In August 1859 a corpulent middle-aged German nun, the Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen, appeared before the officials of the Inquisition to denounce the Roman convent of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima as a hotbed of false religion, sexual perversion and murder. She had fled the convent in fear of her life a month earlier, and taken refuge with a cousin at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. The ensuing five-year investigation by Vincenzo Sallua, a doggedly thorough inquisitor, uncovered bogus revelations, systematic sexual abuse and serial poisoning.
The small but fashionable Franciscan community of Sant’Ambrogio had been founded in 1806 by a 32-year-old nun with a reputation as a visionary. The “miracles” and mystical revelations of Sister Maria Agnese Firrao, who sported a penitential iron face mask with 52 sharp nails turned inwards, were trumpeted by her confessors, and she was reputed to have been granted the wounds of Christ, the Stigmata, in her feet, hands and side. Bishops, cardinals and the Roman beau-monde flocked to the convent to see its living “saint”. But not everyone was impressed. The Inquisition was innately suspicious of high-profile claims to sanctity, especially among the female religious, and in 1816 Firrao was convicted of “feigned holiness” and “lewd behaviour” with her confessor, and banished for life to a remote convent; the community itself was threatened with closure. Vigorous lobbying by high-ranking friends prevailed, however, and by the time Von Hohenzollern joined it, the convent enjoyed the protection of key figures at the papal court.
Katharina, the romantically pious widow of two German princelings, was herself a product of a fervent Catholic devotional revival centred on papal Rome. Ardently longing for religious life, she had joined Sant’Ambrogio on the recommendation of her confessor, Cardinal August Reisach, one of Pope Pius IX’s most trusted advisers. But her initial happiness rapidly evaporated. The mother abbess, she discovered, was a mere figurehead, the convent controlled, instead, by the 26-year-old novice mistress and madre vicaria, Sister Maria Luisa – beautiful, eloquent and domineering – who herself enjoyed a reputation as a saint, supported by the convent’s Jesuit confessors. Maria Luisa claimed visions of Christ and the saints, during which she received heavenly gifts, including relics of Our Lady’s hair and the true cross. Signed letters from the Virgin Mary (written in bad French) denounced her enemies. Her body was said to exude a heavenly odour, and jewelled rings, symbolising her mystical marriage to Christ, seemed to appear and disappear miraculously on her fingers.
Katharina soon realised something was badly amiss. The convent secretly maintained the forbidden cult of their disgraced founding abbess. Maria Luisa, rarely attended chapel services, ate meat on Fridays and frequently entertained one of the Jesuit confessors, Father Giuseppe Peters, in her cell all night. All protests about such deviations were waived aside by the senior confessor, Giuseppe Leziroli, who colluded in the cult of the foundress and insisted on Maria Luisa’s sanctity. He attributed Von Hohenzollern’s doubts to demonic delusion. As relations with Katharina deteriorated, Maria Luisa received revelations predicting the death of the princess, and Katharina became desperately ill. Convinced she was being poisoned, she refused all food and medicine, and eventually made her escape.
Hubert Wolf’s sensational narrative draws on a shelf-load of Inquisition records, long misfiled and buried in oblivion. They reveal a sensational trail of abuse, fraud and murder in a closed and claustrophobic female community. Maria Luisa used her position as novice mistress to impose lesbian initiation rites on every nun entering the convent, assuring her favourites that she had been filled with divine blessing, communicated to them through her body fluids in orgasm. It emerged in the trial that she herself had been initiated by a former abbess, who claimed in turn to be passing on the miraculous “liquor” from the “saintly” mother foundress. Novices who became ashamed of these nights in Maria Luisa’s cell were either persuaded that the devil had assumed Maria Luisa’s shape to discredit her, or, if they remained dubious or indiscreet, mysteriously sickened and died. Maria Luisa’s torrid nights with Father Peters were excused as religious “communing”. Her famous odour of sanctity, it emerged, was achieved by anointing herself with attar of roses from a local pharmacy, and her miraculous rings were the work of a Roman jeweller, paid for by plundering the convent dowry fund. Maria Luisa eventually confessed that she had indeed ineffectually tried to poison Katharina, administering massive doses of opium, corrosive emetics, mercury and powdered glass procured from the convent infirmary.
The novice mistress’s story ended in tragedy: convicted and sentenced by the Inquisition to perpetual imprisonment in another convent, she became deranged and violent. Returned to her parental home, her loud denials of God and hell, and her violent and abusive behaviour proved unmanageable. The new secular Italian state ruled in favour of a lawsuit she brought to reclaim her convent dowry, but this prosperity was shortlived. She disappears from the record in the early 1870s, after a reported final encounter with Von Hohenzollern, now a distinguished Benedictine nun, who took pity on her destitution and gave her alms.
There is more than enough here for a novel by Dan Brown, but the story of Sant’Ambrogio has a further extraordinary twist. Maria Luisa died in poverty, but Peters, the Jesuit who had eagerly promoted her claims to sanctity, and with whom she had conducted a heated if unconsummated affair, flourished, and went on to help shape the course of Catholic theology. Peters’s real name was Joseph Kleutgen, a Westphalian theologian who had distinguished himself in the 1830s as a leading champion of an increasingly reactionary Catholicism, rejecting liberal thought in favour of a revived scholasticism, and exalting papal infallibility as the remedy for the ills of 19th-century modernity. Pius IX entrusted oversight of the Sant’Ambrogio trial to cardinals favouring similar views. In the wake of the trial, Kleutgen was exiled to a Jesuit house in the Alban Hills as “punishment” for his religious deviance and sexual misdemeanours. But, mysteriously, he was soon back in favour. In 1870 Puis XI lifted all the ecclesiastical censures against him, and he was appointed a theological adviser at the first Vatican council. According to Wolf, the key to this remarkable turnaround lay in Kleutgen’s fashionably rightwing theological views. In the early 1850s he had pioneered the novel claim that not only were solemn decrees of popes and councils infallible, but the “ordinary magisterium”, or routine teaching of the pope and Curia, was itself binding on Catholic consciences and above scrutiny by theologians. This teaching rapidly became an official orthodoxy, music to the ears of Puis XI and his entourage, and Kleutgen was able to surf the rising tide of papalism back to respectability and influence.
The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio sometimes veers dangerously close to conspiracy theory: conjecture is treated as fact, and all Wolf’s heroes are liberals, all his villains reactionaries. The translation is sometimes unidiomatic: priests “give” confession and “read” mass, while the Colli Albani, the low hills round Lake Albano are magnified into “the Albanian Mountains”. But Wolf’s absorbing unravelling of the Inquisition trial convincingly recovers a lost world of rancidly overheated religiosity, rendered toxic by the force of a monstrous ego. It also opens a disturbing window on a closed ecclesiastical establishment in which unquestioning support for authority might excuse almost anything. To that extent, it can stand as a salutary tract for the times.
• Eamon Duffy’s include The Stripping of the Altars, published by Yale. To order The Nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
The post The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio by Hubert Wolf review – the true story of a convent in scandal appeared first on History of Royal Women.