by Hubert Wolf
Kleutgen refused to climb down on this matter—and, ultimately, Sallua was unable to refute him. On a factual level, all anybody had were claims, interpretations, and readings: it was Kleutgen’s word against Sallua’s, and so the matter remained undecided. At the end of this disputation, the Jesuit was prepared to make only the most minimal of confessions. He said that the judges shouldn’t take his text, which argued that the veneration of Maria Agnese was permitted, to imply that there was no cause to criticize his behavior. He had merely wanted to give the court some arguments for his “good faith” in the legitimacy of the cult. He stuck to his guns on the issue of Leo XII’s confirmation of the Rule and the constitutions as well as on the rehabilitation of Firrao he had derived from it, maintaining that text and author could not be separated. An orthodox Rule could not be written by a heretic. And vice versa: a false saint could not write a sacred constitution. The Catholic Church’s teaching authority couldn’t contradict itself by approving a text and, at the same time, condemning its author.
On the central question of whether the cult of Firrao was allowed, Kleutgen had cheerfully passed the buck to the Church authority—or rather, to various Church authorities, and ultimately the pope. But if the Church had sanctioned the cult of Saint Maria Agnese, even indirectly, by confirming the Rule and lifting all its previous censures and prohibitions against Sant’Ambrogio (in the words of Leo XII’s brief), then perpetuating the cult could no longer be a charge in an Inquisition trial.
The other defendants and witnesses who admitted to following the cult of Firrao also accepted the Inquisition’s premise that this was a punishable offense. Kleutgen, on the other hand, called this supposition into question. The practiced theologian Joseph Kleutgen used theological argumentation to justify the spiritual practice of the confessor Giuseppe Peters. There was no conflict between these two roles: Peters and Kleutgen were perfectly in tune.
THEOLOGY AND FRENCH KISSING
Was Maria Luisa a genuine saint? The inquisitors devoted a particularly long time to this question.37 From the day of his first interrogation, March 11, through to July, they questioned Kleutgen continually on this issue. He gave them a lengthy back-and-forth, constantly quibbling and splitting hairs. Confronted with incriminating witness statements, he would answer evasively. The following day, he would submit a well-structured text, admitting only to what the evidence had already shown. Everything else, he denied. Then the game would begin all over again.
In his second interrogation on March 12, 1861, Kleutgen submitted a handwritten text, in which he put this uneducated nun’s excellent theological knowledge down to her holiness, and the authenticity of her supernatural experiences.38 “In order to speak of the experiences that I took to be superhuman, I made Sister Maria Luisa talk about the most sublime mysteries of our religion: not just the Holy Trinity in general, but the intra-Trinity procession of divine beings,39 and the qualities of God and their relation to each other.40 She spoke about creation,41 salvation42 and, above all, the working of God in the soul.”43
Only people with a robust philosophical and theological education would be able to discuss these demanding subjects. The processiones ad intra—the ontological origins of the Trinity—are still one of the most difficult issues in the dogma on God and the Trinity. Any knowledge Maria Luisa was able to demonstrate here certainly wasn’t the result of years of study. Kleutgen argued that she could only have acquired it through her translation into heaven, and an immediate encounter with God.
“I must say that I never noticed her make an error, and that the sister spoke about all these mysteries with admirable clarity. She answered my objections with precision and a quick wit, always using the correct expressions—often those that only learned men know. I could not think but that this insight had been instilled in her directly; I knew for a fact that before she joined the convent, she had only a pauper’s schooling, and I could not discover where she could have got such an education inside the convent.” For him, this had been compelling evidence both for Maria Luisa’s holiness, and the authenticity of the heavenly letters.
Here, the Jesuit voluntarily moved on to an issue in which Sallua had a burning interest. The sum total of the Inquisition’s corpus delicti on the letters was the heavenly epistle to Beckx, intended to bring down the theologians Passaglia and Schrader. Sallua wanted to know how the Virgin, or rather Maria Luisa, had come up with the idea for this letter, seeing that it required a detailed knowledge of the relationships within the Gregorian University and the Jesuit order.
The Dominican was, of course, able to make a few deductions himself. The Jesuits were fundamentally divided on the theological direction their order should take. While Passaglia advocated a pluralistic model, Kleutgen favored a monopoly for new scholasticism. The blow to Passaglia must have come at a very opportune moment for Kleutgen.
As usual, the Jesuit’s answer was long-winded and full of qualifying clauses. Yes, he had once spoken about Passaglia’s theology to Maria Luisa, though without mentioning him by name. Then how had Maria Luisa come by the name of this Jesuit theologian? It was quite simple: Maria Luisa knew all about the theological dispute within the Society of Jesus from her visits to heaven. But Kleutgen then admitted he had spoken to Maria Luisa directly about Schrader and Passaglia, their relationship with each other, and their theological positions. Of course, he added, by this time the whole affair had become public knowledge anyway, and Maria Luisa could have heard the relevant information from “other persons.” To the question of exactly how the supernatural letter about Passaglia had come about, Kleutgen gave the cryptic reply: “I believe it happened as you say, although I have no clear memory of these details.”
The judges weren’t satisfied with this, and demanded more precise answers. And so the Jesuit said that the madre vicaria had claimed the Virgin Mary wrote the Passaglia letter in heaven, in her presence. Kleutgen stressed that in the conflict with Passaglia, the Jesuit general had to support “the teaching of Saint Thomas.” This gave Sallua Kleutgen’s motive for inspiring the letter. Maria Luisa knew of his heart’s desire—the resurrection of scholasticism—and tried to serve him in this aim by writing a letter from the Virgin. Significantly, Kleutgen didn’t reveal whether he had reacted in any way to learning that the heavenly letters, and therefore also the letter to Beckx, were earthly forgeries.
Sallua also put several questions to Kleutgen about the special Jesuit blessing, which had caught the tribunal’s attention in Maria Luisa’s testimony. Having given evasive answers during several interrogations, Kleutgen once again submitted a written document on April 22, 1861.44 In this, he admitted to dispensing the extraordinary Jesuit blessing, which involved embraces and kisses. He called it a “ministry”: an “extraordinary” and “superhuman” pastoral service. He had always carried out these acts in good faith, and in obedience to the Virgin Mary. God had chosen Sister Maria Luisa, through the Blessed Virgin, to vanquish the wickedness of the world and rebuild God’s kingdom. “And God determined that I should assist her in a particular way, protecting and safeguarding her.” The actions involved in the blessing had admittedly “confused” him at first, but the heavenly letters had always reassured him. They told him that God demanded these actions only at this particular stage; it was part of a process that would lead to the “perfect connection” of Maria Luisa’s soul to God. The letters also spoke of a “union” between himself and Maria Luisa, but this was of a purely spiritual nature. There had been no suggestion of any other kind of “love,” or of a physical union.
The reference to other sorts of love gave the Inquisition the perfect opportunity to inquire about the exact circumstances of the affair between Kleutgen, at that time in his mid-thirties, and a certain Alessandra N. Kleutgen now had to reveal his lover’s full name: Alessandra Carli.
Alessandra and her twin brother, Domenico, had been born to Isabella Fellitti and Carlo Buonafede Carli in 1814 in Comacchio, which now belongs to the province of Ferrara. In 183
5, her father was appointed vice consul for the United States in Rome. Alessandra came from a prosperous family, and may well have come to the Eternal City with her parents.45
Kleutgen answered in writing, as he did on all delicate topics—and this time not in Italian, but in Latin.46 He was unable to deny the sexual details that Maria Luisa had already given the judges. Now everything came down to how these facts were interpreted. After the Jesuits had been driven out of Rome in 1848, Kleutgen said, he temporarily became a secular priest, and spent two months living with Alessandra Carli as man and wife, in her apartment in Rome. He presented himself as the victim of a seductress. He, the poor innocent priest, had fallen for Alessandra’s feminine wiles. At the time, he had so little experience of acting as confessor to female penitents. Up until that point, he had always lived in protected monastic houses, hardly ever coming into contact with “worldly people,” let alone young women. Using “false revelations and promises,” Alessandra had persuaded him to commit “shameless and improper acts” with her. But during sexual intercourse, he had never had “any debauched or bad intentions,” and “during these acts never ceased my inner prayer.” He had “not wanted to offend God.”
Kleutgen’s interpretation was designed to convince the court that the whole affair had been purely mechanical, with no eroticism, excitement, or the involvement of libido. From a moral-theological point of view, it was an attempt to mitigate the fact that he had broken his vow of celibacy and chastity.47 Up until the mid-nineteenth century, any sexual misconduct on the part of a priest would be made public, and punished by the Church authorities, as a matter of course. Enlightenment thought influenced the perception of priests, who were seen as educators of the people and moral examples. But the rise of Ultramontanism brought with it a renewed, cultish overelevation of priests, who were now more strongly associated with sexual purity. While sexual impurity and defilement through intercourse with a woman didn’t make priests unworthy of their cult status according to canon law, they did in the eyes of conservative churchgoing citizens. This meant their sins couldn’t be allowed to become public. When a vow of chastity was broken by an ordained man, or in a consecrated place, the moral theology of the time termed it a “sacrilegium.”48 Kleutgen must have done everything in his power to keep his misstep a secret.
For the tribunal, of course, the crucial task here was to clarify whether Kleutgen’s sexual relationship with Alessandra Carli was in any way connected to his function as her father confessor. This would have made it the serious offense of Sollicitatio. But the Jesuit continued to skirt around this central point. Yes, he had met Alessandra when she came to him for confession. No, nothing had ever happened in the confessional itself. Yes, they had slept together in Alessandra’s apartment. In short: he, the inexperienced Jesuit, had been the victim of an experienced woman. He had been attacked by the devilish serpent, working its evil through Eve. Yes, he had “sometimes spoken with Alessandra about such delusions.” But later he, too, had become “deluded.”
These excuses got him nowhere: the court then made him confess that, having described this whole affair by order of heavenly letters, he had received replies from the Virgin Mary. They told him his relationship with Alessandra had involved a dirty, lustful sexual union. By contrast, with Maria Luisa he would be permitted to experience a pure, divine, lustless relationship with a woman. And Kleutgen had never denied this juxtaposition.
So what sort of divine experiences had he had with Maria Luisa? Were they really so different—simply divine—from the sexual dalliance with Alessandra that he’d described with such sadness? The Jesuit attempted to whitewash the facts the court presented to him using theological distinctions. He did his best to come up with “just” causes for his actions. Once again, he denied having felt any sensual, bodily lust, or delectatio carnalis.49 The embraces, caresses, and kisses he had dispensed had left him quite cold; he had merely been fulfilling his pastoral duty.
The new scholastic had read his Thomas Aquinas thoroughly, and Aquinas had provided him with eternally valid answers to all questions of dogma and moral theology. Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae declared that an unchaste glance, touch, embrace, or kiss “in and of itself” was not a mortal sin. It only became so when “lust” entered the equation.50
In light of the unanimous witness statements, Kleutgen eventually had to concede that he had conducted an erotic relationship with Maria Luisa. He confessed that, unfortunately, it was true that “during the night, in the room he had been assigned, he embraced, kissed and held Maria Luisa, and also put his tongue into her mouth.” The Jesuit gave a noncommittal answer to why he hadn’t just kissed Maria Luisa on the mouth—why he had left his tongue in her mouth for a long time. In his defense, he said he had only “seldom put his tongue in Maria Luisa’s mouth.” Still, this meant it had been more than just one kiss. He also confessed to “using the following expressions during the kisses: ‘Thou my daughter, my love, first-born, beloved daughter, my delight, my bliss, my treasure.’ And as he kissed her heart: ‘Thou pure heart, sacred heart, immaculate heart, my treasure.’ ”51
“My treasure”—phrases like this strongly suggest an erotic fascination. At the same time, some of Kleutgen’s exclamations had religious connotations, like the “immaculate heart of Mary.”52 This combination of sex and religion arose again and again in Sant’Ambrogio. The dividing lines between sexual acts and the religious interpretation of these acts had been equally fluid for Maria Luisa and the women with whom she shared her bed. Sexual and religious experiences both involve transcendence and the dissolution of boundaries, meaning that there is a structural relationship between the two. In both religious and sexual experiences, there is a sensual, physical precondition for any transcendental experience. But Catholic moral theology has always disputed this connection: real ecstasies can only occur “when they are related to Christ.” Only then are religious transcendental experiences considered good, while erotic ecstasies are fundamentally sinful.53
Kleutgen wanted his exclamations to be interpreted exclusively as religious rapture, with no sexual content, as we can see from his testimony on May 28:
This did take place. But by way of explanation, I would like to add the following:54 I … never had an impure or tender affection for this nun. And because I had to force myself to commit the acts to which I have admitted, I almost always spoke such words with a cold heart, even feeling troubled or bored. I was trying to convince myself that I must show homage and also fatherly love to this soul that I believed holy. I felt this reverent affection only seldom, and weakly—and it was not an outburst of lust, but absolutely ruled by my will.
In his interrogation on June 1, he added that none of the other acts he had committed with Maria Luisa should be interpreted as signs of his lust. True, Maria Luisa had put the finger that wore the heavenly ring into his mouth, for the purposes of veneration, but he had never “sucked” it.55 For him, a reverent kiss was a religious act, while sucking was something erotic and lustful.
However, Kleutgen couldn’t convince the Inquisition that his encounters with Maria Luisa had been exclusively religious and lustfree. Everything they had done together had clear sexual connotations in the judges’ eyes. This was a case of “fornication”—as could be seen from the repeated, lingering French kisses.
In the moral theology of the nineteenth century, kissing with tongues was a mortal sin “in intent and in the deed itself.”56 Even partners who were joined in holy matrimony weren’t allowed to kiss this way. It was interpreted (with good reason) as an anticipation of sex; this also made it a mortal sin even when it didn’t result in ejaculation, or “pollution.” More recent publications in cultural studies make this point of view seem not unreasonable: here, French kissing is viewed as an analogy of sexual congress, due to the direct contact of inner organs it involves.57
All his powers of scholastic distinction were no help to the learned Jesuit in light of this fact. He couldn’t reinterpret the French kiss as
a cold act of will, performed in the course of carrying out a divine command. According to his own new scholastic moral theology, it was an expression of pure lust. And if this was a mortal sin for married couples, then how much worse was it for a monk who had taken a vow of chastity, and was sharing this kiss with a virgin dedicated to God?
The crucial issue of seduction in the confessional was, of course, something that also had to be addressed in the case of Kleutgen’s relationship with Maria Luisa. Several interrogation transcripts from the end of May and beginning of June 1861 start with remarkably similar questions: Did he know any other confessor who had dispensed a special blessing with similar sexual connotations? Did he know any other confessor who had spent nights alone in a cell with a young nun? Did he know any other confessor who had torn apart his penitent’s scapular in order to kiss her naked breast? Did he know even a single confessor who had put his tongue in a nun’s mouth for minutes at a time? And so on.58
The Jesuit’s justifications were of no use here, either. He denied any chronological or other connection between the sacrament of penance that he dispensed to Maria Luisa, and the embraces, kisses, and other touches. He claimed that Maria Luisa had never let him “enter the clausuras” after confession, which always took place through the grille between the convent’s inner and outer parlatory. It was only much later, when he had visited the sick and given them the sacraments, that he visited Maria Luisa in the convent to give her pastoral support. When the court challenged this, he put forward a particularly weak argument, saying he hadn’t “paid very much attention to the exact circumstances of confession.” Nor had he ever been conscious of “acting wrongly, or abusing the sacraments.”59
Kleutgen may have forced the inquisitors onto the back foot over the veneration of Agnese Firrao, but he couldn’t pull off the same thing when it came to Maria Luisa’s false holiness. This wasn’t a general cult; it was a case of him personally venerating the beautiful young nun as a saint and an attractive woman. It was an attack on his own moral and pastoral integrity. He couldn’t play off Church authorities like Popes Leo XII and Pius VII against each other to undermine the authority of the Inquisition. Kleutgen was a master of disputation in matters of objective fact, but he was unconvincing when it came to subjective misconduct and moral failings. All his attempts at reassurance and scholarly distinction came to nothing. He was even forced to admit that the heavenly letters had told him about Maria Luisa’s lesbian relationship with Maria Giacinta—though he had naturally ascribed these “bad deeds” to the devil in Maria Luisa’s form. Moreover, in the discussion about French kissing, the court had turned his own scholastic theology against him.