This new monastery comes after years of controversy involving the prior Carmelite monastery based in Arlington.

TARRANT COUNTY, Texas — In a letter to the Catholic members of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Bishop Michael Olson announced the founding of a new Carmelite monastery following years of controversy involving the prior monastery.

Olson announced in the letter that Pope Leo XIV granted permission for the establishment in Northern Cooke County, which falls under the Diocese of Fort Worth.

“This decision, confirmed by the favorable vote of the Dicastery and the permission of the President of the ‘Christ the King’ Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the U.S.A., marks a moment of extraordinary grace for our local Church,” Olson wrote. 

Olson wrote that this monastery will sustain the mission of the church in North Texas “through hidden sacrifice and profound fidelity.”

“This foundation, the Carmel of Jesus Crucified, will be a place where the beauty of contemplative life radiates outward into the world,” Olson wrote. “Through prayer, silence, work, and sacrifice, the Discalced Carmelite nuns will accompany the faithful and intercede for the needs of our communities.”

According to Catholic News Agency, these new nuns come to the Diocese of Fort Worth from Lake Elmo, Minnesota.

This comes months after the diocese’s prior monastery, the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Arlington, was dismissed from the Catholic church.

The Discalced Carmelite Nuns of the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity announced last year that it had completed the final steps necessary for the monastery to be associated with the Society of Saint Pius X, a group that has been the subject of controversy and has no canonical status in the Catholic Church.

In response, Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson told members not to participate in sacraments at the monastery or offer them financial support as doing so, he said, would associate them with the “scandalous disobedience and disunity” of the nuns.

The back-and-forth began in June of 2023 after the bishop accused the monastery’s head nun, the Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, of violating her vows of chastity with a priest from outside the diocese.

The nuns have called that accusation false.

The monastery then filed a civil lawsuit against Olson and the diocese, accusing them of theft and defamation. That civil suit was dismissed in June of 2023.