by Hubert Wolf
Maria Luisa was probably just misappropriating money from the nuns’ dowries, which were laid down when they entered the convent, and formed the basis of the institution’s wealth.
While Maria Luisa was in charge, the convent’s accounts had fallen into chaos, as the lawyer Franceschetti (who was actually supposed to keep an eye on what she was doing), admitted in his hearing on September 12, 1860.60
Now I will say something on the administration of the convent of Sant’Ambrogio. As already mentioned, this is completely unlawful. Firstly, there is no general account for income and expenditure. They have a separate arrangement for certain deposits, which are not entered into the main book. Even for the listed deposits there are no receipts. This is particularly clear for the dowry sums—which is to say that these receipts are not specific, or rather, the amounts are not entered as deposits into the reserve assets. Some dowries are not listed at all.
In an attempt to exonerate himself, the lawyer came to the conclusion:
As well as all these irregularities in the accounts, I have now realized that, unlike all other convents, the superiors here arrogated to themselves the privilege of free and independent administration. Only very recently have I been able … to recognize all this.
Sallua could have contented himself with proof of the murders and financial irregularities but, in conclusion to his Relazione for the cardinals of the Holy Office, he added a final Titolo on a matter that lay particularly close to his heart: the role of the two confessors.
THE CONFESSORS AS CONFIDANTS AND ACCOMPLICES
Casting a critical eye over the witness statements, the Dominican came to the conclusion that “sometimes one, sometimes the other, but often both father confessors were aware of all the criminal acts addressed in this trial.”61 They had been revealed as either “supporters” and confidants or, in some cases, “accomplices.” The starting point for the countless crimes committed in Sant’Ambrogio was the false cult propagated with such enthusiasm by Leziroli and Peters. For Sallua, the fact that the two confessors were the “principal supporters of the holiness and the supposed gifts” of Maria Luisa could “clearly be seen from every hearing—one might almost say, from every page of the thirteen volumes of records in this trial.”
Leziroli had even gone so far as to tell the abbess that he could “never call into question Maria Luisa’s holiness, even if an angel were to tell him the opposite.” And Peters said on several occasions that he had “the proof of Maria Luisa’s extraordinary gifts and holiness in [his] possession.” Collective coercion, for which the confessors were ultimately responsible, was part of the Sant’Ambrogio system. It was the huge pressure applied by Leziroli that got Maria Luisa elected as novice mistress and vicaress. And Padre Peters, in particular, encouraged the cult of contact relics. Such was his blind admiration for the beautiful young nun that, several times, he kissed her feet in public.
Both confessors were aware of the “intimacies and kisses” that Maria Luisa exchanged with various other sisters. They were also extremely careless with information the nuns gave them in confession, telling Maria Luisa afterward about “the penitents’ confessions and states of mind.” Many of the sisters were “always deeply troubled by this”: the mistress frequently “spoke to them about what they had just told the priest in confession.” Maria Fortunata made a point of this in her hearing: “The mistress would often mention to me a confession I had just made to Padre Peters. I said to her: ‘Either you are eavesdropping on us, Reverend Mother, or Padre Peters has told you.’ ” Sallua argued that this proved the seal of the confessional had been habitually broken.
Both confessors were also mixed up in the poisoning affair. Maria Luisa had told them “verbally and in writing about the supposed divine revelations and commands regarding the princess’s impending sickness and death.” “The nuns also informed them of facts connected to the poisoning,” as Sallua noted. As evidence for this, he cited the fact that the confessors asked “the doctors treating the princess whether a dose of opium, or some kind of mistake with the medicines, could have led to her illness.” The Dominican referred once more to the testimony of the lawyer, Franceschetti, who said that Padre Peters knew the princess was being poisoned and told him “of this matter” from the beginning. Peters had also warned the lawyer about the upcoming hearings before the Inquisition, self-confidently claiming that “I will not be called before the Holy Office, since I am a confessor. But if I am questioned about the poisoning business, I will leave out many facts, citing reasons of conscience and the seal of the confessional.”62
Leziroli, meanwhile, had forced the abbess to beg Maria Luisa’s forgiveness for suspecting her of poisoning the princess. He also forced the two nurses who had observed the mixing of the poisons to give up their positions. In their hearings, the nuns also blamed the confessors for helping to conceive and implement Maria Luisa’s defense strategy. They, too, had started claiming the devil had assumed her form to carry out the poisoning attacks. The confessors were also the first to proclaim that Maria Luisa had received “monies from heaven in a miraculous manner.” And they openly incited the nuns to perjure themselves during the vicegerent’s Visitation and the hearings before the Inquisition.
“As a result of the facts presented thus far,” Sallua summarized, “it appears obvious that the above-named father confessors acted as confidants and accomplices in the majority of charges to be brought in the present trial.”
THE RESULTS OF THE INFORMATIVE PROCESS
At the end of January 1861, after more than a year of intensive witness examinations, Sallua was finally in a position to summarize the results of the informative process. His Relazione informativa presented some clear suggestions on how to proceed in the case of Sant’Ambrogio.63 But these decisions didn’t fall to the lower, investigative section of the Inquisition: they would be made by the upper section of the Holy Office’s tribunal, the congregation of cardinals, and, ultimately, the pope. They based their judgments on the extremely detailed Relazione, which included an appendix of extracts from the transcripts of the most important witness examinations.
The document in which the Dominican presented the case sticks very closely to the witness statements. His summaries follow the text of each testimony, even reproducing individual phrases. The material is arranged according to the three main charges (the cult of Firrao; the false holiness of Maria Luisa; poisonings and other crimes), and is further divided into a total of fourteen individual charges. On all points, Sallua emphasizes that the facts he is presenting are corroborated down to the smallest detail by the witness statements. The investigating judge’s own opinion can only be read between the lines: the cardinals were to make their own judgment on the basis of the materials he had prepared.
It is only on the very last page of his Relazione that Sallua makes specific judgment suggestions to the congregation of cardinals—and not without once more emphasizing that “base” motives had played no part in the princess’s complaint to the authorities. There had been no mutual enmity between the plaintiff and the defendant, Maria Luisa. Nor had there been any scores to settle between the nuns, Katharina von Hohenzollern, Maria Luisa, and the two confessors. The only motive for planning Katharina’s murder was to keep the Sant’Ambrogio system a secret. In this case, there was no suggestion that the Inquisition was being abused in order to exact revenge. At the end of his report, the investigating judge suggested a series of measures to Their Eminences.
First: charges should be brought against the confessors Leziroli and Peters. They had promoted the false cult of Firrao and Maria Luisa; acted as confidants and accomplices in the poisonings and in other “false precepts”; they had carried out “blasphemous practices sub specie boni et privilegii” and “continually broken the clausura.” In the case of Padre Peters, there was also a charge of sexual relations “ad malum finem” with his penitent Maria Luisa, and of Sollicitatio. Interestingly, there was no specific mention of breaking the seal of the confessiona
l, although several witnesses had raised this more or less directly.
Second: charges should be brought against Abbess Maria Veronica for continual perjury and as an accomplice or at least a confidant in all the above-mentioned offenses.
Third: charges should be brought against Agnese Firrao’s old companions, Sisters Maria Gertrude, Maria Caterina, and Maria Colomba, all now around seventy. They had “promoted her condemned holiness, immoral precepts and practices” as well as Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness.
Fourth: the other nuns who had spoken for the holiness of Firrao and Maria Luisa should be considered “accomplices,” although “some of them have revealed themselves to be more fanatical and obstinate than others.” However, Sallua conceded that a number of the younger nuns and novices were “more led astray than spoiled, and actually had no ill intentions.” The verger Maria Maddalena; the novice mistress’s bedfellow Maria Giacinta; Maria Luisa’s accomplice Maria Ignazia; the secretary and scribe of the heavenly letters Maria Francesca; the “poison expert” Agnese Celeste; the second nurse Giuseppa Maria; and Sister Maria Gesualda had all come to realize the scale of the “evil and the deceptions” over the course of their hearings, “and felt honest regret.” They had won Sallua’s respect with their brutal honesty and openness before the tribunal, and had obviously mollified him. And because of this, they had felt the wrath of the other, more stubborn nuns of Sant’Ambrogio. “They confided in us, saying they found themselves in constant danger.” No charges should therefore be brought against them. But if the situation was not thoroughly redressed, Sallua argued, then Sant’Ambrogio would continue to operate just as it had done for the past fifty years.
On February 27, 1861, the congregation of cardinals met without the pope, and discussed the results of the informative process in detail, on the basis of the printed Relazione. The cardinals largely followed Sallua’s suggestions. More specifically, they decided to bring charges against Abbess Maria Veronica, and to move her from Sant’Ambrogio to the convent of Santa Maria del Rifugio. The two confessors would also be charged, though at first neither of them should be suspended from their priestly offices. The Jesuit general should ensure that Peters and Leziroli couldn’t communicate with each other, either in writing or verbally through middlemen. Beckx was also instructed to hand over every piece of writing that could possibly have a bearing on the Sant’Ambrogio case. The defendants were to be interrogated by the assessor, Raffaele Monaco La Valletta, together with the investigating judge, Sallua, and the fiscal, Antonio Bambozzi, supported by a substitute from the Holy Office’s Chancellery.64 Bambozzi’s involvement came as a surprise: he had been fiscal from May 1841 until July 1851, before moving to the Secretariat of State and being replaced as fiscal by Giuseppe Primavera. The pope redeployed Bambozzi as fiscal specifically for the Sant’Ambrogio case.65
The pope’s initial reservations about the validity of Katharina’s Denunzia were set aside by Sallua’s compelling body of evidence. The pope approved the decisions made by the congregation of cardinals the same day, adding that both confessors should have their right to take confession suspended with immediate effect. In a private audience with the assessor, Pius IX made him responsible for sending all the postulants and simple novices, who had not yet professed their vows, away from Sant’Ambrogio immediately. The pope formally gave the assessor, fiscal, and investigating judge the necessary authority to interrogate the defendants and conduct the rest of the trial.66
Sallua at once set out his suggestions for how the interrogations should be organized. The cardinals gave their unanimous agreement to them a week later, on March 6, 1861.67 The course was set for the second phase of the Inquisition trial in the case of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. The deciding authority, the tribunal’s upper section, tasked the investigating authority with carrying out an offensive process, which would concentrate on the interrogation of the four principal defendants.
CHAPTER SIX
“It Is a Heavenly Liquor”
The Offensive Process and the Interrogation of the Madre Vicaria
“I ALWAYS WANTED TO BECOME A NUN”
Unlike the other three main defendants—the two confessors and the abbess—Sant’Ambrogio’s vicaress and novice mistress, Sister Maria Luisa of Saint Francis Xavier, had been a suspect ever since the preliminary investigation. She was therefore removed from the convent on December 7, 1859, on the pope’s orders, and transferred to the convent of Purificazione, near Santa Maria Maggiore.1
After Maria Luisa had spent more than three months there without hearing any news of the case, she became restless, and asked for a hearing before the Inquisition of her own accord. “Even after repeated examination of her conscience,” she said, she had been able to find no reason for her “transfer.” After consulting her confessor, she asked to make a “voluntary” appearance before the Holy Tribunal. And on March 20 and 26, 1860, Sallua gave her the chance to put forward her side of the story.2
The daughter of Domenico Ridolfi and Teresa Cioli, Maria Ridolfi had been born in 1832, in the parish of San Quirico in Rome.3 The parish is in the Rione Monti, which, in the mid-nineteenth century, had a good twenty thousand inhabitants. Monti was one of Rome’s poorest districts, and was home to a lot of the city’s day-laborers, winegrowers, and market gardeners. Maria’s father was a ciambellaro, selling pastries, which put him firmly in Rome’s underclass.4 As a child, Maria attended the Franciscan school, where she was taught the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. She spent only a few years in school, however, as her mother died young, leaving Maria to take over the management of her father’s household. Her two sisters, one older and one younger than herself, remained single, and in 1860 were still living in their father’s house.
Maria soon tired of housework. “When I was about six years old, I took the vow of chastity, following an inspiration, and on the advice of a good old lady who has since died. Before I took this vow, on several occasions the above-mentioned old lady had taken me to see her father confessor in a church near Monte Cavallo, which can be reached via two staircases.” This was the church of San Silvestro di Monte Cavallo, which today is called San Silvestro al Quirinale. The confessor there, whose name Maria Luisa couldn’t remember, had advised her to take this step. “I took the eternal vow of chastity in that church on the Feast of the Madonna,5 under the guidance of the above-mentioned old lady, Francesca Palazzi.” Maria took her first Communion at the age of nine or ten, in San Quirico’s parish church. After this, she developed a desire to do more than just live as a virgin dedicated to God “in the world.” She wanted to enter a convent and become a nun. However, her confessor advised her to think very carefully about this decision.
When she was eleven or twelve, Maria made the acquaintance of Maddalena Salvati, the wife of Giacomo Salvati, who lived on the Campo Corleo. Giacomo worked closely with Vincenzo Pallotti (who was later canonized), and had founded a house for vulnerable young girls. The Pia Casa di Carità was housed in the building in Borgo Sant’Agata where Agnese Firrao’s reformed Franciscans of the Third Order had originally been accommodated.6 From her conversations with the Salvatis, it soon became apparent to Maria that the Ridolfis could never afford to place her in a convent. In order to be accepted into a nunnery in Rome at that time, an applicant had to provide evidence that she could contribute a dowry of at least 300–500 scudi. This sum was equivalent to the entire annual budget of a middle-class family in Rome. And as the Ridolfis had to get by on 70–100 Scudi a year, it would have been completely impossible for them to raise this amount. Maria’s only hope was to find an upper-class or aristocratic patron to finance her dowry. Her last resort was the archconfraternity of Santissimo Rosario, which offered the annual prize of a dowry for a Roman girl from the lower classes.7 Maria Ridolfi seems to have been successful in this. Having secured the money, all that remained was to find a suitable convent for her in Rome.
Maria then revealed her intentions to her family, who strongly opposed her decision
to enter a convent. But with the help of her confessor, Monsignore Pastacaldi,8 and Maddalena Salvati, whose apartment became Maria’s second home, she finally obtained her father’s permission. Maddalena Salvati introduced Maria to several convents, but they all rejected her for being too young. Finally, Mrs. Salvati took Maria Luisa to the convent of Sant’Ambrogio, where she was at least permitted to remain for a day. After pleading with the abbess, she was granted a second day there. This time, she spent most of the day locked in a room. It was only toward evening, when she wanted to leave, that the abbess told her she would have to prove herself. “Then she said that I should wait another year; but after a little while, she wrote to say I could spend that year in the convent. This was how I entered the convent, on April 21, at the age of 13.” The year was 1845, and on June 22, 1846, Maria was duly clothed as a novice. After a year in the novitiate, she professed her vows, and took the religious name Maria Luisa.
The unrest in the city during the period of the Roman Republic (1848–1849) meant that the nuns had to leave Sant’Ambrogio and take refuge in the convent of Santi Quattro Coronati,9 where they remained for almost a year.
After that, we went back to Sant’Ambrogio. While I was there, I held almost every office. In December 1854, I was elected novice mistress; three years later I was elected vicaress of the convent, and held the role of novice mistress together with this other office; I held these two offices until the day I was taken away from Sant’Ambrogio.