The Nun Who Challenged The Church Leads Ukrainian Relief
A famous Spanish nun who received death threats for saying that Joseph and Mary probably had sex and who is friends with Lionel Messi, has met the Pope, is now working to help Ukrainian refugees.
Sister Lucia Caram, an Argentine Dominican nun who is an FC Barcelona fan and a friend of Lionel Messi, can be seen in these images with some of the Ukrainian refugees she met this month after travelling over 3,300 kilometres (over 2,000 miles) from Spain to the Romanian capital Bucharest, which is separated from Ukraine only by Moldova.
She has been helping them to get to her mission in Spain where they will get shelter and rest and said: “We cannot look the other way because peace absolutely depends on everyone, because we are all threatened and because Ukrainians are our brothers.”
Sister Lucia, 55, who has met Pope Francis made international headlines in 2017 and received death threats after reportedly saying: “I think that Mary was in love with Joseph and that they were a normal couple, and the normal thing is to have sex.
“It’s hard to believe and to take in. We’ve stuck with rules that we have invented without reaching the true message.”
She is also active on social media where her Twitter profile describes her as: “Contemplative Nun. They say I am a restless and disturbing nun. I try to be happy and make others happy. I fight for children’s rights.”
Accompanied by a Romanian carpenter who has lived in Spain for 18 years and who preferred to remain anonymous, Sister Lucia arrived in Bucharest last Saturday, on 5th March, with a simple mission: to help people escaping from the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
She met with six people, who have been named as Olena Rozhova, 37, who fled Ukraine along with her son Nikita, 12, Irina Antonenko, 39, with her two children Illia, 13, and Alexandra, 14, and a woman called Alessa, 39.
Sister Lucia, a Lebanese Argentine, met with them at a refugee camp in Satu Mare, which is a city of over 100,000 people located in Satu Mare County, in northern Romania, near the borders with Hungary and Ukraine.
Sister Lucia also praised the work being done to help refugees, while slamming Vladimir Putin and denouncing the Mafias profiting off other people’s misery.
She said: “We have seen the best and worst of humankind, with all the madness of the delusional Putin and those who support him, we have also seen a lot of solidarity in the refugee camps, hurts me a lot to see that there are also Matthew is who take bribes at the border and who profit from the misery of these people terrorised by the bombings, who have left everything.”
The refugees Sister Lucia crossed Europe to help were reportedly given clothing, food and some much-needed rest before they all departed for Spain on Monday.
After waiting for hours in a lengthy queue at the border between Romanian Hungary, near the town of Petea, they are now heading across Europe to the town of Manresa, which is located 60 kilometres (37 miles) from Barcelona, in the autonomous community of Catalonia, in north-eastern Spain.
Manresa is where the nun runs the Foundation of the Convent of Santa Clara, which is described on its website (https://www.fundaciodelconventdesantaclara.org/) is an organisation made up of 220 volunteers and is geared towards expediting “comprehensive short- and long-term responses for people who have been excluded from the system and cannot live with dignity”.
The latest statistics from the United Nations public yesterday (Tuesday) is at noon that the number of refugees currently fled Ukraine at over 2 million, with over 1.2 million of them having fled into Poland.