Vatican monastery that served as Pope Benedict XVI’s retirement home gets new tenants

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press

ROME (AP) — The converted monastery in the Vatican gardens that served as Pope Benedict XVI’s retirement home is getting some new tenants. Pope Francis signed a note Oct. 1 ordering the Mater Ecclesiae monastery to resume its original purpose as home within the Vatican walls for communities of contemplative nuns. St. John Paul II had created the monastery for that purpose in 1994. Francis invited a community of Benedictine nuns from his native Buenos Aires to take up residence starting in January. During Benedict’s 10-year retirement, the monastery came to epitomize the problems of having two popes living together in the Vatican. It became the symbolic headquarters of the anti-Francis conservative opposition.