A real life “habit change”. Selma Teixeira is now 51 years old, but 25 of them have been dedicated to work in the church. She is a former nun, who abandoned her vows and her celibacy to live an unexpected romance: she fell in love with her doctor.
Selma – or rather, Chiara Letícia, as she was called – was not just a nun. She was The Nun. The woman has already been with three popes, one of them being Pope Francis. She is also a former Mother Superior, the highest rank a woman can attain in the Catholic Church.
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“I lived in celibacy and seclusion for nearly three decades. But that doesn't mean that my life up until now hasn't been busy", said the former nun in an interview with Universa UOL.
Restlessness and desire to do mine led to a poor and chaste life
Selma Teixeira was born in Piracicaba (SP) and, wanting to contribute to the community, began her dedication to the Catholic Church. At the time, she was 18 years old.
“I arrived at the Teresian Carmelite Sisters, an order installed in the city of Jundiaí, also in the interior of São Paulo. They had important outside work with girls and women at risk,” she recalled.
In her studies, she read a lot about Santa Clara and Saint Francis of Assisi. Feeling uneasy, she realized that her uneasiness was because she still hadn't found her religious form of expression. So she decided that she would be "poor, free and chaste, as they were".
Then, she transferred to the Order of the Clarissa Sisters, in Espírito Santo, when she made her perpetual vows and became Sister Chiara Leticia of the Mother of God.
Former nun had 'sweeping passion' for doctor who saved her life
During her life as Sister Chiara Leticia, she built two monasteries, studied theology, philosophy, psychology and history. However, educational institutions were not recognized by the Ministry of Education (MEC). So, Selma doesn't have the titles, just the knowledge.
At some point during this period, she found herself with bouts of high blood pressure and she found herself, as she describes it, the victim of a “joke my heart played”. “At 148 kg and 1.58 m, he started hitting wildly,” she recalls.
She had heart treatment and bariatric surgery. “There, my life changed once again”, he reinforces. “I already realized, at the time, that my time in the cloister, all the donation to the church and community was coming to an end, that I had already contributed enough”.
During cardiac treatment, the former nun was accompanied by a doctor, who ended up becoming her friend. As gratitude, she gave the health worker a box set by the French composer of classic music Claude Debussy.
“In one of my exams, I arrived at the office and she had put Debussy on to play. It was on that day that she kissed me”, she recalled, which, at first, did not respond. "It took me a long time to realize that I had bonded emotionally with her."
Withdrawal from religious life
After a leave of absence from the Church to reflect on what she felt, she made her decision: she asked for a definitive exclausion. As at that time she was already Mother Superior, only the Pope could dismiss her from her post.
“First, I wrote a letter to the mother superior of the mother monastery, who gathered other documents from my religious life and forwarded everything to the Vatican,” said the former nun. the return of Pope Francis it was positive.
“[He] thanked me for my years of dedication to religious life and the Catholic Church. He said that he was praying for me to be happy and that, from that moment on, I was completely unvoiced, that I could have new relationships until I got married”.
She married, but not the doctor who fixed and confused her heart. They stayed together for six months, but after that Selma Teixeira went to live. She traveled, bought a bar and today works as an app driver.
In October last year, the former nun met his wife, Priscila. They have been officially married since February.
“I never felt that God abandoned me because I left the religious life or because I am in sin, living with a woman who completes me”, emphasized Selma. “I spent 25 years of my life in the cloister. It's not that hard to imagine why I want to expand. Live free, light and loose”.
*with information from Universa UOL
