by Hubert Wolf
For these misdemeanors, the Inquisition sentenced Firrao to “lifelong imprisonment in a convent of the strictest observance, to be determined by the cardinal vicar. From henceforth she must wear the penitential habit without the black veil, and is strictly obliged to stay away from the grille, the gates and the convent’s parlor. She is also forbidden from corresponding with anyone without the express permission of the mother superior.” The principal aim of this punishment was to prevent any kind of communication between the former abbess and the nuns of her reformed Third Order. If there was the least breach of the Inquisition’s terms, Firrao would automatically be sentenced to a year in a convent jail, and three months of taking only bread and water on Fridays. She also had to pray a Rosary in atonement for her sins every Saturday for the rest of her life.49 The notification added that once His Holiness and Their Eminences the cardinal inquisitors had decided the matter, “Nobody must dare to claim in the future or continue to believe that the above-named Sister Maria Agnese Firrao is a saint.”
This judgment, made in the assembly of the Holy Office cardinals and Pope Pius VII on February 8, largely followed the recommendation of the consultors. They had considered Firrao’s case on January 22, and classed her supernatural experiences and supposedly divine gifts as “Molinosism,” thus pigeonholing what she had done as a heresy that had been condemned in 1687.50
Molinosism was named for Miguel de Molinos, who died in the Inquisition’s jail in 1696.51 The Spanish priest had quickly made a name for himself as a spiritual leader and confessor in various convents in Rome. This rapid success led envious rivals to accuse him of Quietism—and it didn’t end there. Molinos’s opponents ramped up the charge, arguing that if he and his followers considered their own moral actions meaningless in terms of their souls’ salvation, then they must believe that one could indulge in the worst kind of fleshly debauchery without being called to account on the Day of Judgment.
On February 15, 1816, the Holy Office published Maria Agnese Firrao’s formal conviction for “pretense of holiness” on a bando. (illustration credit 3.3)
In the language of the Inquisition, Molinosism meant not just false mysticism but, at least indirectly, serious sexual misconduct.52 It is very likely that the cardinals and Pius VII consciously avoided using this term in their public judgment: to do so would have been to unleash speculations about erotic adventures behind the convent walls. This was a trope that had been common currency ever since the anti-monastic rhetoric of the Reformation, and it was revived during the Enlightenment.53
In the meeting on February 8, 1816, the cardinals also decided to dissolve the convent with immediate effect.54 Agnese Firrao herself was incarcerated in the convent of the Concezione.55 However, according to Sallua, her confessor helped the “mother” to remain “in secret and cunning contact” with her “daughters.” She induced them to “continue to adhere to the maxims and principles that had been condemned.” Her letters gave secret instructions, and prophesied that she would soon be reunited with her daughters. She was therefore summoned once more before the Holy Office’s tribunal. The witness statements and documents with which they confronted her were so overwhelming that Firrao confessed to everything they had accused her of, including her long sexual relationship with Monsignore Marchetti. When he was interrogated by the Inquisition, Marchetti himself was forced to admit “that he in eodem lecto simul turpiter agebat56 both with Firrao and Sister Maria Maddalena.” In plain English, this meant the priest had had sexual intercourse with two nuns at the same time, in the same bed.
Sallua described how the Inquisition increased its pressure on Firrao. She now “repented of all her wicked deeds, in her own handwriting.” The tribunal officially informed Firrao’s “daughters” of the judgment and her abjuration, hoping to “disillusion” them. But this didn’t stop them venerating her as a saint. Contact between the mother and her daughters continued in secret, and the Inquisition finally decided to transfer Maria Agnese to San Marziale in Gubbio, away from Rome, to break off the forbidden contact once and for all—though this strategy also failed.
The Inquisition generally concluded affairs of this type with a secret internal abjuration. Why did it depart from its usual practice in Firrao’s case? Why did it decide to make a public announcement of the judgment? This was principally because since the confirmation of the 1796 miracle, Maria Agnese Firrao’s fame had spread right across Europe. In Rome, even members of the College of Cardinals and ladies of the Roman nobility had held her in high esteem.57 The wounds and ecstasies had turned her into a saint. A public condemnation would draw a line under any further regard for her.
The Damnatio of 1816 led to substantial coverage of the case in the international press.58 Over the course of March that year, people all over Europe were informed of the false saint and the wounds she had inflicted on herself. The Inquisition’s verdict even seems to have had consequences in far-off Dülmen, the home of the stigmatized visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick.59 She had been born in 1774, and had borne bleeding marks from the crown of thorns on her head since 1798. In 1812 she also developed five wounds on her hands, feet, and side, which at first bled regularly, then only on Fridays, and eventually only during Holy Week. But on Good Friday of the year 1816, Anna Katharina Emmerick’s stigmata didn’t bleed.60 A connection has been posited between the Roman Inquisition’s judgment against Firrao, and Emmerick’s fear that her stigmata might be examined.61 The Journal de la Province de Limbourg commented that the Holy Office’s judgment against Firrao proved “that this tribunal has allowed itself to be illuminated by the century’s Enlightenment.” Despite the “deference showed to her by several cardinals and ladies of the Roman aristocracy, the tribunal held her to be a fraud, deserving of the harshest punishment.” A surgeon and a pharmacist had also been arrested on suspicion of “causing the stigmata on the body of the alleged saint” and providing her with the “suffocating drug” that could be smelled in the alleged visionary’s room, “whenever she claimed to have been tempted by the devil.”62
THE MIRACULOUS CONVERSION OF LEO XII
Roma locuta—causa finita: Rome has spoken, and that is an end to the matter. The Roman Inquisition must have been convinced this would also hold true for the case of Maria Agnese Firrao. But it was not to be. Her devotees suffered a sore defeat in 1816, but they still weren’t prepared to accept the verdict. Members of Rome’s noble families (including the Marchesa Costaguti63 and Signora Faustina Ricci),64 prelates of the Curia, and even cardinals (Alessandro Mattei’s name repeatedly crops up in this context)65 were apparently still convinced of Firrao’s holiness.66 The king of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel IV,67 and his wife, the French princess Marie Clotilde,68 played a particular role here: the king was a Jesuit sympathizer, and Marie Clotilde was an enthusiastic disciple of Maria Agnese.69 The royal couple had shared a confessor with the stigmatized nun: the ex-Jesuit Padre Marconi, who died in 1811.70 There had been a long, difficult period between the point at which the pope had succumbed to pressure from other European powers and suppressed the Jesuit order, and its reinstatement in 1814. During this time, the feeling of solidarity between i Nostri in the tight, militaristically organized unit of the Society of Jesus had become even stronger than the order’s constitutions had envisaged. The fellow feeling within the Society was greater even than the duty of obedience to the highest religious authority.
At first, the efforts of Firrao’s supporters were fruitless; this changed only when Cardinal Lorenzo Litta71 became cardinal vicar of Rome on September 23, 1818. Litta was convinced of Firrao’s innocence, and on April 3, 1819, he managed to persuade Pius VII to revoke his dissolution of the convent in Borgo Sant’Agata. With the exception of their former abbess, the nuns were allowed to return.72 They elected Maria Maddalena as their new abbess, and Maria Crocifissa as their novice mistress.73 Litta died on May 1, 1820, and Cardinal Annibale della Genga succeeded him as cardinal vicar on May 6.74 He had been born in 1760, and came from a noble family wit
h land in the Marches and Umbria. Della Genga was a member of the Zelanti, and a firm opponent of the moderate cardinal secretary of state, Ercole Consalvi. He was marked out by a rigorous puritanism and piety, and regularly took part in processions barefoot. The fate of the Regulated Franciscans of Sant’Agata now depended on him.75 And their prospects didn’t look good: della Genga came to the convent in 1822 with the firm intention of “expelling” the nuns.76 The Franciscans and their confessor saw him as the “worst enemy of the Reform, because of the hatred he bore for Maria Agnese.”77 He was determined to enforce the Holy Office’s decision of 1816.
When Cardinal Vicar della Genga arrived at the convent, Abbess Maria Maddalena took him into the chapel, where they both remained for a long time, sunk in prayer before the picture of the Virgin Mary, the Maria Santissima Consolatrice. This image showed the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, holding the globe in one hand, with his other resting in benediction on the head of the young John the Baptist.78 The painting was believed to possess miraculous powers, and the Mother of God was said to have spoken to the nuns through it. Following this, they had scraped a few fragments from its edges and ground them into a healing powder.79 It was reported that, as a child, Cardinal Nicola Clarelli Paracciani had been cured of an illness by this powder.80
This painting made a deep impression on della Genga; one might say it worked the miracle of his mutazione from firm opponent to firm supporter of the Regulated Franciscan nuns.81 It was “un miraculo della Madonna, who spoke to him from her image.” Over the period that followed, Maria Maddalena seems to have become the cardinal’s closest confidant. Backed by revelations from the miraculous painting, she apparently prophesied that he would be elected pope the following year. After the death of Pope Pius VII, the conclave really did elect della Genga as the new pope, on September 28, 1823. He took the name Leo XII.
Leo XII came to the convent in modo privato several times, to honor the painting and discuss important issues of his pontificate with the abbess. During one of these visits, he is said to have exclaimed: “Sono il Leoncino delle mie Riformate”—I am the little lion of my Reformed sisters.82 Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, the rector of the English College who later became cardinal of Westminster, mentioned Leo XII’s visits to the nuns in his memoirs, describing them as a “most unexpected proof of paternal care.”83 On August 19, 1826, the pope crowned the miraculous image of the Virgin with his own hand.84
However, the Sant’Agata convent was too small, and entirely unsuitable for enclosure, so in October 1828 the pope presented the community with the convent of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. This was to become the permanent home of the Regulated Franciscan nuns of the Third Order of Holy Saint Francis, reformed by Agnese Firrao. Leo XII also reinstated the Jesuit network that Giuseppe Marconi had created to protect Firrao’s reform at the turn of the century. At the end of 1828, the pope requested that pastoral care and the hearing of confession in Sant’Ambrogio be divided between two Jesuit padres—functions that would remain in Jesuit hands until the convent was dissolved.85
This painting hung in the church of Sant’Ambrogio. Many Catholics, including Pope Leo XII, believed it was miraculous. (illustration credit 3.4)
In 1828, Leo XII also ordered an Apostolic Visitation.86 The visitator noted that there were nineteen women in the convent at this time. The Rule approved by Pius VII in 1806 was followed in a very strict and exemplary manner, and the visitator had no doubt that the papal approbation of 1806 had been genuine. But the Inquisition’s tribunal had disputed this fact in 1816, and was still disputing it in 1861.87
The Visitation formed the basis for a very well-meaning brief issued by Leo XII on January 30, 1829. This text solemnly confirmed the reformed Rule of 1806, and the gift of the new convent. “We have given consideration to transferring these sisters to another, larger and more suitable place. And finally we have selected for them the convent called Sant’Ambrogio, in the Flaminio district.” The pope also freed the sisters from “any kind of censure, all judgments, the punishment of excommunication and interdict, and every other conviction by the Church, for whatever reason and in whatever matter these may have been effected.”88
Leo XII died a few days later, on February 10, 1829. After his death Padre Pietro Cinotti,89 who was the Jesuits’ Vizepreposito, the second most important man in the Society, gave the nuns his personal condolences. The well-known Jesuit dogmatist Giovanni Perrone90 led their exercises.91 Over the period that followed, Leo XII’s nephew, Cardinal Gabriele della Genga,92 kept a protective watch over the nuns. He also had a close relationship with the abbess, Maria Maddalena, whom he held in “high regard.”93 It was no coincidence that when he was enthroned as a bishop on September 15, 1833, the ceremony was held in the church of Sant’Ambrogio, underneath the miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary.94
Without saying so explicitly, Leo XII’s brief had declared the Roman Inquisition’s 1816 verdict invalid. In any case, the pope had overturned the judgment’s legal effects, and the question of Agnese Firrao’s holiness was open once more.
TRUE AND FALSE HOLINESS
The main goal of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition was to fight heresy and maintain the purity of the sana doctrina, healthy Catholic doctrine.95 The “sacred duty” of this authority, which had good reason to be called the Holy Office, was to sniff out heretics of every stripe and to silence anyone who deviated from the official line. When the Christian denominations became more sharply divided following the 1563 Council of Trent, the newly founded Inquisition concentrated on Protestant communities and their protagonists. Over the course of the eighteenth century, and increasingly after the French Revolution, its focus gradually shifted to matters within the inner-Catholic realm. The Holy Office became the disciplinary organ for Church-internal movements away from Rome and the pope, no matter how orthodox their positions were in other respects. The Index of Forbidden Books also showed this tendency: more and more Catholic theologians whose thought differed from the prevailing views in Rome were denounced to the Congregation of the Index or the Inquisition by their opponents, and ended up on the “blacklists.” Over the nineteenth century, new scholasticism—which had been just one of many theological schools of thought—gradually became the Roman (and therefore true Catholic) theology. All other theological viewpoints were a priori suspicious.96
The Inquisition turned its “left eye” toward the pursuit of intellectual dissenters in the area of doctrine. Its “right eye,” however, had a great deal more to see.97 Its gaze fell on all phenomena that might very broadly be described as mysticism and the belief in miracles: private revelations, epiphanies, visions, and auditions of divine powers—in particular angels and saints, but most of all apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There were more than a few Catholics who heard “voices from beyond the grave” or received messages from those “poor souls” who had passed on. Supernatural abilities and miracles were often attributed to these people: they healed the sick through the laying-on of hands, multiplied bread, or averted storms. A few particularly “blessed” among the faithful even bore the stigmata, the wounds being a sign of their special devotion to Christ.
This was a form of religious behavior that largely evaded the rational foundation and controls of the Church. These “mystics”—often women—claimed to have a direct line to God and the saints, and could therefore pose a threat to the Church hierarchy. Anyone who could communicate directly with heaven had only a limited need for the Church as an institution and a mediator of God’s blessing and sacrament. If these “blessed” people then claimed to be living saints, or were honored as such by simple Catholics, the Inquisition was forced to impose harsh measures to protect the hierarchy. Where would the Catholic Church be if its flock was able to choose its own saints without the pope’s blessing? What would happen if unworldly mystics, who protested long and loud about how the Catholic Church was becoming nothing more than a clerical and judicial institution, were raised to the altars by these “subve
rsive” means?
The Congregation of Rites was founded in 1588, as the sole authority responsible for carrying out the canonization process. At this point the expression “pretense of holiness” appeared for the first time in the catalogue of responsibilities and rubrics of the Holy Office.98 The pope was laying claim to a new monopoly: it was now only possible to become a saint by decree from the Summus Pontifex, rather than through popular devotion.
Following a long period of trial and error, a process for canonization began to develop in 1634, and was given its eventual form by Pope Benedict XIV in 1741. This remained in place until the publication of the Codex Iuris Canonici in 1917.99 At the same time, a new Roman Catholic model of sainthood was taking shape. The traditional markers of sainthood such as ecstasies, prophecies, and other supernatural apparitions, food for the sensation-hungry masses, retreated into the background. Rome became especially skeptical of stigmata.100 “Heroic virtue in a moral or social field” was now the crucial criterion.101
Since the end of the sixteenth century, the history of canonization shows each pope raising people to the altars according to his own Church-political leanings. If a pope flew the flag for the fight against Protestantism, he would canonize martyrs who had been killed by Protestants. If he was aiming to intensify the Church’s missionary work, new saints would be successful evangelists. If a pope wanted to cultivate a close bond with the Society of Jesus, he would canonize a large number of Jesuits.102 From 1519 to 1758, a total of fifty-two new saints were canonized, forty-one men and eleven women. Only two of them were members of the laity; most belonged to religious orders, or were bishops or archbishops. However, there was only one pope among them: Pius V, canonized in 1712.103 In 1625, the Holy Office expressly forbade Catholics from honoring any deceased person rumored to have been holy without prior authorization from the apostolic throne.104