The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (16 page)

The confessor’s interpretations of these visions drew implicit parallels between Maria Agnese, at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Saint Catherine of Siena in the second half of the fourteenth century. Maria Agnese lived through Napoleon’s first occupation of the Papal States and the city of Rome in 1798, when he threatened the very
existence of the papacy. Catherine of Siena, who was born in 1347, had experienced something very similar when the popes were wholly dependent on France. In 1309, at the start of the Church’s “Babylonian Captivity,” the papal residence had to be moved from Rome to Avignon, into the sphere of influence of the French kings. Like Catherine of Siena, who was very involved in Church affairs and finally succeeded in persuading Gregory XI to return to Rome in 1377, Agnese Firrao was now speaking out against what was, in her view, Pius VI and his successor, Pius VII’s, excessive compliance with the French. In 1801, Pius VII had to sign a humiliating concordat with France, and in 1804 he even had to anoint Napoleon as emperor. Both Catherine and Maria Agnese belonged to strict penitential orders; both had received stigmata; both achieved the highest level of mystical union with God through a “heavenly marriage” with Christ. Though they were women, these direct encounters with God legitimated their involvement in the politics of churchmen. Catherine of Siena paid the price for her mystical experiences and her political activity when people accused her of being a heretic and a false saint. It took a long time for the Church authorities to recognize her as a true mystic. Wasn’t there a danger that the same fate might await Maria Agnese?

To start with, things seemed to be going well for her. Influential circles of the Roman Curia came out in support of the young visionary. The cardinal protector of Santa Chiara, the influential cardinal Giuseppe Albani,
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encouraged her and her new confessor, Giuseppe Loreto Marconi,
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to carry out a reform of the convent. Marconi also secured the support of a network of ex-Jesuits, many of whom became secular priests after their order was suppressed in 1773. Padre Giuseppe Pignatelli,
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who was later beatified, seemed especially convinced that Firrao’s visions were genuine, and helped with the creation of new constitutions for the convent. But very soon, problems began to arise with the implementation of the reform in Santa Chiara. The changes boiled down to a tightening of discipline and enclosure, and there was open resistance to this from nuns who had been there for many years. And so Pius VII allowed Maria Agnese, her biological sister, and two other nuns to leave the convent and found a new institution. In 1804 he gave them a house in the Via Graziosa, near Santa Maria Maggiore.
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Pope Pius VII considered the proposed Rule for the reformed Franciscan Nuns of the Third Order, and approved it on January 26, 1806. Papal authorization for the ceremonial followed on April 10,
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and Maria Agnese became the first abbess.

Maria Agnese Firrao, in an attitude typical of a saint, with a cross at her breast. (
illustration credit 3.2
)

Even after Firrao had founded her own order, Marconi continued to inform the public of her numerous visions and miracles. She was said to have multiplied items of food, in emulation of Jesus’ loaves and fishes miracle,
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which caused a huge sensation in Rome. But sooner or later, somebody must have denounced her to the Holy Office. Saint Catherine of Siena wasn’t the only woman whose fate Firrao now shared; the Roman Inquisition scrutinized almost all women who founded an order or carried out reforms in the area of organized female asceticism. Angela Merici,
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the founder of the Ursulines, and Mary Ward,
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the founder of the English Ladies, suffered the same scrutiny. It wasn’t unusual for these devout and driven women to be accused of dishonest intentions and heretical tendencies, and for the Church to declare them orthodox only after a long struggle involving humiliation, allegations, condemnation, and incarceration. The Church’s mistrust of Firrao was in line with the Roman Inquisition’s view of nuns and women in general: the daughters of Eve had to subordinate themselves to the male clerical hierarchy. It had been the decision to act on her own initiative—as every reader of the Bible knew—that led to catastrophe for the priordial mother of the female sex in paradise, laying the way clear for the devil.

AGNESE FIRRAO IS ACCUSED OF FALSE HOLINESS

There is no record of precisely when and why Sister Maria Agnese Firrao was arraigned before the Holy Tribunal. Her devotees tried to play down the whole affair. They simply reported an accusation of 1809, leading to a trial that was stopped before it could really begin, when the French forced the Holy Office’s commissary, Angelo Merenda, into exile.
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Her opponents, on the other hand, attempted to recast Firrao’s entire biography as the life of a heretic.
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This was also the approach taken by the investigating judge, Vincenzo Leone Sallua, at the end of 1859 and the start of 1860. But before he could start questioning the witnesses in the current Sant’Ambrogio case about the veneration of Firrao, he had to get an overview of the old case.

This undertaking proved difficult, as the Papal States had been occupied by French troops on several occasions between 1798 and 1814. Conditions were so chaotic during the notorious
epoca napoleonica
that the Inquisition had to keep suspending its work.
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In the history of the old case that Sallua prepared for the Congregation of Cardinals, he evolved a completely different chronology from that suggested by her devotees.
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He claimed that in January 1806, the Holy Office had begun a
new
trial against Firrao. If this was so, then the proceedings over the miraculous healing of 1796 would have to be seen as her first Inquisition trial, which wasn’t true.

In any case, Sallua reported that the Holy Office had reached a verdict against Agnese Firrao in 1806. He claimed that her former spiritual guide, Marconi, who had publicized her miracles, was stripped of his office, and Agnese Firrao was demoted from her role as abbess. Her active and passive voting rights in the convent were also removed. The decree specifically prohibited any further personal or epistolary contact between the confessor and the nun, on pain of excommunication. Sallua remarked ruefully that due to the political confusions of the time, the judgment could not be implemented.

But this interpretation of events is less than convincing. At the time when the Inquisition, with the pope at its head, was supposed to have been passing judgment on Padre Marconi and Agnese Firrao, Pius VII was actually approving the Rule and the ceremonial that
Marconi and Firrao had presented to him. One gets the impression that, whether consciously or unconsciously, the investigating judge was rewriting inquisitorial history in the Holy Office’s favor. In his version, its wisdom naturally recognized the false saint’s deceit from the very beginning.

Sallua then claimed that February 4, 1808, marked the conclusion of a further Inquisition proceeding—but this is also impossible to substantiate.
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At this time, the inquisitor stated, “crucial evidence” was found of Firrao’s “feigned holiness” and her “lewd behavior” with the priest Pietro Marchetti.
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In addition to this, there were the “perverse principles of Quietism” that she and her sisters followed. She also caused “dangerous writings” to be produced, publicizing her own holiness. Firrao’s spiritual guides and confessors wrote ever more detailed hagiographic texts. The most monumental of these was the seven-volume saint’s life from the pen of Padre Marconi, in which the confessor essentially proposed a living woman as a candidate for beatification.
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This made the charges brought by the highest religious authority more serious in two respects. First, sexual misconduct was added to the theological misdemeanors—naturally, initiated by the woman, not the priest in question, which was typical of the views of the period. Then the whole thing was classed as heresy, and specifically as Quietism.
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The Inquisition was looking for a heretical pigeonhole into which they could sort Firrao’s behavior, because the phenomena somehow seemed to fit there. There is, however, some doubt about whether Quietists even existed at the start of the nineteenth century, and whether Agnese Firrao had ever heard of their theological system.

As a theological movement and a devotional practice, Quietism was founded on a theory of grace, based on the assumption that man could only find God by negating the self, avoiding all independent activity, and remaining in a state of “absolute inaction” and “total passivity.”
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A person had to be indifferent to everything earthly, and was unable to do anything toward his own salvation. Instead, everything was left up to God. For the Inquisition, Quietism was a sort of crypto-Protestantism.

But once again, Sallua said, there could be no trial, and therefore no judgment: in February 1808, Napoleon reoccupied Rome, taking
Pius VII captive, and sending him into French exile in the summer of the following year. The Napoleonic-era chaos also meant that the nuns were expelled from their home in the Via Graziosa and had to flee. It was only after the pope’s return to Rome in May 1814 that they were able to move into a new house in Borgo Sant’Agata, in the district of Monti.
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And at this point, like other Congregations of the Curia, the Inquisition also resumed its work. The Firrao case was at the top of its list.

From this point on, Sallua’s historical rehash of the old Firrao case was able to draw on his authority’s files. Abbess Maria Agnese Firrao was immediately arrested and held in a series of convents in Rome. Besides the supernatural phenomena and “boasting of her holiness,” the main accusation leveled against her was of sexual misconduct, specifically “lasciviousness and carnality with demons.” Finally, they said, this had left her pregnant. Two fetuses were removed from her, causing great pain, by surgeons at the Hospital of the Holy Ghost.
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In his biography of her, Marconi claimed that her chastity had not been broken by this, because she had been the victim of evil powers. For Sallua, on the other hand, the pregnancies were the result of a long affair with the priest Pietro Marchetti, lasting from the start of 1810 until October 1812. The two had met regularly in the convent’s parlor. “She pretended ecstasies, fell on him in an improper way, and gave him wine to drink to enhance his libido.”
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THE INQUISITION’S 1816 VERDICT

The Holy Office came down entirely on the side of Firrao’s opponents and, on February 15, 1816, pasted a poster-sized
bando
on the doors of St. Peter’s, the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva next to the Pantheon, in the Campo de’ Fiori, and in “the other usual places” in Rome. This was how the Inquisition’s commissary at that time, the Dominican Angelo Maria Merenda, chose to publicize Firrao’s formal conviction for “feigned holiness.”
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For these misdemeanors, the Inquisition sentenced Firrao to “lifelong imprisonment in a convent of the strictest observance, to be determined by the cardinal vicar. From henceforth she must wear the penitential habit without the black veil, and is strictly obliged to stay away from the grille, the gates and the convent’s parlor. She is also forbidden from corresponding with anyone without the express permission of the mother superior.” The principal aim of this punishment was to prevent any kind of communication between the former abbess and the nuns of her reformed Third Order. If there was the least breach of the Inquisition’s terms, Firrao would automatically be sentenced to a year in a convent jail, and three months of taking only bread and water on Fridays. She also had to pray a Rosary in atonement for her sins every Saturday for the rest of her life.
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The notification added that once His Holiness and Their Eminences the cardinal inquisitors had decided the matter, “Nobody must dare to claim in the future or continue to believe that the above-named Sister Maria Agnese Firrao is a saint.”