by Hubert Wolf
Unsurprisingly, this monopoly met with both private and public opposition. Many of the faithful didn’t agree with their saints being moral rather than magical. They didn’t want saints to show special virtue and moral strength in everyday life, but to do something extraordinary: saints were supposed to float through the air, work miracles, heal the sick, and receive secret messages and revelations from the afterlife. A saint was a prophet who could see into the future, go for months without nourishment, or live exclusively off the strength he derived from the Host at Holy Communion. The wounds of Jesus Christ that he bore on his body were an unmistakable sign that he had been chosen by God; they forced him to reenact Christ’s Passion over and over again. Mystics who bore the stigmata sometimes caused outbreaks of hysterical devotion, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which saw the emergence of Anna Katharina Emmerick, Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth, and Padre Pio.105 It is the fascination held by supernatural phenomena with no rational explanation that drives people to create a cult around a (living) saint, and explains the “persistenza del modello mistico.”106
Many men at the top of the Church hierarchy, especially Pius IX, were also susceptible to the fascination of transcendent phenomena. This meant the Church hierarchy didn’t always combat the new forms of popular piety as thoroughly as it might. Instead, churchmen put all their energy into channeling and controlling these movements according to their political interests and theological ideas. Even so, the kind of contemplation that was supposed to lead to a mystical vision of God, in the mold of Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, was often viewed as a protest against the utilitarianism of the Counter-Reformation’s “heroic” saints. In the eyes of the faithful, a mystic’s direct connection with God gave him an advantage over the Church hierarchy, whose power came via the objectivity of the authority that ordained them, and not the charisma of a divine encounter.
The Inquisition’s “invention” of the concept of feigned holiness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must be viewed in the context of the changes within the Catholic Church during this period. In the wake of the Counter-Reformation and confessionalization, the Church became more uniform and centralized, with a set hierarchy.107 The diverse Catholica of the Middle Ages had to be subsumed into a unified Roman Catholic Church, in order to distinguish Catholicism from the other Christian denominations. Clear Catholic principles and precepts had to be drawn up, and these were to be guaranteed and overseen exclusively by Rome and the papacy in an attempt to discipline Catholics into denominationally correct behavior.108
Feigned or simulated holiness was initially seen as just a moral misdemeanor, a strategy used by the “saint” to gain social, financial, and religious capital. This was dealt with on the level of Church discipline. Over time, however, the Roman inquisitors turned it into a crime against the Faith, which the highest religious authority could punish with the thunderbolt of excommunication. It was frequently ranked alongside the heresies of Molinosism and Quietism. “Until the start of the 17th century, false holiness is fraud and deceit, subtle human artifice, then a sickness, and finally and above all a heresy.”109
For his history of the Inquisition in Italy, Andrea Del Col found verifiable records of 114 Inquisition trials for feigned holiness between 1580 and 1876. There were at least thirty-two other cases formally handled under the rubric of “falso misticismo,” where the offense also amounted to feigned holiness. For this period, then, there were twice as many saints condemned as “false” as there were “true” saints raised to the altars.110
False or fraudulent holiness, as the Roman source material also calls it, was an especially incendiary matter when the suspect was a woman. The Roman inquisitors regarded women as being particularly susceptible to the devil whispering in their ear. And it was almost a matter of course for the guardians of the Faith to see the demons of sexual seduction at work in cases where women pretended to be saints. But mysticism and extraordinary occurrences were pretty much the only way for women to make their voices heard in the male-dominated Church. Significantly, the overwhelming majority of people who displayed stigmata were women. Of the 321 documented cases up to the end of the nineteenth century, 281 were women and only forty men. Of the fifty to sixty cases of full stigmatization, only two were men: Saint Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio.111
The relationship of these “holy” women to their spiritual guides and confessors was an important factor.112 Agnese Firrao and Domenico Salvadori were certainly no exception in this respect. Confessors provided an interface between the holy mystics and the general public. A confessor might dismiss and suppress his charge’s ecstasies, prophecies, miracles, and stigmata as deception and superstition. Or he could become an advocate for her status as an authentic saint. But this didn’t necessarily mean he held the position of power in the relationship: the confessor might also have fallen under the influence of the “seer” and become fascinated by her himself. Unsurprisingly, such a close spiritual relationship between a man and a woman sometimes led to physical intimacy and sexual contact. And here, too, the roles were by no means predetermined: the “saint” might have seduced the cleric, or it could be the other way around.
But why are there hardly any known cases of feigned holiness from the nineteenth century?113 Three possible explanations suggest themselves: the phenomenon may simply have ceased to exist in this period. Or there were cases, but these haven’t yet attracted the attention of researchers. Or—and the find in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s archive certainly speaks for this—cases of feigned holiness continued to arise in the nineteenth century, but were frequently handled as something other than affettata santità. The offense may, for example, have been Sollicitatio, seduction in the confessional.114 After all, the Inquisition frequently connected the offense of feigned holiness with Molinosism and its attendant sexual misdemeanors. However, the user guide for collections held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reveals that files dealing with offenses committed in the celebration of the sacraments (the so-called graviora delicta) are still classified, and inaccessible to researchers.115 This makes the case of Firrao a truly valuable find.
PROOF OF THE CONTINUING CULT OF FIRRAO
Tellingly, the continued veneration of Maria Agnese Firrao also formed the kernel of the first strand of the informative process that Pope Pius IX ordered in December 1859. The second part of this investigation focused on the pretense of holiness of Sister Maria Luisa, and the third on the reprehensible moral practices and crimes committed in Sant’Ambrogio. Over the course of the hearings, Sallua gradually formed a more detailed picture of the case, and was able to subdivide each of the three main charges into several Titoli. He then presented the result of this process to the cardinals.
In preparation for the hearings, Sallua had composed a historical overview of the old Firrao case for himself and the congregation of cardinals. However, there was one crucial question he failed to ask: did the verdict against Firrao from 1816 still hold even after Leo XII’s 1829 brief, which released Sant’Ambrogio from all Church censures and judgments?
If Leo XII’s brief had quashed Firrao’s conviction for false holiness, then the sisters were doing no wrong in venerating their mother founder. But Sallua’s consideration of the case took no account of this brief, thus editing out a fundamental part of the 1816 judgment’s history. In Sallua’s eyes, the veneration of Firrao was clearly a crime. He just had to prove that it was happening, and the nuns would have committed a punishable offense.
In her denunciation, Katharina von Hohenzollern had referred to a continued cult of the mother founder in spite of her conviction for feigned holiness. Sallua’s initial interrogation of Luigi Franceschetti, the convent’s legal representative, provided strong evidence to substantiate this.116 The lawyer said that the young vicaress, Maria Luisa, had told him several times of the founder’s extraordinary holiness. She believed the trial before the Inquisition in the early
nineteenth century had been “slanderous.” To her mind, it was no coincidence that some of her denouncers had since “suffered an agonizing death”: this was a punishment from God. According to Franceschetti, Maria Luisa thought of Agnese Firrao as a true saint. The novice mistress pointed to Firrao’s stigmata as hard evidence of her holiness: on Good Friday, sister Maria Agnese had always “suffered the agonies and pains of Jesus’ passion”; furthermore, the lawyer said, Maria Luisa had told him that even years after her death and interment in Gubbio, the founder’s body remained undecayed.
Here, Maria Luisa was pointing to a typical marker of true holiness. While the apostle Paul said that man’s earthly body was “corruptible,” Psalm 16 claimed that God would not “suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” At first, this idea was applied exclusively to Jesus, but it was soon extended to the saints. Texts from the Middle Ages often speak of bodies being exhumed intact even decades or centuries after burial. The undecayed body soon became a trope and a sign of sainthood, especially for martyrs and people who were sexually abstinent.117
The novice mistress evidently succeeded in convincing Franceschetti that her own visions and revelations were genuine. The lawyer testified: “I believed in them completely.”
When the nuns were questioned, they corroborated Franceschetti’s testimony. And, as the inquisitor discovered, they were unanimously convinced that the Inquisition had judged the mother founder unfairly. They all spoke of miracles, visitations, and healing the sick; they all believed the founder would guide their souls to heaven when they died. Their testimonies tallied right down to their choice of words—as the Dominican noted in his summary of the hearings of the three dozen nuns, for the cardinals of the Inquisition.118
The fifty-five-year-old abbess, Maria Veronica, displayed an initial unwillingness to speak plainly about the whole thing.119 It was only when the inquisitor confronted her with the other nuns’ statements that she gave up “her discretion.” Even so, he didn’t manage to convince her that the retraction the Inquisition had eventually forced from the mother founder was legal. Maria Veronica continued to refer to the Beata Madre, and to speak of Firrao’s extraordinary self-discipline in penance and fasting. She termed the founder’s practice of flagellating herself until she drew blood exemplary. She herself had cured several illnesses through the laying-on of the mother founder’s veil. The abbess admitted that, by way of numerous visions and visitations, the founder had also imparted specific instructions to her for the leadership of the convent. Finally, she also admitted to venerating the founder as a saint. She said that a portrait of Agnese Firrao stood on the novitiate altar between two candles, and that the nuns had venerated it over a period of several days, coming to kneel and pray before it.120
The abbess went on to say that in prayers of supplication and litanies,121 the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio called on the mother founder instead of Saint Clara (the companion of Saint Francis), saying: “Holy Agnese di Gesù, pray for us!” The inquisitor suggested that the nuns had performed “cult acts, which one would usually perform only to a canonized saint,” and the abbess replied: “This allegation is correct. We believed she had been glorified by God in heaven, and hoped that one day we would also see her glorified by the Church. These feelings and convictions were shared by the father confessors. For this reason we—and I, in front of the nuns—referred to her as beata e santa madre.”122
The mother founder’s first companions and old friends, who had entered the convent under Abbess Agnese Firrao, proved particularly recalcitrant under questioning. They were Sisters Maria Caterina of Saint Agnes, Maria Gertrude of Saint Ignatius, and Maria Colomba of Jesus of Nazareth, who were now all around seventy years old.123 All three claimed they had witnessed several miraculous healings following the holy founder’s intercession, both during her lifetime and after her death.124 The three old nuns were using these medical miracles to allude to a central element of the official Catholic canonization process: nobody could be raised to the altars without evidence that they had performed at least one miracle, interceding to heal a sick person whose recovery had no medical or scientific explanation. Martyrs were the only exception to this, as they had borne witness to Christ with their blood.125
Even forty years after the fact, the founder’s three companions believed the Holy Office and Pope Pius VII had made a fatal error in convicting her for feigned holiness. During her interrogation on January 31, 1860, Maria Caterina also stated:126 “After the founder was convicted by the Sanctum Officium and the judgment was read out to us, which said so many serious and terrible things, we, who were witnesses to the Mother’s innocence and the falseness of all parts of the judgment, thought the Holy Father had said in his judgment: ‘that he condemned her for all the things he had heard from the Holy Office.’ And so we said: ‘he did not condemn her as the pope and successor to St Peter, but only as the result of things he had heard from the Sanctum Officium, which were completely false.’ And so we remain convinced of the Mother’s holiness and innocence.” Maria Caterina believed the pope had erred in his judgment of Maria Agnese because he had spoken as a man, and had been taken in by human errors made by the Roman Inquisition. As evidence of this, she mentioned that the head of the Scottish College in Rome, Paul MacPherson,127 had told her that “Padre Merenda said on his deathbed: ‘The Holy Office committed a grave error in condemning Maria Agnese; if we could undo it, we would.’ ”
It took a certain amount of chutzpah to tell the investigating judge of the Holy Office that one of his predecessors had admitted to an error of judgment. Padre Merenda was in fact Angelo Merenda, commissary of the Inquisition from 1801 to 1820. It was his signature on the bando that proclaimed the judgment against Agnese Firrao.
The three older nuns backed their claim that the Holy Office had made an error in the Firrao case, by saying that senior people in the church hadn’t accepted the validity of the notification, either: “More than a few cardinals, who had always venerated Maria Agnese, continued to venerate her after she was convicted.” Among them were Placido Zurla, Alessandro Mattei, and Giacomo Filippo Fransoni.128 Sister Maria Colomba went so far as to say: “Even if you were to cut me into little pieces, I would still say she is a saint.”129
To Sallua’s mind, the remarkable agreement between all the witnesses he had questioned proved the first Titolo without a doubt. With one accord, and in spite of formal prohibition, the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio had venerated their condemned mother founder as a saint during her lifetime, and all the more so after her death. And, as the Dominican noted, they were entirely unrepentant, refusing to abandon this false cult even during the trial.
THE SECRET ABBESS
In Sallua’s mind, the second Titolo arose unavoidably from the first.130 The judgment of 1816 not only forbade the continuation of the cult; it also threatened to punish any contact between the convent’s founder and its nuns. And if the false cult had continued, it was to be suspected that the “mother” and her “daughters” had remained in uninterrupted contact.
Sallua had plenty of forthright witnesses and handwritten evidence for this charge. The principal witnesses were the abbess, the prioress, and the father confessors of San Marziale, as well as some women from Gubbio who had taken dictation from Agnese Firrao in the last years of her life, after she went blind. On November 29, 1859, Sallua asked the local inquisitor of Gubbio to question these witnesses, and after the New Year he informed the head office in Rome of the results.131
The abbess of Gubbio, Sister Matilde Bonci, had no doubt that Firrao had been in constant written communication with the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio. “On some occasions all of them, or almost all, wrote to her.” They had “a great admiration for her, both as founder of the convent, and due to her reputation for holiness.” The prioress of San Marziale, Teresa Serafina Salvi, and other sisters there, corroborated the abbess’s statement. Filomena Monacelli, who had taken dictation from Agnese Firrao, stated: “I recall that some of the sisters of Sant’Ambrogio
believed Sister Agnese to be a saint; for her part, she thought some of the sisters of Sant’Ambrogio were saints, too”—namely Maria Metilde and Maria Maddalena. Filomena Monacelli read out letters to Firrao from the nuns and a “certain Jesuit Padre Leziroli from Rome.” These not only expressed a deep admiration, but also contained statements of accounts, and news that her previous instructions had been carried out. The mother founder had dictated these instructions to her in letters to Rome. Firrao had also exercised a direct influence on the elections to convent offices. From exile in Gubbio, she used the authority of heavenly visions to decide whom the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio should choose as abbess, novice mistress, or vicaress. The same went for the acceptance or rejection of novices. The confessor at San Marziale, Canon Bruno Brunelli,132 even told the local inquisitor in Gubbio that the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio were “totally dependent” on Firrao, as “daughters depend on their mother.”133
The San Marziale witnesses were, however, unable to provide evidence of Agnese Firrao’s saintly life and death, even though she had lived with them for around forty years. “We never noticed any deeds of special and exceptional virtue,” the sisters agreed. Firrao died without being anointed, or receiving absolution and the Viaticum of Holy Communion, although she had been ill for more than a year and therefore had ample time to request the last rites.