns dispute this.

No one disputes their misery in the new environment, a retirement home run by the church in a nearby town that also houses retired male clergy members. Sister Rita cried when she arrived. In Sister Regina’s small room at the home, visitors found she didn’t get up from bed. She seemed to have lost the will to live.

Last October, a group of the nuns’ former students met for a class reunion. They discussed their teachers’ desire to return to the abbey. The only thing to do, they decided, was to break the nuns out.

“They were just unhappy,” said Christina Wirtenberger, 65, a former student.

There was a vow of silence over the plan. Sister Regina and Sister Rita each broke it. Apparently nobody noticed or cared.

On Sept. 4 at 2 p.m., the escape began.

Ms. Wirtenberger appeared in front of the senior center in a black Opel sedan. She was trailed by a white moving truck and a flock of reporters, tipped off by the former students. The press attention, Ms. Wirtenberger hoped, would pressure the abbot into acceptance.

Officials at the senior home reported the nuns to the police as missing. Two officers were dispatched to the abbey. One happened to be a former student. She hugged the nuns. The nuns denied breaking in, and so the police left.

Two weeks later, the dark and musty corridors of the nunnery were abuzz with improvements arranged by a network of about 200 supporters who had joined a WhatsApp group set up by Ms. Wirtenberger. Lights were back on. New refrigerators were running. Security cameras had been installed in the stairwell.

The story has been covered by the BBC and CNN, among others. A reporter from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper, set up an inflatable mattress, preparing to spend the night.

On a recent visit, the women set their lunch table together, unfolding a white tablecloth with a choreographed precision that suggested years of repetition.

Sister Regina, who once taught math and calligraphy and is now the most frail of the three, dozed off during the visit. Sister Bernadette, a former home economics teacher, seemed to have mellowed from the days when former students recalled her as a sometimes terrifying disciplinarian.

The nuns said they enjoyed the new attention but mostly wanted to return to normal life in their old home.

Sitting at an antique wooden table at the top floor of the abbey, Sister Rita said she particularly hoped to tame the overgrown greenhouse in the garden. She also hoped to reconcile with the abbot.

“I still like him,” she said.

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment. The abbot’s spokesman, Harald Schiffl, said church officials felt helpless amid the media blitz. They were mostly baffled, he said, as to why the women had left what he characterized as a good life in their retirement home and returned to an abbey that he said was structurally precarious and a health hazard.

But, he allowed, “it’s clear that it’s not easy to leave a place where you’ve lived for decades.”

Mr. Schiffl said church officials had not spoken with the nuns. They had no immediate plans to do so.

Johannes Gress contributed reporting from Reichersberg, Austria.