An 80-year-old nun has been sentenced to a year in prison in the United States for stealing $800,000 from a school cash register and gambled it away at a casino.
"I have sinned, I have broken the law and I have no excuse," the nun said in court, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.
The nun was the principal of a Catholic private school in the American state of California.
When she entered the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet over 60 years ago, she took a vow of poverty.
Yet she embezzled money for years to fund her love of luxury vacations and gambling.
The fraud was uncovered during an audit.
The director of the Catholic school had tried to cover it up by ordering her subordinates to destroy incriminating documents.
When the Archdiocese of Los Angeles demanded an account of her, she replied, according to the newspaper report, that priests were paid better than nuns and that she felt she deserved a raise.
The nun's lawyer pleaded gambling addiction and demanded that his client be allowed to serve her sentence at the convent where she has been living since the fraud was exposed in 2018.