«I am 17 years old and I want to be a cloistered nun»

This reality is what the Biscayan director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Baracaldo, 1978) also encountered when researching to write the script for ‘Los Domingos’, the film that won the Golden Shell in San Sebastián that premiered this Friday. In it he narrates the vocational process of a 17-year-old girl who announces her desire to enter a cloistered monastery and the conflict that this generates in his family. Ruiz de Azúa confesses to being a non-believer and having a secular education, but the experience of a similar case had been on his mind for two decades and he decided to turn it into his second feature, after ‘Cinco wolves’.

To give shape to the story, he undertook a long documentation process. He spoke with young people immersed in vocational processes, with their families and friends. From this improvised sociological study of 21st century Spain, he was surprised by “everything that was generated when the girls raised their religious vocation at home for the first time. On many occasions caused conflict and rejectioneven in believing families»

In the case of Marta, a Benedictine at the Santa Cruz de Sahagún monastery (León), the experience was different. When he told his parents about his decision, when he was just over 16 years old, “They took it quite well, although it is true that they were a little shocked». Later he learned that they “also carried out their process” to assume it, but their initial response paved the way for him. “They told me that if it was what made me happy, they were delighted and supported me,” Marta explains to ABC. Over time he has understood that his case was not usual. “I thought that mine was normal, but as I have learned about other vocations I have seen that it was quite exceptional.”

Marta felt her first vocational call on a family trip, the summer she turned 16. Together with her parents and her two brothers – she is the eldest – they visited the Leyre monastery in Navarra. It was there where felt “a very pleasant sensation”. “I was in a search process, but normal and ordinary, like any 16-year-old, thinking more about what I wanted to study and the high school electives, but there I noticed that everything connected, that something like this is what I wanted for my life,” he explains. From that visit he left the monastery store with a small book containing the rule of Saint Benedict, which inspired the cloister and still governs the life of the monasteries today.

The text became her bedside book and she went to the Internet to learn more about the female congregations (Leyre is a male Benedictine monastery) and finally left “a little to luck or the Holy Spirit” – she tells us with a laugh – to choose the possible monastery from which to ask for more information. Thus, he wrote to the first reference that the search engine returned to him to ask for more information about what he was feeling, and his life was already linked to Sahagún, even from those first moments in his native Ciudad Real. However, although he told his parents about the discernment and vocational accompaniment that would take him to the monastery when he turned 18 (Canonical regulations establish the age of majority to enter a monastery), he took a while to tell his more distant friends and family of his decision. «Precisely to avoid comments or misunderstandings I told him very late. I joined in August and I told the rest of the family in May, and to my colleagues, a month before,” he adds.

“My mother thought it was an attack on her”

María’s case is more similar to that generality we talked about at the beginning. Agree to speak with ABC after authorization from the prioress of the Carmelo will enter in a couple of weeksbut with the condition that her real name does not appear, nor the specific convent in which she will begin her postulate. It will not be the first time I enter a monastery. Now he is over thirty, but his first vocational call came when he was finishing his university studies. Although that experience did not stick, he does remember how he went through the entire process of telling his family.

As a catechist, she was closely linked to her parish and a college classmate told her that she had a Carmelite sister. That unleashed the desire that he had been ruminating on for a long time. «I was little by little seeing that the Lord was taking me to consecrate myself to him. I told him: ‘Lord, whatever you want, but let’s see if something happens with this boy that I like.’ Until one day I decided and I told him: ‘Whatever you want, whatever it really is, no ifs and buts’».

It was from that moment when “I began to desire consecrated life,” he explains. “The Lord is a gentleman, he knew how to wait until I told him to freely do whatever he wanted, to burst into my life.”

More difficult was the moment of telling his family about the decision, which also implied leaving his university studies in his last year. «It was a bombshell. My parents told me that they sensed something because they saw that she went a lot to the parish and the prayer groups and that they were not surprised that their daughter could be consecrated, but What they couldn’t imagine was that it was closed.». The one who took it the worst was his mother, “who saw it as an attack” and found it difficult to understand, even though “she goes to mass every Sunday.” Now, a few years after that first attempt, he has more accepted his daughter’s decision and supports her in this new entry into the monastery, now in Carmel.

Less strict rules

The request for discretion to Mary speaks clearly that, even today, the cloister continues to be lived in the strict sense of the word, although some congregations have relaxed the strict rules that separated those who entered the convent from the world. While before they barely went out to go to the doctor or to vote and limited family visits to friends to a few a year, In recent years most orders have opened their doorsboth physical and virtual, as in the case of the Benedictines in which Marta professed, very active on the networks as a “digital evangelizer.”

On her Instagram account alone, Marta already has more than 145,000 followers, in addition to those she adds on other social networks. In them he talks about his vocation, gives advice on the life of faith to his followers and shows day-to-day life in the convent. She had to write a letter to get to know the monastery, and now, in this way, Young women who believe they feel that call have it easier. Of course, much easier than when the only option to find out what was happening there was to go to the turnstile.

It is not the only initiative they have to introduce young women to the contemplative life. “In summer, every week, up to five girls can come who are really defining their vocation and here we let them know our life, without much juggling, so they can see if that is what they are considering, if that is what they really want to live,” she explains. In 2023, the first time they carried out this experience, eight girls passed through there, last year 25 and this summer 14. Some of them have decided to take the step and they are in different phases to enter the monastery.

It is a discreet but significant example that the female contemplative life continues to be a reality for young women in this first quarter of the 21st century. Spain continues to be one of the countries with the most active monasteries in the world. The last annual report of activities of the Episcopal Conference put the monasteries at 703 and the total number of cloistered monks and nuns at 7,664. It did not distinguish by sex, but more than 7,000 are women. The last time they gave this broken down data was in 2020 and they spoke of 8,731 members of the contemplative life, of which 8,273 were women and only 458 men.

Vocations increase

It is true that the average age of cloistered nuns is high, but ecclesiastical sources speak, without specifying data, of an increase in vocations. Congregations such as Iesu Communio, which is derived from the Poor Clares although with a more relaxed cloister, always show more than a hundred young girls wearing their peculiar denim habit. Others, like the Benedictines of the Monastery of Marta, experience a more discreet, but also significant, growth.

Like Ainara, the young idealistic protagonist of ‘Los Domingos’, even today there is no shortage of girls willing to accept the call, and assume the rebellion that implies breaking with the world and dedicate their life only to God from the cloister, even in the face of the incomprehension of their families and friends. It is a sincere response that Saint Benedict already included in the rule: “Place nothing before the love of Christ.”