The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (17 page)

This judgment, made in the assembly of the Holy Office cardinals and Pope Pius VII on February 8, largely followed the recommendation of the consultors. They had considered Firrao’s case on January 22, and classed her supernatural experiences and supposedly divine gifts as “Molinosism,” thus pigeonholing what she had done as a heresy that had been condemned in 1687.
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Molinosism was named for Miguel de Molinos, who died in the Inquisition’s jail in 1696.
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The Spanish priest had quickly made a name for himself as a spiritual leader and confessor in various convents in Rome. This rapid success led envious rivals to accuse him of Quietism—and it didn’t end there. Molinos’s opponents ramped up the charge, arguing that if he and his followers considered their own moral actions meaningless in terms of their souls’ salvation, then they must believe that one could indulge in the worst kind of fleshly debauchery without being called to account on the Day of Judgment.

On February 15, 1816, the Holy Office published Maria Agnese Firrao’s formal conviction for “pretense of holiness” on a
bando
. (
illustration credit 3.3
)

In the language of the Inquisition, Molinosism meant not just false mysticism but, at least indirectly, serious sexual misconduct.
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It is very likely that the cardinals and Pius VII consciously avoided using this term in their public judgment: to do so would have been to unleash speculations about erotic adventures behind the convent walls. This was a trope that had been common currency ever since the anti-monastic rhetoric of the Reformation, and it was revived during the Enlightenment.
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In the meeting on February 8, 1816, the cardinals also decided to dissolve the convent with immediate effect.
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Agnese Firrao herself was incarcerated in the convent of the Concezione.
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However, according to Sallua, her confessor helped the “mother” to remain “in secret and cunning contact” with her “daughters.” She induced them to “continue to adhere to the maxims and principles that had been condemned.” Her letters gave secret instructions, and prophesied that she would soon be reunited with her daughters. She was therefore summoned once more before the Holy Office’s tribunal. The witness statements and documents with which they confronted her were so overwhelming that Firrao confessed to everything they had accused her of, including her long sexual relationship with Monsignore Marchetti. When he was interrogated by the Inquisition, Marchetti himself was forced to admit “that he
in eodem lecto simul turpiter agebat
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both with Firrao and Sister Maria Maddalena.” In plain English, this meant the priest had had sexual intercourse with two nuns at the same time, in the same bed.

Sallua described how the Inquisition increased its pressure on Firrao. She now “repented of all her wicked deeds, in her own handwriting.” The tribunal officially informed Firrao’s “daughters” of the judgment and her abjuration, hoping to “disillusion” them. But this didn’t stop them venerating her as a saint. Contact between the mother and her daughters continued in secret, and the Inquisition finally decided to transfer Maria Agnese to San Marziale in Gubbio, away from Rome, to break off the forbidden contact once and for all—though this strategy also failed.

The Inquisition generally concluded affairs of this type with a secret internal abjuration. Why did it depart from its usual practice in Firrao’s case? Why did it decide to make a public announcement of the judgment? This was principally because since the confirmation of the 1796 miracle, Maria Agnese Firrao’s fame had spread right
across Europe. In Rome, even members of the College of Cardinals and ladies of the Roman nobility had held her in high esteem.
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The wounds and ecstasies had turned her into a saint. A public condemnation would draw a line under any further regard for her.

The
Damnatio
of 1816 led to substantial coverage of the case in the international press.
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Over the course of March that year, people all over Europe were informed of the false saint and the wounds she had inflicted on herself. The Inquisition’s verdict even seems to have had consequences in far-off Dülmen, the home of the stigmatized visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick.
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She had been born in 1774, and had borne bleeding marks from the crown of thorns on her head since 1798. In 1812 she also developed five wounds on her hands, feet, and side, which at first bled regularly, then only on Fridays, and eventually only during Holy Week. But on Good Friday of the year 1816, Anna Katharina Emmerick’s stigmata didn’t bleed.
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A connection has been posited between the Roman Inquisition’s judgment against Firrao, and Emmerick’s fear that her stigmata might be examined.
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The
Journal de la Province de Limbourg
commented that the Holy Office’s judgment against Firrao proved “that this tribunal has allowed itself to be illuminated by the century’s Enlightenment.” Despite the “deference showed to her by several cardinals and ladies of the Roman aristocracy, the tribunal held her to be a fraud, deserving of the harshest punishment.” A surgeon and a pharmacist had also been arrested on suspicion of “causing the stigmata on the body of the alleged saint” and providing her with the “suffocating drug” that could be smelled in the alleged visionary’s room, “whenever she claimed to have been tempted by the devil.”
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THE MIRACULOUS CONVERSION OF LEO XII

Roma locuta—causa finita
: Rome has spoken, and that is an end to the matter. The Roman Inquisition must have been convinced this would also hold true for the case of Maria Agnese Firrao. But it was not to be. Her devotees suffered a sore defeat in 1816, but they still weren’t prepared to accept the verdict. Members of Rome’s noble families (including the Marchesa Costaguti
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and Signora Faustina Ricci),
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prelates of the Curia, and even cardinals (Alessandro Mattei’s name repeatedly crops up in this context)
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were apparently still convinced of Firrao’s holiness.
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The king of Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel IV,
⁶⁷
and his wife, the French princess Marie Clotilde,
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played a particular role here: the king was a Jesuit sympathizer, and Marie Clotilde was an enthusiastic disciple of Maria Agnese.
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The royal couple had shared a confessor with the stigmatized nun: the ex-Jesuit Padre Marconi, who died in 1811.
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There had been a long, difficult period between the point at which the pope had succumbed to pressure from other European powers and suppressed the Jesuit order, and its reinstatement in 1814. During this time, the feeling of solidarity between
i Nostri
in the tight, militaristically organized unit of the Society of Jesus had become even stronger than the order’s constitutions had envisaged. The fellow feeling within the Society was greater even than the duty of obedience to the highest religious authority.

At first, the efforts of Firrao’s supporters were fruitless; this changed only when Cardinal Lorenzo Litta
⁷¹
became cardinal vicar of Rome on September 23, 1818. Litta was convinced of Firrao’s innocence, and on April 3, 1819, he managed to persuade Pius VII to revoke his dissolution of the convent in Borgo Sant’Agata. With the exception of their former abbess, the nuns were allowed to return.
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They elected Maria Maddalena as their new abbess, and Maria Crocifissa as their novice mistress.
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Litta died on May 1, 1820, and Cardinal Annibale della Genga succeeded him as cardinal vicar on May 6.
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He had been born in 1760, and came from a noble family with land in the Marches and Umbria. Della Genga was a member of the
Zelanti
, and a firm opponent of the moderate cardinal secretary of state, Ercole Consalvi. He was marked out by a rigorous puritanism and piety, and regularly took part in processions barefoot. The fate of the Regulated Franciscans of Sant’Agata now depended on him.
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And their prospects didn’t look good: della Genga came to the convent in 1822 with the firm intention of “expelling” the nuns.
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The Franciscans and their confessor saw him as the “worst enemy of the Reform, because of the hatred he bore for Maria Agnese.”
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He was determined to enforce the Holy Office’s decision of 1816.

When Cardinal Vicar della Genga arrived at the convent, Abbess Maria Maddalena took him into the chapel, where they both remained for a long time, sunk in prayer before the picture of the
Virgin Mary, the
Maria Santissima Consolatrice
. This image showed the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, holding the globe in one hand, with his other resting in benediction on the head of the young John the Baptist.
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The painting was believed to possess miraculous powers, and the Mother of God was said to have spoken to the nuns through it. Following this, they had scraped a few fragments from its edges and ground them into a healing powder.
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It was reported that, as a child, Cardinal Nicola Clarelli Paracciani had been cured of an illness by this powder.
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This painting made a deep impression on della Genga; one might say it worked the miracle of his
mutazione
from firm opponent to firm supporter of the Regulated Franciscan nuns.
⁸¹
It was “
un miraculo della Madonna
, who spoke to him from her image.” Over the period that followed, Maria Maddalena seems to have become the cardinal’s closest confidant. Backed by revelations from the miraculous painting, she apparently prophesied that he would be elected pope the following year. After the death of Pope Pius VII, the conclave really did elect della Genga as the new pope, on September 28, 1823. He took the name Leo XII.

Leo XII came to the convent
in modo privato
several times, to honor the painting and discuss important issues of his pontificate with the abbess. During one of these visits, he is said to have exclaimed:
“Sono il Leoncino delle mie Riformate”
—I am the little lion of my Reformed sisters.
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Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, the rector of the English College who later became cardinal of Westminster, mentioned Leo XII’s visits to the nuns in his memoirs, describing them as a “most unexpected proof of paternal care.”
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On August 19, 1826, the pope crowned the miraculous image of the Virgin with his own hand.
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However, the Sant’Agata convent was too small, and entirely unsuitable for enclosure, so in October 1828 the pope presented the community with the convent of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. This was to become the permanent home of the Regulated Franciscan nuns of the Third Order of Holy Saint Francis, reformed by Agnese Firrao. Leo XII also reinstated the Jesuit network that Giuseppe Marconi had created to protect Firrao’s reform at the turn of the century. At the end of 1828, the pope requested that pastoral care and the hearing of confession in Sant’Ambrogio be divided between two Jesuit padres—functions that would remain in Jesuit hands until the convent was dissolved.
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