After spending 35 years in a convent, a Spanish nun has been thrown out of her order because she spent too much time on the social networking site Facebook.
María Jesús Galán was nicknamed "Sister Internet" by her fellow nuns, recently shared on her Facebook page that she had been required by her superiors to leave the convent after strong disagreements over her online activities.
The 54-year old nun had around 600 Facebook "friends" at the time of her eviction, but now has a fan page with thousands of supporters from around the word demanding she be allowed back into the order.
Sister Maria first encountered computers a decade ago when her Mother Superior was convinced that it would lessen the need for nuns to leave the safe sanctuary of the 14th century Santo Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, central Spain.
"It enabled us do things such as banking online and saved us having to make trips into the city," clarified Sister Maria.
Sister Maria, who entered the convent aged 21, soon saw the potential behind computers and started digitalising the precious archives hidden behind the convent’s walls to make them accessible to the outer world.
The nun won a local government prize in 2008 for this painstaking and valuable work. The award made headlines and before she knew it, she had been ‘friended’ by people from all over the globe.
Sister Maria says that her conviction to her call as a nun is as strong as ever, but that fellow nuns disapproved of her activities and she was eventually driven from the convent.
Her Dominican order has refused to comment on the matter, while the Archbishop of Toledo insisted to reporters that it remained "an internal matter".
The “internet nun” is now living at her mother’s house, but if her fight to gain re-admittance to the convent does not work out, then she said she would start a new phase of her life.
"I would like to visit London and New York," she recently posted on Facebook. "Such things were impossible to even dream when at the convent."