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

by Hubert Wolf

  I trembled, expecting a terrible scolding, but she got up and sat on the bed. She embraced me and said that I should have no fear, because what I had done was the will of God, and the Lord had given me a great gift. But this was only the beginning, and she had received the command to give this gift fully. She held me in her arms and spoke at length to me, with tender words; then she got out of bed and, invoking the obedience due to her, demanded that I lie down. In the meantime, she made signs with her hands and eyes towards heaven, as one might in prayer. Finally she got into bed too, undressed me and laid herself on me, and touched me in a shameful way with her hands. Through vigorous movements of her body on mine, the liquid from her private parts flowed into mine, which afterwards felt quite moist.

  She said to me several times: “My daughter, receive … this heavenly liquor.”

  After some time she got up. She had performed this act several times and rested a little in between. She asked what I was thinking, and said that I should have no fear: this was not a sin, but a holy thing and a gift from God. She also said that to the world these were wicked acts, but they had been commanded by the Lord as a gift for me.

  After the last of these acts she remained in bed; I knelt beside her, and she laid her hands on my head; with the tone of a mother superior she said to me: “Daughter, you have received a great gift; in the name of God I command you to safeguard and to propagate it. Every evening you must put a finger into your private parts and then make the sign of the cross with your damp finger on your forehead and lips. In this way many gifts of God will be imparted to you.”

  Then she blew three times into my mouth. Finally, as she continued her affectionate expressions and embraces, she asked me to take her breast in my mouth and suckle on it, which I did. The last thing she did was to lay a veil of secrecy over everything: under no circumstances was I to speak about this to anyone.

  Later, she asked me about my prayers, and also whether I was practicing every evening the things she had taught me. She said I should be sure not to speak to the father confessor, Padre Leziroli, about it: one had only to confess sins, and not gifts. These were special gifts that the Lord had bestowed upon me through her, which would benefit the institute, as I would see later.

  Sister Maria Crocifissa was the one who had introduced me to these acts with the abbess, and so when I read the letters from the mother founder and her spiritual guides, which I was to keep safe in the convent of Santi Quattro Coronati, it was to her that I turned for explanation, as stated elsewhere.

  The above-named abbess wanted to hear about the whole of my previous life and the things that had happened to me. Then she advised me what I should say to the father confessor. When I had been to confession, she demanded an account of what I had said to the father confessor. This is the system that was used in Sant’Ambrogio, and I myself practiced it with the novices.

  I do not know whether the abbess did what I have reported above with other nuns; it might have happened with the late Sister Maria Metilde, because I could see that they were very close.

  As soon as the abbess died, I made use of what she had taught me and, although I was still a novice, I tried to behave like a mother superior. I invented revelations and commands from the abbess. I made Sister Anna submit to me, and forced her to give me an account of her conscience every evening—then I blessed her with my scapular. Now I remember that, after doing the things I have spoken of, Abbess Maria Maddalena kept me with her on my own and, as well as the usual instructions, took my hand and put it into her private parts seven or eight times. Afterwards she told me to make the sign of the cross, so that I might receive gifts.

  Maria Luisa now retracted her earlier accusations against Agnese Eletta. It hadn’t been Agnese Eletta wanting her to touch her private parts—it was she, Maria Luisa, who had forced Eletta to perform the sexual acts she had described. She confirmed “under sacred oath” that everything she had said about her introduction to the practice of sexual purification at the hands of Mother Maria Maddalena was true. The young novice mistress was therefore clearly to blame for the “moral deviance” and “acts of sodomy” that had taken place later, as the investigating judges recorded in the Ristretto.

  A young girl was required to perform sexual acts by her superior, the abbess. Later, the former victim, Maria Luisa, became a perpetrator herself. By engaging in the homosexual acts she used to bless, purify, and heal her partners, she was following a “sacred” tradition that had begun with Agnese Firrao, and had been upheld by the subsequent leaders of Sant’Ambrogio’s community, ending with Maria Luisa. This tradition spanned more than six decades and, according to the mother founder’s instructions, must not be interrupted.

  In the nineteenth century, sexual relationships among monks and nuns, and between confessors and penitents, were a commonplace in anticlerical literature, which drew a connection between celibate lifestyle, religious mania, and sexual deviance.32 The difficulty of the source material makes it impossible to clarify the extent to which these clichés may have had a basis in reality. But in today’s terminology, what went on in Sant’Ambrogio constituted sexual abuse. The preconditions for this, generally speaking, are an imbalance of power.33 Perpetrators usually use sexual abuse to satisfy both their own sexual needs and their need for power and recognition. In this sense, Maria Luisa seems to have achieved a great deal, playing on her winning personality and her sexual attractiveness. Abuse is often preceded by a special devotion to the abuser.34 But this doesn’t mean her victims consented to sexual acts with “knowledge, willingness and competence.”35 The novices were duty bound to obey the novice mistress and vicaress. For many of them, the madre vicaria was an ersatz mother, and Maria Luisa systematically exploited their emotional dependency. She also used secrets from the confessional to manipulate her opponents, and render her victims submissive. Maria Luisa further increased her power by bringing the confessors under her control: the nuns had to view their instructions as absolutely binding. She also swore those who participated in these acts to absolute secrecy: nobody on the outside must ever learn of them, not even the confessor—particularly not him!—or the heavenly blessing would lose its unique, holy quality. This way, she succeeded in committing the nuns to keep absolute silence. Swearing victims to secrecy and threatening dire consequences if they tell is another typical marker of sexual abuse.36

  The crucial factor, however, was the religious authority that Maria Luisa assumed. She gave her behavior a religious elevation by claiming it was the will of God. Speaking out against Maria Luisa’s revelations wouldn’t just have been a rebellion against the commandment of obedience, but against the heavenly powers, and ultimately against the will of God. The nuns and the confessors would have been risking their immortal souls, the salvation of which was the true goal of their earthly existence. To the people who received letters from the Virgin Mary, the threats these letters contained were real and existential. This fear allowed Maria Luisa to disguise her crimes and moral misdemeanors as spiritual and medical treatment or, just as easily, as the work of the devil. The nuns’ faith in the sacred led them to allow Maria Luisa to abuse them.

  On the one hand, the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio weren’t really able to speak about sexuality, as it could play no part in a life dedicated to God—but on the other, they honored numerous saints whose mystical experiences were described using metaphors of love and eroticism. In this milieu, it may not have seemed at all strange to interpret what they felt during an exchange of intimacies as a sanctifying spiritual experience, rather than forbidden lust. During their hearings, many of the nuns brought up the fact that they felt ashamed and guilty about undressing for the doctor. This speaks for the likelihood of a cloistered upbringing leading to an immature form of sexuality. In the insular environment of Sant’Ambrogio (which was what sociologists would call a “total institution”)37 there was nothing to correct the worldview its nuns all shared. The confessors and Patrizi had completely failed in their duties as supervisory a
uthorities, not least because their own piety followed the same popular trends as that of Sant’Ambrogio’s nuns.

  Maria Luisa also admitted to the other endearments and “improper intimacies and practices” mentioned by numerous witnesses. She admitted all the “obscene acts” that had taken place during her tenure as novice mistress, which the court put to her per singolo (case by case) from the transcripts of the novices’ hearings. She did, however, attempt to give at least some excuse for her behavior, by claiming that many of the novices had “shown her an exaggerated love.” They had fussed around her constantly, repeatedly embracing her, “one kissing her shoulder, another her breast, a third her arm.” At first, she had only reacted to these professions of love, but this had only caused them to escalate.

  Maria Luisa also admitted to a custom she had introduced as novice mistress, whereby the night before they professed their vows, novices would sleep with her in her cell. On those nights, “two beds were made into one.” After the novices lay down, she pretended to have spiritual conversations—sometimes with God, sometimes with the Virgin—in which these heavenly figures gave her various commands. At this, the novices would begin kissing and caressing her. Abbess Maria Veronica had been well aware of this. She had even told her to “let them do it.” Once, she allegedly helped to push the beds together in Maria Luisa’s cell.

  The investigating judges found the descriptions of sexual practices and Maria Luisa’s abuse so shocking that they omitted their own summary and a full commentary on this statement from the Ristretto. They twice referred the cardinals to the “shameless and obscene deeds,” “excesses and disgusting offences,” and “perverse precepts”—as they termed the homosexual acts—described in the transcripts of the hearings, which were attached to their report. The “Most Reverend Judges” were simply advised to read these statements for themselves.

  JESUIT CONFESSORS AND THEIR VERY SPECIAL BLESSING

  Now the court turned its attention to Maria Luisa’s father confessor. However, before she addressed her special relationship with Padre Peters, the former madre vicaria wanted to put it into context. In order to understand what had happened between Maria Luisa and Padre Peters, the inquisitors first had to hear about another of Sant’Ambrogio’s secrets: the Jesuit blessing. She revealed this to the Inquisition on June 26, 1860.38

  In the old writings of the mother founder and her first companions … I read the following: so that the convent would not fall into the hands of the Holy Office again, as had happened to the mother founder, and to preserve the spirit of the institute that she had founded with advice and guidance from Padre Pignatelli, it turned out to be necessary always to have a Jesuit father confessor. (The mother founder had always had Jesuits as spiritual guides, and wanted to retain their spirit.) He must instill the Jesuit spirit into the nuns of our institute, and could thereby awaken extraordinary things.…

  Agnese Firrao had sworn her community into a very special practice, saying: “My daughters, if you do this, you will preserve the institute. You know how much it costs—if you do not do it, you will be ruined.”

  As proof of this, I can tell you what the late sisters Maria Crocifissa and Maria Francesca confided to me. They said Padres Marconi, Doz39 and Santinelli40 had instilled the spirit of the Mother, and God’s spirit, in Mother Maria Maddalena by a unique method. This spirit was then also instilled in Teresa Maddalena.

  The spirit is instilled in the following way: the father confessor kisses the penitent on the forehead, the face and the lips; then he makes the sign of the cross on her throat with his tongue. Sometimes he puts his tongue into the penitent’s mouth and kisses her on the heart, on the side where we usually have the crucifix. Before these acts are begun, the penitent nun falls on her knees before the father confessor, who remains standing. He gives her the blessing, using the words that I have written down. Sometimes during the aforementioned blessing, the nun falls into ecstasies. Then the father confessor falls upon his knees and, supporting her with his right arm, he performs the acts I have just described.

  I did not only find these acts and the words of the blessing in the Mother’s writings; the late nuns also explained them to me, just as I have described them now. They also performed these acts … I think that these things were done with great secrecy, since I did not notice the other nuns doing anything of this sort.

  As with the sexual blessings, Maria Luisa didn’t hang back. She was keen to follow in the mother founder’s footsteps with this special Jesuit blessing as well, and she enlisted Padre Peters to carry it out. Maria Luisa said that for around three years she had been fabricating heavenly letters. These encouraged the confessor to give her the extraordinary blessing, just as his Jesuit predecessors had given it to the previous heads of Sant’Ambrogio. She put these letters into the little casket, to which Peters believed he had the only key. Of course, Maria Luisa had a second key, as she admitted to the court.

  In these letters I called on him to instill in me the spirit of the mother founder and the spirit of God, in the way I described above. And indeed I fell on my knees before Padre Peters and he dispensed the blessing. However, I did not go into ecstasies, but remained clearly composed. After the blessing, he would also kneel down; sometimes he carried out one of the above actions, sometimes another. Then he had to go, as the letters decreed. How many times this happened I cannot say, because it happened whenever the opportunity arose. As far as I remember, he only put his tongue in my mouth twice. This did not trouble my conscience, and I also never confessed it.

  In Sant’Ambrogio, as the court learned, these “sensual and intimate acts” were known by the term benedizione straordinaria—an extraordinary blessing.41 Maria Luisa ascribed a fourfold effect to the blessing:42 “1. Insight; 2. Spiritual meditation; 3. Transformation; 4. Substantial communication.” She went on to say that this “substantial communication must take place seven times a year between the father confessor and the nun, and the other actions together with the blessing a total of 33 times within a year.”

  But what was this special communication? Maria Luisa had also gleaned this information from the mother founder’s documents. There she read “that the comunicazione sostanziale takes place when the father confessor puts his tongue in the mouth of the penitent nun; this was like the laying on of hands that the apostles practiced with the disciples to instill in them the Holy Spirit.… Regarding the other actions, it was written that as the Lord gave potency to the water of Holy Baptism, and the oil of Confirmation, so He had embued all the above-named actions with the power to instill in the penitent nun the energies and the gifts described above.”

  In these old writings from just after the convent was founded, Maria Luisa discovered the names of five Jesuits who had dispensed this extraordinary blessing, which was reserved for the abbesses of Sant’Ambrogio. Giuseppe Marconi, José Doz, Agustín Monzon,43 Brunelli,44 and Nicola Benedetti had upheld this special tradition by giving the blessing during confession. Maria Luisa’s list didn’t specifically include the Jesuit Padre Pignatelli, who was later canonized by Pius XII. But she made it clear that the spirit of the institute, which was passed on through the “substantial communication” of French kissing, originated with none other than Pignatelli—whatever this statement might mean. And although Maria Luisa was a mere vicaress, rather than the abbess, she was keen to perpetuate the tradition and add another Jesuit to the list: Padre Peters.

  It wasn’t just the form but the supposed pretense of the benedizione straordinaria that went far beyond that of a blessing a priest might say during Mass, or following the absolution of sins in the confessional. Heavenly gifts of grace were conveyed in Sant’Ambrogio. This gift of divine mercy was even connected with the idea of “transformation.” This suggests that the being and substance of the nuns receiving this blessing were transfigured, just as a priest is at his ordination. The office of priest and bishop has been handed down through the Catholic Church since the time of the apostles, in an unbroken line of
benedictions that preserves the Faith’s tradition. In Sant’Ambrogio’s extraordinary blessing, the hand of benediction was replaced with a French kiss. To the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, the Jesuit blessing seemed more important than the consecration of an abbess, the ceremony through which the Church installs a mother superior. And this special blessing, received in an encounter with a man, then allowed the abbess to conduct the homosexual “purification” and “care” of the sisters in her charge. Here, of course, it was bodily fluids as well as the convent’s spirit that passed from one nun to another. The goal was an unbroken line of tradition from one abbess to the next. In a sense, the mother founder had devised an alternative, exclusively feminine model of succession.

  But the women of Sant’Ambrogio couldn’t do without men entirely. Each new abbess required a new act of Jesuit inspiration: the spirit still had to be breathed into her through a French kiss with a padre from the Society of Jesus. This may have originated in an attempt by individual Jesuits to protect the spirit of their own order (which was suppressed in 1773, and only permitted to resume in 1814), by preserving it in a community of Franciscan women. Firrao’s reform came during the Society of Jesus’s suppression. This would have made the Regulated Third Order Franciscan nuns female Jesuits in disguise—something that has never existed in the Church, and certainly couldn’t exist at this time. So the special protection the community of Sant’Ambrogio received from Jesuits and Jesuit pupils after 1814 comes as no surprise. Leo XII was as much a friend to the Jesuits as Pius IX, Patrizi, and Cardinal Reisach.

  THE CONFESSOR’S AFFAIR WITH ALESSANDRA N.

  The heavenly letters and the Jesuit blessing’s intense physical contact, with all its erotic implications, gave Maria Luisa an unusual power over her confessor. Padre Peters was putty in her hands. The Madonna’s letters enabled her to guide him in whatever direction she pleased. She spoke about this to the Inquisition on June 26, 1860.45