by Hubert Wolf
CHAPTER FOUR
“Wash Me Well, for the Padre Is Coming”
The Madre Vicaria’s Pretense of Holiness
VISIONS ON THE ROAD TO POWER
Madre Vicaria Maria Luisa’s pretense of holiness was the second of the three main charges considered in the informative process.1 Over roughly three dozen hearings with the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, Sallua was repeatedly confronted with this issue, in more or less unconnected statements. And very soon, a focal point emerged: Maria Luisa was said to have had ecstasies, visions, and other supernatural experiences that bordered on mystical translation.2
The testimonies, particularly those of the older sisters, all agreed that Maria Luisa’s career as a visionary had begun very early. She was taken into the convent as a postulant at the age of thirteen, and received her novice robes in 1847. People spoke of her even then as “a soul particularly favored by God.” During her first year in the convent, Maria Luisa told Maria Veronica, the nun who was then novice mistress (and who later became abbess), that she had had a vision of “the Lord Jesus pierced through with many lances.”
The world of ideas in which this young nun was operating was clearly still influenced by the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult, promulgated by Pius IX. In the nineteenth century this symbol, printed on thousands of holy cards and used enthusiastically in religious instruction, was a standard element of Rome-oriented Catholic faith.3
But Maria Luisa must soon have started having other, very different, visions. The late abbess, Maria Maddalena, under whose aegis she had entered the convent, seemingly appeared to her frequently. But in her letters from Gubbio, Agnese Firrao cast doubt on the authenticity of these visions. She warned the convent’s superiors about Maria Luisa, urging Padre Leziroli to keep a particularly close eye on her, “because this woman seems to be deceived and betrayed by the devil.” After Agnese Firrao’s death in October 1854, Maria Luisa told the whole convent that the mother founder had appeared to her in a vision, and had “begged her forgiveness for questioning her virtue and favor while she was still alive.”
A few weeks later, in December 1854, the current abbess (Agnese Celeste della Croce) also died. Just a few hours after her death, Maria Luisa went to the novice mistress, Maria Veronica, to report something the dead woman had just told her in a vision: Agnese Celeste della Croce had been too mild and gentle. “For this she would have to spend several years in purgatory, and only the intercession and mercy of the mother founder Maria Agnese could free her. The dead woman said: ‘Above all, the new abbess must ensure strict adherence to the rules.’ Her command was that Maria Veronica should become the new abbess. The novice mistress should become the vicaress, and Maria Luisa should be made novice mistress.” This vision was relayed to Padre Leziroli, who—as the nuns’ testimonies confirm—spoke at length about it to the voters, instructing them that it was “their duty” to do what the vision had commanded. And so Maria Luisa was elected novice mistress, on the basis of a divine command that she alone had received. Maria Veronica became abbess, for which she ultimately had Maria Luisa to thank.
Sister Maria Gesualda was one of the few witnesses who took a skeptical view of these “divine” appointments, and cast doubt on Maria Luisa’s visions. During her witness examination on May 7, 1860, she said:
When I was a novice, Maria Luisa read me part of a letter from the mother founder, in which she reprimanded her for her headaches and visions—things she took for tomfoolery. And in fact, as long as Agnese Celeste della Croce was alive, Maria Luisa was kept in check. But after the deaths of Agnese Firrao and Agnese Celeste della Croce, Maria Luisa began to speak openly about her supernatural experiences. They included a vision of the mother founder, pleading for forgiveness because she had not believed her. Even as a novice, Maria Luisa showed a desire for power. She said: “let me be mistress for a single hour, and I will make everything right again.”
Three years later, in 1857, the vicaress died. Maria Luisa brought a note to the abbess, Maria Veronica, telling her the Madonna had “dictated this to her and commanded” she give it to the confessor. He should then “proclaim the will of the Virgin to the electoral committee.” The note read: “It is the will of the Blessed Virgin Mary that Maria Luisa should be elected as vicaress, and at the same time remain novice mistress.” Once again, Leziroli completed his task without hesitation, and without calling into question the authenticity of these commands. This time, however, there were difficulties. Some of the nuns resisted; they thought Maria Luisa far too young to take over both convent offices simultaneously, and they doubted the truth of the revelation. But the confessor forced them all “to suppress their judgment and remain silent,” as Sallua put it. He added that a few of the sisters were now well aware of Maria Luisa’s “artfulness.”
A valid election could take place only in the presence of the cardinal vicar, the protector of Sant’Ambrogio.4 Maria Luisa therefore had another vision of the Virgin Mary, who gave her a message for the cardinal. The Virgin said that if he didn’t come to Sant’Ambrogio on the day of the election, he would be “poisoned with chocolate” at home by a servant who had been possessed by the devil. Satan apparently had a deep hatred of Patrizi, because he had campaigned “so hard for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.” Leziroli also acted as postman on this occasion, and Patrizi did in fact come to Sant’Ambrogio on October 17, 1857, for the election. As was only to be expected, the vote fell just as the Virgin had wished.5 Maria Luisa had used her visions to put her career plan in Sant’Ambrogio into action. At just twenty-four years of age, she was already novice mistress and vicaress. The next step was to aim for the office of abbess. But for this she would have to wait for the present incumbent to die or step down, or found her own convent.
This accumulation of roles was highly unusual in the history of religious orders: the offices of vicaress (the convent administrator), and novice mistress (the new sisters’ spiritual leader), weren’t really compatible. The fact that Patrizi gave consent to this double election shows how convinced he was of Maria Luisa’s qualities.
Maria Luisa also used her supernatural gifts to allocate tasks in Sant’Ambrogio, to influence the convent’s philosophy, and, above all, to recruit new blood. A series of younger sisters made corroborating statements to the effect that Maria Luisa had used her hotline to heaven to “entice young women into the convent,” and to decide which of the novices were allowed to profess their vows. A few of the witnesses claimed that the very first time they met, the novice mistress revealed she had seen them in spirit long before they entered the convent, and could thus communicate God’s will to them. Several of them were admitted to the novitiate, or were even clothed, without having fulfilled the necessary requirements.
Maria Crocifissa provided a telling example of this method of recruitment. On April 25, 1860, the twenty-two-year-old nun gave the following statement:6
I entered this convent thinking that I would leave it again immediately, as one of my sisters was quite ill. But after a few days I changed my mind, which happened by a miracle, as I learned afterwards. When I entered the novitiate, Agnese Eletta, a friend of Maria Luisa’s, told me … that when Maria Luisa had been in the choir at a novena for the Mother Comforter, Jesus Christ had appeared to her. He told her that if I left the convent even for a short time, I would never return. It was His express wish that I remain a nun in this place, and He would therefore show my family special favor if they declared themselves to be in agreement. In confession, Padre Leziroli spoke to me of this same favor, and Maria Luisa’s vision—and he added that he himself had delivered a letter to my home, in which this vision and the favor were mentioned. He said this letter had not been signed, and he had named neither the convent nor the person who had given him the letter. He urged me never to speak of it, and never to say who had written the letter. There is no doubt that this was true, because my mother and my uncle told me of it when they came to the convent.
Maria Luisa also claimed that Christ hi
mself had worn her cloak during a vision. Padre Leziroli preserved this cloak as a contact relic, to be brought out whenever important decisions had to be made. Some of the novices claimed that, after the reading of the Rule, Maria Luisa “breathed upon” their faces, “to instill in them the spirit of the institute.” In a vision, she herself had been “thrice breathed upon” by the mother founder. Agnese Firrao “thus instilled her spirit in her.” Maria Luisa was drawing on the Bible, where Christ breathes on his disciples, saying “receive ye the Holy Spirit.”7 This claim was a signal that the founder had passed her authority on to Maria Luisa, in the same way that Christ gave it to his apostles. But once again, Maria Luisa went beyond the biblical paradigm: a single breath, like Jesus, wasn’t sufficient—it had to be three.
And the novice mistress went still further, acting out her God-given authority in quasi-sacramental rituals. One Easter Saturday, when she had spoken to the novices about the Passion of Christ, she took “a large glass, which she called a chalice.” After drinking from this glass herself, she passed it to the novices, declaring: “This is the chalice of Christ.… My daughters, you must never forget that you have drunk from this chalice, as the apostles did with the Lord. Take courage.” The chalice of the Passion tasted (as one young nun put it) extremely bitter. One of the novices suspected a bitter liqueur, another “pistachio ice-cream from the infirmary.” Maria Luisa was giving a word-perfect imitation of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples, as described in the Gospel of Luke.8 Maria Luisa cast herself as the Lady of the Supper. The glass of liqueur or pistachio ice cream did, however, lend the whole tableau a note of absurdity.
A series of nuns reported that God had bestowed other heavenly “gifts” on Maria Luisa. Among these were her mystical translations into heaven, hell, and purgatory. Maria Luisa frequently told her fellow nuns that she had been taken up to heaven, where once she had even celebrated the Feast of the Assumption.9 She had experienced the mystery of the Trinity at close hand, and had other deep mystical experiences there. The Mother of God had also taken her into hell many times, where Maria Luisa had “trampled the devil with her feet” and commanded him not to attempt any more campaigns of deceit. Here, Maria Luisa was using a familiar liturgical trope, which celebrated the Virgin Mary as a warrior who “trampled the head of the hellish serpent.”10
However, Maria Luisa’s actions in hell attracted the devil’s “particular hatred.” He often came at night to do battle with her. “The morning after, her face and mouth looked terribly bruised; her scapular11 was torn into long shreds.”
Furthermore, Maria Luisa claimed that in purgatory, where she was a frequent visitor, she had released many of her order’s sisters, reducing their time in the purifying flames and allowing them to go straight to heaven. There she had also received from God “the privilege … of being present at the judgment of each sister who died,” and thus being able to plead their case. In classical Catholicism, the intercession for the dead at the throne of heaven is one of a saint’s most important tasks.12 By implication: a person who you believe capable of divine intercession should be honored as a saint.
According to the numerous witness statements given by the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, discussions with heavenly beings were part of Maria Luisa’s everyday life. During her mystical fits, she often broke into “prophetic expressions,” when she could be heard talking to Christ. And she was always speaking “with the Virgin, and with the angel, and often with the dead mother founder and Maria Maddalena.”
Saints are frequently given the gift of prophecy.13 Maria Luisa made good on this expectation, too, as her fellow nuns told the inquisitor. Of particular interest to the investigating judge was a prophecy concerning Pius IX: Maria Luisa warned that the pope was in danger of falling into “eternal damnation.” But she had “secured his salvation through prayer.” With all these phenomena, Maria Luisa was building on the tradition of the female mystics of the Middle Ages.
MYSTICISM
In everyday language, the word “mystical” carries a whole raft of undertones. The things we call mystical are typically opaque and shrouded in mystery, magical and occult, hidden and extrasensory, inexplicable and intangible, or even demonic and spiritualist.14 Mysticism doesn’t quite seem to fit into a modern, rational world. But over the last few decades, a new kind of spirituality or esotericism has led to a widespread resurrection of mystical practices—initially outside Christianity, with shamans, Sufis, neo-Hindu gurus, yoga cults, and Zen meditation. And within Christianity, there has also been a revival of forms of devotion influenced by mysticism, as demonstrated by the sightings of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina that began in 1981, or the veneration of Padre Pio in Italy.
In the history of the Catholic Church, mystical experiences have been regarded with a high degree of skepticism for both theological and political reasons. According to Catholic belief, Jesus’ message of divine revelation was passed from His apostles to their successors, the bishops, forming an unbroken line of witnesses through the ages. The vital task of imparting Jesus Christ’s divine revelation thus falls to the Church as an institution. Faith comes from listening to the proclamations of ordained, male witnesses, and Christ only comes in a mediated form, via the office of the Church.15
But alongside this there has always been a second, extraordinary and immediate route to Christ, often called mysticism. The mystic movement centered on the unmediated experience of the absolute, the ascension of the soul to God, and its union with Christ.16 The initiative for this unio mystica clearly came from God. The mystic could prepare himself by means of meditation, asceticism, or fasting, but ultimately he would be “graciously seized by the divine reality.”17 This unmediated experience of the divine was very often bestowed upon women, who were then able to use their extraordinary route to Christ to compensate for their exclusion from religious office.18
The Church was rather distrustful of these “private” revelations.19 Many mystics drew political conclusions from their direct experience of God, and went to the hierarchy with calls for reform. As a result, mystics were often met with hostility. Many were prosecuted, locked up, or even executed for heresy. It was only after a long struggle that great mystics like Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Avila gained official Church recognition. From the Inquisition’s point of view, real mystical occurrences were rare, and false mysticism was the norm.
The unmediated “vision of God’s being” might be a purely spiritual experience for a mystic, but it could also take on physical and even erotic characteristics. The female mystics of the Middle Ages were particularly given to describing their experiences in the erotically charged language of the Old Testament’s Song of Songs. The unio mystica could be interpreted as a divine wedding to Christ in heaven.20 As a sign of this bond, some female mystics even received a heavenly ring, to symbolize their marriage to their divine bridegroom.21
The “mystical wedding” of Saint Catherine of Siena may be the best known of these bridal experiences.22 In his Legenda maior, the Dominican Raymond of Capua23 spoke of this event in detail. Catherine had been praying for a union with her “divine Spouse” Christ “with more fervor than ever.” The Lord replied: “I intend … to celebrate the wedding which is to unite me to thy soul. I am going, according to my promise, to espouse thee in Faith.” At this, the Virgin Mary took Catherine by her right hand and gave it to her Son. Jesus “offered her a golden ring, set with four precious stones, at the center of which blazed a magnificent diamond. He placed it Himself on Catherine’s finger, saying to her: ‘I thy Creator and Redeemer, espouse thee in Faith.’… The vision disappeared, and the ring remained on the finger of Catherine. She saw it, but it was invisible to others!”24 Raymond of Capua laid particular emphasis on this point. The ring came from heaven, and, as it was only the mystic herself who had been elevated to this sphere, only she was able to see it. It was and remained part of that supernatural reality, even after Catherine returned to ear
th. Her confessor, who had not been granted a role in this mystical union, was therefore unable to prove the ring’s objective existence. It existed only in the mystical world.25
As an extraordinary route to Christ, mysticism played a substantial role in Church history until the era of the Reformation. In the seventeenth century, however, it reached a crisis point. At the same time, the Roman Inquisition began to keep a very close eye on mystics—particularly female mystics. The increasing emphasis on the absolute “passivity” of a person undergoing a mystical experience, during which God alone was the active party (which was, apparently, a false understanding of grace), made many members of the Inquisition suspect crypto-Protestantism. The Enlightenment’s rationalist outlook then gave rise to a general suspicion of mystical experiences, which were seen as the spawn of irrationalism.
But countermovements also started to spring up. The century of materialism and science saw a rediscovery of the supernatural. The rise of spiritualism, with its séances, mediums, and table-tipping, can be interpreted as an esoteric counterweight to the nineteenth century’s rationalist drive toward science and modernity.26 Enlightenment thought and Romantic art, rationalism and mysticism, secularization and resacralization in private devotional practices were all closely interrelated.27 Even educated Catholics longed for a “re-enchantment of the world.” Some of Romanticism’s leading exponents were Catholics, or at least Catholic sympathizers. Clemens Brentano, for example, wrote a literary interpretation of the visions of the stigmatized nun Katharina von Emmerick.28