The mystery and love of Christ at a convent in Spain

The Mystery and love of Christ at a convent in Spain
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 possiblilities 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.
Author and journalist Dr Clemente Ferrer Roselló is a former professor of the University of Navarra and the Complutense University of Spain.