The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal

by Hubert Wolf

  But the allegation of “pretense of holiness” against Maria Luisa must have made the inquisitor prick up his ears. Combating women who claimed to be living saints, or were honored as such by their devotees, was one of the Holy Office’s “sacred duties.” And Katharina was making a double accusation: first against the dead founder, and secondly against the young madre vicaria. The Inquisition had to act on this. Katharina’s use of the words affettata santità, for the religious offense of feigned holiness suggested she had received professional advice. This must have come from either Hohenlohe or Wolter. If the princess hadn’t been able to name a specific offense against the Faith—if she had continued to focus on the poisoning attempts—then her complaint wouldn’t have fallen within the Inquisition’s remit. Her cousin and her new spiritual guide had considered this carefully. They also seem to have coached Katharina on the reason for making her complaint, which she cited several times: she was simply fulfilling the moral obligation that had been laid out for her in confession.

  THE SECRET OF SANT’AMBROGIO

  Sallua was confronted with the monstrous scale of Katharina’s accusations against the convent only on careful reading of her written denunciation. It must have taken his breath away.

  Sant’Ambrogio had a secret. At first, Katharina had no idea what this might be. But three months after she entered the convent on March 27, 1858, she knew that something that “frequently occupied the community” had been kept from her.71 Through her conversations with the madre vicaria, she became aware of the existence of “some kind of secret.” “She led me to understand that the father confessor had decided it was not yet time to reveal it to me.” She soon sensed this was somehow connected with “influences of a supernatural kind,” but comforted herself with the thought that “such naïve souls” as her new Roman sisters could more easily obtain their spiritual edification from those miraculous tales than from abstract theological tracts.72

  Of course, had she been able to interpret Reisach’s cryptic remarks, she might have been forewarned about this, as Katharina remarked self-critically in her Erlebnisse. Before she entered the convent, the cardinal had explained to her that in a southern country such as Italy one was frequently confronted with unusual or supernatural occurrences. “Strange and remarkable things might take place around her.” The Italians’ lively characters would make things seem very different from what she was used to, coming from cool, rationalist Germany. But in a place like Rome, where a “living faith grasps and maintains everything with a freshness and strength that we Germans can hardly conceive of … there also exist struggles and temptations quite alien to our experience.” Reisach had warned Katharina not to let herself “be unsettled or disturbed by such things.”73

  The cardinal’s words reveal his own enthusiasm for Latin European sentimental forms of Catholic devotion, and his rejection of an Enlightened, rational religious practice that was common in Germany. He was particularly fascinated by transcendental religious phenomena: in every single hour he was prepared for manifestations of the Sacred, especially in Rome. There was no doubt in his mind that “poor souls,” the spirits of the dead, could take up contact with this world from the other side at any time.74 So the princess saw nothing unusual in the fact that the refectory readings in Sant’Ambrogio often mentioned “ecstasies, miracles and apparitions.” Admittedly, she criticized these readings for overstimulating the imagination of her fellow nuns, and would have preferred solid “religious instruction.” This might have imparted the necessary basic Christian knowledge that the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio were wholly lacking—as the princess soon noticed.75 But, following Reisach’s advice, she put their enthusiasm for supernatural religious phenomena and miracles down to their southern mentality and their lack of educational achievement. At first, she didn’t see anything dangerously heretical. And her new father confessor, Padre Peters, managed to allay the princess’s “first serious concerns.”76

  However, the nuns were still hiding something from her: they would stop talking abruptly when Katharina approached them; they would slip into a Roman dialect that the princess didn’t understand; they dropped obscure hints. It was only after she was admitted as a novice on September 29 that Padre Peters and Cardinal Reisach were finally prepared to come clean and lift the veil of secrecy. They had kept from her the fact that the founder of the Franciscan community of Sant’Ambrogio, Mother Agnese Firrao, had been condemned as a false saint by the Roman Inquisition, and sent into exile. They evidently feared that this revelation would have kept the princess from entering the convent.

  This secret was the first point of Katharina’s denunciation. She complained that despite her conviction, Agnese Firrao was still being honored as a real saint in Sant’Ambrogio. The nuns, and in particular Padre Peters, had played down the implications of the Holy Office’s verdict on their mother founder. Once Katharina had become a novice, they referred to Firrao in her presence as La Beata Madre and venerated her as a saint, even though the Church stipulated that this kind of cult was only for people it had officially beatified. “They showed me her scourges, and other instruments of mortification, and told me of the three pounds of raw flesh that fell from the Mother after a single flagellation. They always praised her extraordinary virtue,” the princess noted in her report. “In this convent they don’t even blush when they proclaim the holiness of Sister Maria Agnese; she surpasses almost all other saints.” In Sant’Ambrogio, the Inquisition was criticized for having passed a clearly wrong judgment when it found Agnese Firrao guilty of false holiness. According to Katharina, the nuns regarded numerous items owned by their “saint” as contact relics: clothes, embroidery, and in particular three portraits done in oils. The confessors were working on a “saint’s life” of Firrao, which would be read aloud to the community once it was finished. The founder’s prayers, mottoes, letters, and messages had been painstakingly collected. On high feast days, “poems were recited, glorifying the blessed Maria Agnese, depicting her surrounded by angels, and nuns who had passed on.” On these occasions, “words of praise for the current madre vicaria were put into the mouth of the ‘Beata Madre,’ calling her ‘her joy, her treasure, the brightest of her stars.’ ”

  A POSSESSED SEDUCER OF NUNS

  The second of the princess’s allegations came under the mysterious heading “Report on the Possessed Man.”77 Maria Luisa, the novice mistress, had told stories about an attractive man whom she called Pietro, or just “The Americano.” This man, who had apparently been educated at a Jesuit school in Fribourg, Switzerland, had been close to the convent’s second confessor, Padre Peters, since his early youth. The mysterious American was actually a native German speaker, as Katharina discovered, and was probably from Tyrol. He was said to be in his mid-thirties, and a doctor by profession. He had come to Rome to rid himself of five demons, which Peters could “clearly distinguish,” as he had given them names. Maria Luisa was convinced that, once the Americano had been healed (through tough penance and fasting), he could do a great deal of good for the Jesuits, and would “convert thousands of people.” “On July 11, 1858, the madre vicaria told me he had prayed for 11 hours at the grave of St Ignatius, where the saint had appeared and praised the madre vicaria, expressing his joy that Pietro was under her guidance.”

  This last phrase caught the princess’s attention. It seemed to be Maria Luisa, and not one of the confessors, who was undertaking the exorcism to free him from his demons: an unheard-of idea for Katharina. According to canon law, exorcisms were only to be performed by very experienced clerics. Under no circumstances should they be carried out by women, whom the Church had regarded as particularly susceptible to the temptation of evil ever since the fall of Eve. And in fact, on several occasions the novice mistress told her how much she had suffered because of this possessed man. In her written complaint, Katharina reported several meetings between Maria Luisa and the American. “One day, when she came back from a meeting with him, she limped into my cell, her eye closed up, her
tongue swollen, her head covered in bruises. She announced that she had fought him and had eventually emerged victorious, forcing him to make five signs of the cross on the ground with his tongue.”

  The whole thing seemed highly suspicious to Katharina. As she tried to explain to the inquisitor, whenever she saw the novice mistress, she did her best to avoid this delicate subject. However, Maria Luisa wanted to impress her new novice with this exorcism, and on several occasions she showed Katharina letters from Pietro, composed in bad Italian. A letter in German at the end of October was addressed both to Maria Luisa, and to Luisa Maria (Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern). It made a play on the similarity of the two nuns’ names, and used lewd terms to suggest that Luisa Maria could become a “mother without a husband” like Maria Luisa. Maria Luisa didn’t speak German, so she gave this letter to the princess to translate. Katharina was “highly indignant” at its many erotic innuendos and “extremely obscene expressions.” Pietro more or less explicitly asked both nuns to engage in sexual acts with him. The letter concluded by saying that the madre vicaria would be tormented by one of the American’s demons—“the demon of impurity”—for seven months; she would “suffer so much that she would have to seek his help as a doctor, though she wouldn’t have to lose her virginity.”

  Katharina was shocked, and her trust in the novice mistress was shaken. She told her confessor, Padre Peters, that she was “astonished to see a young nun’s chaste eyes under threat of reading such turpitudes.” Peters, as Katharina recalled in her Denunzia, admitted to her that Maria Luisa had also shown him a letter of the Americano. “But he claimed that he either didn’t read Pietro’s letters, or destroyed them immediately.” The princess ended her remarks on the “Possessed Man” with the cryptic assertion that following the “sad events” that had taken place as a result of her informing the confessor about this, Peters and Maria Luisa had stopped mentioning Pietro in her presence. These words contained at least an indirect accusation that the Jesuit had reported to the novice mistress everything Katharina had told him in their pastoral conversations.

  A FALSE SAINT

  The princess’s third allegation related directly to Sister Maria Luisa, whom she accused of nothing less than “false” and “feigned holiness.”78 But first, she presented a very interesting character sketch of this young nun.

  Maria Luisa is 27 years old and has been in the convent since she was 13. She has a very pleasant physiognomy and an almost irresistible charm—which, however, is rather more like that of a worldly person than of a virgin dedicated to God. In addition to this quality, she is constantly busy and thinking about everyone and everything. She has a superior elegance and ease in conversation, and displays the utmost delicacy in her dealings with others, along with a sharp wit and cunning—though without any sententious affectation—and a tense, composed manner. You can hear the madre vicaria chatting away in the convent almost all the day; she is quite incapable of staying quiet or keeping a secret. The consequence of this is garrulity, volatility, a tendency to lie easily, alongside extreme cunning, an intriguing mind, jealousy and effrontery. But all this seems to vanish beneath a mysterious allure, a sweet lovability and a kind of affected ingenuousness and liveliness. Among all the offices she holds—though she is far too young for them—are the important positions of cellarer, vicaress and novice mistress. She pays hardly any heed to the convent rules. She seldom shows her face in the choir, the refectory or at the daily devotions. In addition to this she has access to all the keys, and to all the convent’s rooms during prayers and mealtimes, in which she almost never participates. Her duties make it very easy for her to spend long periods in the parlatory, conducting long, confidential conversations with outside persons, and gaining her impressive knowledge of all that is going on in politics and in the city. She is able to satisfy her boundless passion for control and command over everything. This ambitious pride drives her to use everyone as an instrument for her projects to diminish the authority of the mother abbess, even to remove it, by speaking ill of her and countermanding her instructions with orders of her own.

  The princess added an observation that sounds very much like the “crushes, ‘breakdowns’ and exuberance” typical of a girls’ boarding school in the nineteenth century—ways in which young girls expressed their enthusiasm for a teacher or more experienced pupil, while also channeling their “erotic desires.”79 Maria Crocifissa, a twenty-year-old novice, followed the novice mistress everywhere, “as if drunk with love. She is always caressing her, kissing her hand, laughing and doing a thousand crazy things without the madre vicaria stopping her. The tender, jealous affection most of the novices display towards their mistress is also reprehensible: they frequently gather round her bed until late into the night. I cannot and must not make an ultimate judgment on her methods of educating the novices. But what I do know is that the novices are largely left to their own devices.”

  After this, Katharina von Hohenzollern raised her real allegation: the madre vicaria’s pretense of holiness. Maria Luisa enjoyed “the reputation of an extraordinary penitential spirit. In the convent she is known for hardly ever taking sustenance.” The confessor had told Katharina that “there was no natural explanation for how little she ate.” Katharina was not convinced: “Outside the refectory, I have seen otherwise.” She must have observed Maria Luisa eating between the official mealtimes. “She also gives the appearance of spending her nights in prayers, meditations, and in terrible privations and sufferings, emerging from these mysterious nightly struggles with her tongue swollen and of different colors. And here I must sadly confess that in 16 months I never saw her pray during the day before the Blessed Sacrament, or in any other place.”

  The way Maria Luisa spoke about senior figures in the Catholic Church struck Katharina as high-handed, and out of keeping with the humble bearing of a nun. Still, Maria Luisa had “the reputation, particularly with the father confessor, of possessing unusual and wonderful graces, which showed themselves in a heavenly wisdom, a superhuman knowledge of secret things, both inside and outside the convent …[and] through miracles, namely the ability to heal the sick. The madre vicaria also often prophesies, with an indifferent expression on her face, that at a certain hour her guardian angel would leave something for her in the rota at the convent gates80—sometimes sweets, or other things. And the items she mentioned really did appear at the appointed hour, to the great wonderment of the novices, who would eat them with great reverence and devotion.”

  After a refectory reading on the life of a saint who exuded a pleasant, sweet fragrance for three weeks, the madre vicaria smelled so strongly of rose essence “that it induced a headache, because the whole convent was filled with it.” The princess didn’t share the opinion of many in the convent that Maria Luisa was able to draw the pain and suffering of other nuns to herself with an almost magnetic force, and could even heal the sick using a ring of “mysterious power.” She didn’t know how the vicaress had come by this ring, but one of the nuns who had supposedly been healed by it later said: “It is certainly a strange thing that our madre vicaria received a ring of such extraordinary size, when the ring Saint Catherine received from the Savior was so small and hardly visible.” Katharina went on: “After I had complained about all this to the father confessor, she stopped wearing the ring when I was there. This ring is about an inch and a half in size, and they say it is made of diamonds and rubies! And here I cannot conceal the suspicion that this mysterious ring came from the possessed Pietro.”

  It was impossible for anyone in Sant’Ambrogio to express doubts about Maria Luisa’s holiness. The abbess and the convent’s spiritual director, Padre Leziroli, always had explanations at the ready. “The fragrance of sainthood which surrounds the madre causes people to associate her authority with a particular hatred of the devil—as if any skepticism about her perfection were inspired by Satan.” For many years, the confessors had been rebutting any doubt about Maria Luisa’s virtues, calling it “diabolica
l machination.” The novices in particular felt they were “placed under a good deal of pressure” by the madre vicaria. But Leziroli and the abbess had explained to them that if they thought they had seen Maria Luisa doing anything unjust, this was in reality “a manifestation of the devil, who took on the appearance of the madre vicaria.”

  Katharina’s father confessor, Padre Peters, also rejected her doubts about the madre vicaria’s “truthfulness” and her “character.” He believed Maria Luisa completely incapable of “deception.” This prompted a confrontation between the novice and the novice mistress, during which Maria Luisa denied ever having spoken to Katharina about the possessed Americano, let alone having shown her a letter from him, “and certainly not the above-mentioned German letter.” Both confessors declared “that what had happened was impossible to explain, unless by a most frequent apparition of the demon in the guise of the madre vicaria.” Katharina could “give no credence” to this explanation. In her view, all the facts fitted “very well with the character and the behavior of the madre vicaria.” She had become well acquainted with these over fifteen long months, during which: “I can say with the greatest certainty that I did not see her perform a single virtuous deed.”

  To Katharina’s mind, the only plausible explanation was the obvious one: Maria Luisa was pretending a holiness she didn’t deserve. She was a false saint, and thus a heretic. But how had she managed to convince the other nuns and the confessors of her holiness? Katharina’s denunciation also provided an answer for this. She took the confessors’ diabolical explanation, and turned it around: Maria Luisa was no victim of Satan; she was in league with him. “Considering all of this together, I feel obliged to express my most painful concern that the above-mentioned madre vicaria, Maria Luisa, was only able to achieve her reputation for extraordinary holiness in the convent of Sant’Ambrogio with the help of the devil. In the future, she could call up endless misery not only for this convent, but for more distant regions too.” Katharina also put the attempt on her own “poor life” down to this.