‘To Return the Nuns to the World Is to Deliver Them to the Devil’

[Stone]

‘To Return the Nuns to the World Is to Deliver Them to the Devil’

TIA [adapted] | December 2, 2023

Referring to Luther and the French Revolution, Pius VI and Adrian VI severely condemn the heresiarch Luther and the revolutionary authorities who removed so many consecrated nuns from their convents and returned them to the world.

Analogously their words apply to Vatican II’s aggiornamento, which stimulated nuns to leave their convents and embrace the modern world. Indeed, what the Conciliar Popes consider "progress” – for religious men and women to enter the world – was severely condemned by previous Popes as the work of heretics and blasphemers.

Popes Pius VI & Adrian VI
Pius VI, the Brief Quod aliquantum of March 10, 1791

As for what we have already said about the vows of the Religious, we must add the odious decree pronounced against the sacred virgins [the nuns], that is, the order to remove them from their Cloisters, such as Luther made. For he, to use the words of Adrian VI “was not afraid of contaminating those vessels dedicated to God` and to physically remove from their Convents the virgins consecrated to Jesus Christ who had professed the monastic life, and to return them to the world, or rather to the Devil, which they had previously abjured.”

Yet these religious nuns – this most illustrious part of the flock of faithful Catholics – have often kept very serious disasters away from the cities with their prayers, as St. Gregory the Great recalls having happened in his time in Rome: “Without the religious virgins, none of us could have survived for so many years in this place among the swords of the Lombards.”

And Benedict XIV spoke similarly about the religious of Bologna: “This city which has been oppressed for so many years by so many misfortunes could not still exist if the Divine Wrath had not been partly appeased by the continuous, fervent prayers of our nuns.”