The Mystery and Love of Christ at a Convent in Spain

(MADRID) - The day has long passed since Marijosé Berzosa entered the cloister without batting an eyelash. She was just 18 years old, and the town of Lerma was celebrating a feast day. Behind her, she abandoned the study of medicine and its possibilities so as to heed the call of Christ.

Her new home, a convent, housed some twenty nuns. The youngest of these was already 40 years old, and it had been more than 23 years since a postulant had crossed the threshold.

Chastity, obedience, and poverty. A contemplative life and nothing more. Marijosé changed her name to Sister Veronica and cast off her worldly things for the dress of a nun cinched with a white cord, sandals on her feet year round, a cell as a bedroom, prayer from the first hours of the day, penitence, discipline, silence, prayer and labor, so as to find Christ. And she found it far from the outside world, behind walls and the grille. An elderly sister, on her death bed, told her that she would do great things. And so it came to be, when the Holy See gave its approval for its creation as feminine institute of pontifical right called “Jesu Communio.”

Today, the monastery takes in young women who aspire to become part of the joy of these women religious, who pray and sing songs and dance with ever a smile on their lips. They raise their arms up to Eternity while singing, “I belong to Christ.”

The joyful nuns are university trained and come from cities. Their convent is full of women lawyers, economists, physicists, chemists, and engineers in road construction, aviation, agronomy; there are teachers, professors, pharmacists, biologists, and graduates in philosophy and teaching.

Now known as Mother Veronica, she captures my eyes with a limpid gaze that has been purified with tears. She nods her head and in her thin hands takes mine and says, “We are doing something big out of love for Christ and we need time.” And then she leaves, bearing with elegance her habit around which she wears a rosary of wooden beads.

When Marijosé came to the monastery at Lerma in 1984, there were 23 sisters of St Clare. Now there are 181.

Now, as Mother Veronica, she is pious and luminous. With a strong spirit and a frail body, her shoulders are slumped but untired. On them she bears the weight of 181 daughters, continuing the great project of planting in them the love of Christ.

But she is not the mystery that fills the convent at Lerma. It is, simply, Christ himself.

(Video text translated from Spanish via Babelfish - The community of nuns of closing of Lerma - the Eyrie in Spain, that a year ago surprised the world by its numerous young vocations, received an oral notification of the decision of Pope Benedicto XVI to erect its community like a new feminine religious institute of pontifical right, denominated " Iesu communio".

Before the different journalistic versions that they give account of the papal approval, the nuns published an official notice in which they confirm the notification but they clarify that they are " in the hope of knowing documents pertinent, reason why at this moment detallada" is not possible to us to provide one more a information;. The nuns explain that the papal decision " one takes place after the study, by the competent organisms of the Roman Bar, of the documentation presented/displayed through Mr. Arzobispo de Burgos, Mons Francisco Gil Hellín, like answer to the request by which the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life had animated to the community in 2009 to try to define with clarity the life form to which call by God felt. Mr. Arzobispo also received the oral communication of the pontifical decision, that transmitted inmediatamente" to us;.

"Until now one has come keeping the logic and necessary reserve, for being submissive matter to the study and decision of Santa Sede. The approval that now communicates to us contains the joyful newness and the strong responsibility to confirm us in the life that God had provoked between us for a long time. He is the protagonist of everything and Him we trusted so that he takes to good term the life that is comenzado", they add. In declarations to ACI Press, the Andrea sister of the community of Lerma reiterated that they are in the hope of the decree of the Pope and all the proceedings are being taken by the Archbishop.

"In a brief space of time, when the documentation is in rule, we will not have problem in giving information of our way of life and the name, but until that moment we cannot say más" , it indicated. On the community The community of Lerma-La brothers Eyrie was the news in the middle of 2009 when the Radio and Italian Television (RAI) dedicated a news article to them in stellar schedule for being the convent of closing with more young vocations of the world. This vocational boom began with Sister Veronica, today superior of the community, that entered the convent of Clarisas nuns of closing of the Ascent founded on Lerma (Spain) in 1604, when this one was in a vocational crisis. In 1984, Marijose Berzosa --today Sister Veronica-- she decided, to the 18 years of age, to back leave the medicine race, the friendly, the discotheques of ' 80s and the basketball to enter a convent where 23 years ago a beginner did not enter. Today the convent of Lerma has more than one hundred nuns with an average of age of 35 years.)

Author and journalist Clemente Ferrer Roselló, a prestigious Spanish advertising character, presents a fascinating personal and professional career fully devoted to the world of communication in its varied dimensions. He earned a PhD in Information Sciences from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, BA in Advertising from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona Master in Marketing from the School of Marketing Studies in Madrid.

He has been Associate Professor of Business Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Navarra and a contributor to the Madrid daily ABC. He also spent several years teaching, both in the Official School of Advertising as the School of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1985 he was awarded the Gold Master, granted by the Senior Management Forum and AMPE Prize 1996 to the "long and brilliant career advertising."