A New Ages Under the Vatican

Rebellious Nuns Receive Their Marching Orders

The women had taken over the building in a rebellion against the Vatican, which had ordered the replacement of their mother superior, Jadwiga Ligocka.

"They were disobedient," said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

Police arrested Mother Jadwiga and a former Franciscan friar, Roman Komaryczko, ho had been living with the nuns, police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said. He would not specify the charges.

A locksmith had opened the gate to the walled convent in the town of Kazimierz Dolny and police in riot gear pushed forward, encountering an onslaught of verbal aggression from some of the former nuns, Mr Sokolowski said.

Several hours into the operation, the women, in black habits and each escorted by two policewomen, began filing out of the building.

Some carried musical instruments -- guitars, a tambourine, a drum -- while others bore simple backpacks or carried large blue garbage bags apparently packed their with belongings.

The women walked calmly out of the convent, through a tree-dotted courtyard, and on to a bus that finally pulled away 5 1/2 hours after the police operation began on Wednesday night.

The Vatican expelled the women from their Sisters of Bethany order last year, but they refused to leave the building, cutting themselves off from the outside world.

The convent's electricity was cut off this year, but residents sympathised with the ex-nuns' plight and secretly supplied them with food in the night.

A man at the site who identified himself as the father of one of the nuns said the women had staged their lock-in to protest the Catholic church's rigid treatment of women.

~ AP