Eight elderly Poor Clare nuns in Bruges sold their convent, rewrote its bylaws and left for France with the proceeds. Their extraordinary revolt exposed a struggle over property, obedience and who controlled the women’s future after decades of religious poverty.
In the spring of 1990, a convoy left Belgium carrying eight nuns aged between 62 and 93. One travelled in an ambulance, while the others rode in a Mercedes limousine towards a new life in southern France. Behind them was a convent they had sold for about $1.4 million, despite the anger of church authorities who expected its assets eventually to return to the diocese.
We are looking past the irresistible image of millionaire nuns in luxury cars to the conflict that made it possible. The sisters had spent their adult lives under a rule of poverty, but dwindling vocations left them facing old age without younger women to care for them. Their escape was comic, defiant and legally ingenious, yet the surviving reports also leave important questions about what happened next.
What Happened When the Belgian Nuns Sold Their Convent?
The women belonged to the Poor Clares, a contemplative order founded by Clare of Assisi in the thirteenth century. Its traditional rule emphasised enclosure, prayer and radical poverty. Members did not build personal wealth or treat the convent’s property as their own. Their security came from the religious community, which was supposed to sustain them through every stage of life.
By the late twentieth century, that system was under pressure across Western Europe. Far fewer women were entering religious orders, and many convents were ageing faster than they could recruit. The Bruges community had dwindled to eight sisters. The youngest was in her early sixties and the oldest, Sister Agnes, was 93 and needed substantial care.
The diocese decided not to send younger nuns to replenish the house. Church representatives later argued that the sisters could have remained there for years, but the women saw a different future. If the community simply declined, the diocese would inherit the convent and its contents. The nuns would have obeyed the rule all their lives, only to lose control over how they were cared for and what happened to the value surrounding them.
Sister Josephine expressed the point bluntly in contemporary coverage: the women did not want to watch the convent die and allow the diocese to take everything. The building, antiques and religious objects may not have belonged to any sister personally, but the community itself was organised as an independent non-profit body. That distinction created room to act.
The sisters amended the organisation’s bylaws so that, if the convent closed, its assets would pass to their families rather than automatically to the diocese. They then sold the centuries-old property to a developer for roughly $1.4 million. The arrangement was made without the approval church leaders believed should have been sought, turning an internal disagreement about retirement into a public battle over ownership and authority.
A younger adviser named Ronny Crab helped the women navigate the outside world. Reports describe him assisting with investments, property and transport. His involvement also made him an obvious target when the church and Belgian authorities questioned whether elderly, enclosed women had freely made such dramatic decisions.
The purchases ensured that nobody could dismiss the story as a modest relocation. The nuns acquired a chateau and a farm in southern France, eleven horses and six luxury cars. Three Mercedes were reportedly fitted with telephones and televisions, extravagances that looked astonishing beside the order’s commitment to poverty. Their limousine alone was valued at about $110,000.
The spectacle was tailor-made for newspapers. Images of frail women abandoning a medieval convent for a French estate inverted every expectation attached to cloistered life. The sisters insisted, however, that comfort had not ended their faith. They were not renouncing prayer or declaring that decades of religious life had been meaningless. They were claiming the right to decide what security looked like in old age.
Belgian authorities arrested Crab while investigating the convent’s finances. He spent 39 days in custody before being released, and early reports recorded a long list of suspicions and competing allegations. The nuns said he had helped them; critics suggested he had manipulated them. The contrast mattered because portraying the women as victims allowed institutions to deny that they had acted deliberately.
Contemporary reporting also noted disagreement inside the group. One sister, Clara, broke with the others and made accusations about the handling of property. That fracture became part of a much more sensational later story involving alleged relationships and personal revenge. Those claims are difficult to verify and often come from retrospective tabloid accounts, so they should not be treated as established fact.
The Bruges dispute was not the only Belgian convent controversy making news. At roughly the same time, Sister Maria Logghe converted part of a convent in Nieuwpoort into the Hotel Clarenhof. Newspapers compared the two stories to television soap operas, presenting them as evidence that Belgian nuns had suddenly become entrepreneurs.
Yet the shared background was serious. Both communities faced shrinking membership, costly buildings and uncertain care. Selling property, hosting guests or creating a hotel offered income and independence, but it also challenged a hierarchy accustomed to deciding how religious women should live and how institutional assets should be transferred.
The later fate of the Bruges sisters is less clearly documented than their departure. Retellings say financial and legal pressure forced them to sell the French property and that several eventually returned to religious life or family care. Crab later maintained that the women had chosen the cars, horses and farmhouse themselves and that he had been made a scapegoat. The broad outline is plausible, but precise claims about acquittals, romances and the sisters’ final homes should be approached cautiously unless supported by court records or contemporary reporting.
The bishop involved, Roger Vangheluwe, remained in office for another two decades. In 2010 he resigned after admitting that he had sexually abused a nephew. That later scandal does not prove every allegation made during the convent dispute, but it profoundly changes how the hierarchy’s claims to moral authority are read today.
Why This Story Matters
The story matters first because a vow of poverty is not the same as consent to abandonment. The sisters had surrendered personal property in exchange for a collective promise of care. When recruitment collapsed, the practical support behind that promise weakened, while the institutional claim over the convent’s value remained strong.
It also reveals how easily older women’s agency can be discounted. The purchases were extravagant and perhaps unwise, but extravagance does not by itself prove incapacity. By insisting that an adviser must have controlled them, observers avoided the more uncomfortable possibility that the nuns understood the rules and deliberately used them against the institution that wrote them.
The legal structure was as important as the rebellion. A convent may feel like church property in an everyday sense, yet non-profit constitutions, boards and national property law determine who can actually sell an asset. The sisters’ power came not from ignoring the paperwork but from understanding that the paperwork gave their community a separate identity.
There is also a warning about turning incomplete history into entertainment. The limousine, chateau and racehorses are documented well enough to make the story extraordinary without adding every later rumour. Responsible retelling should distinguish contemporary facts from colourful claims repeated decades afterwards.
Most of all, the eight women force us to ask who benefited from obedience. Their poverty was praised while it preserved institutional wealth, but their demand for comfort was treated as scandalous when they redirected that wealth towards themselves. The nuns’ brief escape may not have produced a simple happy ending, but it made the unequal bargain visible.
Topics Include
The Poor Clares’ tradition of enclosure and radical poverty
Why an ageing Bruges convent faced closure without new recruits
The bylaw change and $1.4 million sale of the convent
Ronny Crab, the French chateau, horses and luxury cars
The parallel Hotel Clarenhof dispute in Nieuwpoort
Questions of agency, property and care for elderly religious women
Resources and Further Reading
“The aging nuns who sold their convent” - The advisor
“Poor Clares” - Wikipedia
“The Millionaire Nuns” - Radar online