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

by Hubert Wolf

  Maria Luisa never wanted to find herself standing in the shade again. She wasn’t going to carry on being one of life’s losers. It was only natural that she should follow the example of female mystics from history, and portray herself as a nun with a direct line to God. And she had the perfect environment for this: supernatural phenomena weren’t exactly rare in Sant’Ambrogio, as things stood. Backed by a divine authority, Maria Luisa was gradually able to accumulate power, first within the convent, and then in parts of the Curia. Her direct connection to heavenly powers made her closer to God than any priest or bishop, and even the pope himself. She could always answer objections from ordained men by saying: and did the Mother of God tell you that herself? And—as crazy as it sounds—Maria Luisa and her feminine, mystical strategy made some headway in the masculine, clerical hierarchy of the Catholic Church.76

  The fact that theologians and cardinals genuinely believed in Maria Luisa is only understandable against the backdrop of the miracle addiction of Rome’s religious milieu in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the apocalyptic mood stirred up by the gradual shrinking of the Papal States, and the prospect of Rome’s occupation by Italian nationalist troops, people expected heavenly powers to intervene at any moment, to protect the pope and the Curia. And naturally, the pope himself performed miracles on an almost daily basis, as more than a few of his contemporaries believed.77

  But Maria Luisa wanted more. She wasn’t content with controlling the simple, pious women in Sant’Ambrogio, and manipulating men of the cloth. She wanted to create a legacy that would forever be associated with her name. And so she began to formulate a plan that would make her the next Agnese Firrao: she would found a new convent, an offshoot of Sant’Ambrogio, with herself as abbess. But she needed money for this—a lot of money, and the protection of influential churchmen.

  Part of the tragedy of this beautiful young nun’s story is that it was the preparations for this masterstroke that led to catastrophe. Cardinal Reisach had finally put the money to finance the new institution within her reach. Katharina von Hohenzollern was very wealthy, and had put her widow’s inheritance into a convent fund. The Virgin Mary soon laid claim to her: “She must be mine, the princess.” But nobody had reckoned with the German noblewoman’s mentality, which was radically different from that of her Italian sisters. The princess saw through Maria Luisa, and the story ended with poisoning attempts and a trial before the Holy Office.

  The churchmen who had previously hung on Maria Luisa’s lips and breasts, and venerated her as a living saint, now dropped her like a hot potato. The Holy Office’s all-male tribunal believed them when they said they’d been deceived. Their claims chimed with contemporary clichés about women: what else could one expect from the weaker sex, the daughters of Eve, who were so easily seduced by evil and then seduced men in turn? The powerful men, the cardinal protectors, members of the Curia, and father confessors, should have realized what was going on from the start. They should have provided pastoral support to Maria Luisa when she was abused as a child and young woman, supporting her on a personal and a spiritual level. Now she alone would be punished for all the things that the churchmen’s false faith had allowed to happen, while the eminent gentlemen themselves got off scot-free.

  Of course, we must not forget that Maria Luisa had confessed to several murders, and a secular court might well have sentenced her to death.78 In accordance with the regular criminal law of the Papal States in the nineteenth century, “every planned and premeditated killing” carried the death penalty as well. A poisoner couldn’t expect the authorities to be any more lenient—in fact, while executions were usually carried out by beheading, the law stipulated an even worse fate for those who had poisoned their victims. They were executed by being shot in the back.79

  But the blood of priests and members of religious orders was seldom shed. In the Papal States, they held the so-called privilegium fori, according to which they couldn’t be tried before a secular court for civil or criminal offenses.80 It was very rare for them to be handed over to the jurisdiction of secular courts and executed. This only really happened to those who stubbornly refused to abjure in cases of heresy, or had committed a capital offense and were dismissed from the priesthood. And the Inquisition tribunal wasn’t looking for capital crimes: its sole focus was heresy, next to which murder and attempted murder were almost classed as secondary offenses, the results of false belief.

  Maria Luisa was never allowed to speak publicly about the involvement of clerics in the whole affair. The young nun remained alone, imprisoned in cloistered isolation and cut off from the world.81 During the trial, from December 1859 until May 1860, Maria Luisa was held in the convent of Purificazione, where her “strange behavior” was noted. The abbess then requested that she be transferred elsewhere. The first five years of her monastic imprisonment in Buon Pastore, from 1862 to 1867, seem to have passed without incident. However, she then became “restless,” and started behaving oddly. She roamed the convent day and night, upsetting the nuns with her crazy talk. She started to become violent, and finally could no longer be controlled. She even endangered a nun’s life by trying to “compress her throat.”

  In light of this, on July 29, 1868, the Holy Office decided to place Maria Luisa in the Casa della Penitenza alle Terme prison.82 People there soon began to have serious doubts about her mental health. “Here she has been living in quite an animal fashion, and showing clear signs of mental confusion,” as a report to the cardinals of the Inquisition stated.83 The prison physician, Doctor Caetani, described Maria Luisa as “a woman as excited as a wild animal, who suffers excessive outbreaks of the nervous system. However, I do not believe I have been able to discern a true madness.”84 Expert knowledge was necessary to reach a conclusive diagnosis here.

  The tribunal followed the doctor’s suggestion on January 20, 1869, and had Maria Luisa committed to the Ospizio dei Dementi,85 Rome’s lunatic asylum. The doctors there diagnosed a mental “disharmony,” in addition to physical weakness. Maria Luisa’s mind had been thrown completely off balance, and she displayed strong kleptomaniac tendencies. She stole everything she could find, and stubbornly denied having done so. She had developed a kind of mantra, denying over and over again that she had ever had a religious vocation. She claimed to have lived an orderly, secular life. She had evidently repressed her convent past, and all the experiences bound up with it. The doctors told her several times that she had entered a convent at the age of thirteen. “But she understood nothing”—or she refused to understand.

  Maria Luisa didn’t seem to be responding to any kind of therapy, so the doctors suggested she be allowed to live with her family under house arrest. Pius IX approved this decision on June 30, 1869, with the proviso that her father must guarantee to keep watch over her and prevent her from causing any more damage. She should continue to live as a nun at home. It was impressed upon her that she should give no cause for future complaints.

  After little more than a year, in mid-1870, Domenico Ridolfi appealed to the Holy Office, telling them he couldn’t keep his daughter with him any longer. She had plunged his entire household into chaos, and was “unruly.” “She just roamed around all day when she was at home, crashing about and screaming, she treated her sisters like whores, laying hands on them.… She denied God and hell,” he complained. Following a ruling on July 1, 1870, Maria Luisa was taken back to Buon Pastore.

  Just a few weeks later, in October 1870, Italian troops occupied Rome and released her. She claimed to have been imprisoned on purely religious grounds. She explained to the Italian authorities that her trial before the Holy Office eight years previously had merely been a “question of religious conflict between Franciscans and Dominicans,” into which she had been drawn quite innocently. The picture she painted of herself as the victim of an arbitrary, inhuman religious court, made use of existing prejudices against the Inquisition. As far as Rome’s new lay administration was concerned, she was preaching to the choir.<
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  Finally, on October 23, 1871, Maria Luisa’s case was brought to trial before the civil court of Rome. Maria Luisa, represented by her lawyer, Orlando Fiocchi, was pitted against the Holy Office, represented by the lawyer Severino Tirelli.86 The former novice mistress requested the return of her dowry, to the sum of 1,300 scudi, plus an adequate pension and the restitution of her honor, which had been damaged by her wrongful conviction. In a modern state like Italy, a person couldn’t be punished for divergent religious beliefs that opposed the papal system. Maria Luisa and her lawyer made good use of this principle.

  Severino Tirelli, the Holy Office’s lawyer, made it clear that the judgment of 1862 had covered not only religious but capital offenses. However, he didn’t go into detail. The Church was desperate to avoid any further aggravation of the already tense situation between state and Church that had developed since 1870. Revelations about Sant’Ambrogio would have been just what the new Italian bureaucracy was waiting for. Tirelli was thus quick to offer a settlement on behalf of the Inquisition—though not without mentioning the immense costs that Maria Luisa had racked up for the Holy See since 1859, and referring pointedly to the asylum doctors’ evaluation of her mental state. Her accommodation in various jails and institutions had cost a total of 4,473.76 scudi. Nevertheless, the Church was prepared to return the dowry of 500 scudi that Maria Luisa had paid on her entry to Sant’Ambrogio. Maria Luisa didn’t accept this offer, insisting she wanted the 1,300 scudi she originally requested. However, on May 2, 1872, the tribunal ruled that she should receive 500 scudi, which corresponded to 2,687 Italian lire.

  The money doesn’t seem to have lasted long. Maria Luisa had not only parted ways with the Church; she had fallen out with her family as well. And once she had been “freed,” she couldn’t return to the asylum or a convent jail. She was mentally and physically broken. The judgment of Sant’Ambrogio, and the distance she had fallen as a result, had caused her—if we believe her father—to lose all faith. The woman who had once been the Virgin Mary’s favorite daughter could find no place for herself in this world. The former saint landed first in the madhouse, and then in the gutter.

  If we believe Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, then before Maria Luisa vanished from history, there was one final encounter between the former novice mistress and her former novice Luisa Maria, Katharina von Hohenzollern. It must have been during the princess’s visit to Rome in the spring of 1872 that a “poor woman” visited her apartment.87 “She invited her in—and there stood the madre vicaria. Her heart stood still. But the unhappy, broken, and aged woman, who had retained none of her former beauty, threw herself at her feet and beseeched her for forgiveness. She had recently left prison and was in the depths of misery, literally on the point of starvation.” Katharina, who had inwardly “already forgiven her,” did not refuse her pleas for help, and saved the unhappy woman from “complete despair.”88

  From this description, it would seem that forgiveness had at least brought an end to the conflict that had been the catalyst for the Sant’Ambrogio trial. There was no more enmity between the two women: the “saint” Maria Luisa and the “unbeliever” Katharina, the poisoner and her victim. And neither of the two former nuns would have to face the Final Judgment unreconciled. But this may have just been wishful thinking. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe’s story of reconciliation cannot be corroborated by other sources. Even if it were true, it would probably have made little difference to the fact that the Sant’Ambrogio affair left Maria Luisa a broken woman. The story of the former madre vicaria and novice mistress faded away into the darkness of history. In her case, the Inquisition ultimately achieved its aim of Damnatio memoriae.

  A HERETIC WRITES DOGMA

  Unlike Maria Luisa, Kleutgen got away incredibly lightly, despite the serious nature of the charges against him. He himself said later that the Holy Office had sentenced him to “five years of imprisonment in the Inquisition’s cells” for formalem haeresim (formal heresy). But the cardinals and the pope had rendered the judgment increasingly lenient, and in the end it was reduced to just two years of incarceration in a Jesuit house outside Rome.89 Kleutgen served his sentence in a sanitorium and house of retreat in Galloro, a picturesque location near the Castle of Ariccia on Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome. At the time, this house was frequently used for rest and recuperation by the editors of the Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit journal.90 Kleutgen had close connections with this group, and in Galloro he also had the requisite leisure time to press ahead with his Theology of Times Past. In short, his stay there didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to incarceration “in the Inquisition’s cells.” Unlike Maria Luisa, who fell into a void, Kleutgen was caught by his order’s community, which had plenty of influence within the Curia of Pope Pius IX.

  After just a year and a half, in October 1863, Kleutgen returned to Rome. There he resumed his work as a teacher of rhetoric at the Collegium Germanicum.91 Outwardly, the affair seemed to have caused him only minimal damage. He may no longer have been assigned a place in the order’s leadership, but he was allowed to return to his beloved Germanicum, and had enough time to complete his major work on new scholasticism. His influence on Church policy, in particular the development of the Catholic magisterial authority, was undiminished. Even Kleutgen himself marveled at this in retrospect: “Remarkably, those very cardinals who had not long since convicted me ob formalem haeresim, afterwards treated me just as if nothing had happened.”

  Cardinal Reisach in particular proved very well disposed to Kleutgen, visiting him in Galloro in 1862–1863. When the pope asked Reisach to “procure a theological evaluation on a very important matter,” Reisach asked Kleutgen, who took on the job at once. Reisach handed the text to the pope and another senior member of the Curia, and both were “astonished” at the quality of the votum. In response to their inquiries, Reisach revealed the secret of the censor’s identity. In light of the “aptitude” displayed in this votum, Pius IX allowed Kleutgen to return from exile to Rome straightaway. Not long before, the Jesuit general Petrus Beckx had also gone to the pope to beg for mercy on Kleutgen’s behalf.92 Even as a condemned man and a heretic, Kleutgen had proved faithful to the cause, and the pope was merciful.

  But what was this extremely important theological matter that led to the Jesuit’s immediate reprieve? Reisach had a hand in two pieces of Church policy during 1862–1863 to which Kleutgen may have contributed a votum. One was the brief Gravissimas inter, of December 11, 1862, and the other was the brief Tuas libenter, of December 21, 1863. Both papal documents rested on a concept that Kleutgen had developed as a censor of the Congregation of the Index during the 1850s. His idea made it easier to defame modern, non-new-scholastic theologians as unorthodox, and place them on the Index of Forbidden Books.

  Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and had himself and his successors declared infallible by the First Vatican Council. He was beatified in the year 2000 by Pope John Paul II. (illustration credit 9.2)

  Very soon after Kleutgen had been convicted of heresy, Pius IX enshrined this model, which had initially been used only within the Congregation of the Index, as official Church doctrine. It was the concept of the “ordinary magisterium,” which is still of central importance today.93 Of course, at the same time Joseph Kleutgen was “inventing” this concept, Giuseppe Peters was acting on religious convictions that the Inquisition would later class as heretical.

  The ordinary magisterium makes its first doctrinal appearance in 1863, in Tuas libenter. This brief was principally directed against the Munich Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, and his speech at the academic conference he had organized in Munich.94 The conference had been intended to bridge the divide within German theology between Roman and German theologians, new scholastics and modern thinkers—though after Döllinger’s caustic opening address, this was clearly doomed to failure. Döllinger called Italian theology “gloomy and church-yardish.” The “old tenement knocked t
ogether by the scholastics” had fallen into disrepair. A new structure could only be built using both “eyes of theology”: history and philosophy.95

  Prior to Tuas libenter, the concept of an ordinary magisterium had been unknown. There was only the sacred magisterium of the councils and the pope. On the rare occasions when there was no other option, and it was the only way to secure a religious truth, this teaching authority would turn a tenet into a formal dogma. Among other things, this led to the articles of the creed being set down in writing by the Church’s early councils. But theologians were free to discuss all questions of faith that hadn’t been defined by the sacred magisterium. The essential task of this sacred magisterium was to act as a shepherd, observing and protecting tradition, rather than adding to the Depositum fidei.96 “The Deposit of Faith was not something presented by the magisterium; rather, the bishops were able to testify to it because it was believed.”97

  Going against this tradition, Kleutgen defined the relationship between the papal magisterium and the teaching authority of the theologians in a completely new way. In addition to the sacred magisterium, he proposed an ordinary magisterium for the pope and Curia that would be exercised daily, and would be equally binding. Döllinger’s address, which had made a plea for theology’s freedom from Roman paternalism, was the catalyst that set this in motion. The Munich historian believed that in future only dogmatic errors, offenses “against the clear universal teaching of the Church,” should be denounced and investigated in Rome. Theologians should be given complete freedom in all other fields, which made up the majority of their work—including the freedom to make mistakes. The theological weapons of reason and argument were the only things that should be used against errors that had not been defined solemnly by the Church’s magisterial decision.98