The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (18 page)

This painting hung in the church of Sant’Ambrogio. Many Catholics, including Pope Leo XII, believed it was miraculous. (
illustration credit 3.4
)

In 1828, Leo XII also ordered an Apostolic Visitation.
⁸⁶
The visitator noted that there were nineteen women in the convent at this time. The Rule approved by Pius VII in 1806 was followed in a very strict and exemplary manner, and the visitator had no doubt that the papal approbation of 1806 had been genuine. But the Inquisition’s tribunal had disputed this fact in 1816, and was still disputing it in 1861.
⁸⁷

The Visitation formed the basis for a very well-meaning brief issued by Leo XII on January 30, 1829. This text solemnly confirmed the reformed Rule of 1806, and the gift of the new convent. “We have given consideration to transferring these sisters to another, larger and more suitable place. And finally we have selected for them the convent called Sant’Ambrogio, in the Flaminio district.” The pope also freed the sisters from “any kind of censure, all judgments, the punishment of excommunication and interdict, and every other conviction by the Church, for whatever reason and in whatever matter these may have been effected.”
⁸⁸

Leo XII died a few days later, on February 10, 1829. After his death Padre Pietro Cinotti,
⁸⁹
who was the Jesuits’
Vizepreposito
, the second most important man in the Society, gave the nuns his personal
condolences. The well-known Jesuit dogmatist Giovanni Perrone
⁹⁰
led their exercises.
⁹¹
Over the period that followed, Leo XII’s nephew, Cardinal Gabriele della Genga,
⁹²
kept a protective watch over the nuns. He also had a close relationship with the abbess, Maria Maddalena, whom he held in “high regard.”
⁹³
It was no coincidence that when he was enthroned as a bishop on September 15, 1833, the ceremony was held in the church of Sant’Ambrogio, underneath the miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary.
⁹⁴

Without saying so explicitly, Leo XII’s brief had declared the Roman Inquisition’s 1816 verdict invalid. In any case, the pope had overturned the judgment’s legal effects, and the question of Agnese Firrao’s holiness was open once more.

TRUE AND FALSE HOLINESS

The main goal of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition was to fight heresy and maintain the purity of the
sana doctrina
, healthy Catholic doctrine.
⁹⁵
The “sacred duty” of this authority, which had good reason to be called the Holy Office, was to sniff out heretics of every stripe and to silence anyone who deviated from the official line. When the Christian denominations became more sharply divided following the 1563 Council of Trent, the newly founded Inquisition concentrated on Protestant communities and their protagonists. Over the course of the eighteenth century, and increasingly after the French Revolution, its focus gradually shifted to matters within the inner-Catholic realm. The Holy Office became the disciplinary organ for Church-internal movements away from Rome and the pope, no matter how orthodox their positions were in other respects. The
Index of Forbidden Books
also showed this tendency: more and more Catholic theologians whose thought differed from the prevailing views in Rome were denounced to the Congregation of the Index or the Inquisition by their opponents, and ended up on the “blacklists.” Over the nineteenth century, new scholasticism—which had been just one of many theological schools of thought—gradually became the Roman (and therefore true Catholic) theology. All other theological viewpoints were
a priori
suspicious.
⁹⁶

The Inquisition turned its “left eye” toward the pursuit of intellectual dissenters in the area of doctrine. Its “right eye,” however, had a great deal more to see.
⁹⁷
Its gaze fell on all phenomena that might very broadly be described as mysticism and the belief in miracles: private revelations, epiphanies, visions, and auditions of divine powers—in particular angels and saints, but most of all apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There were more than a few Catholics who heard “voices from beyond the grave” or received messages from those “poor souls” who had passed on. Supernatural abilities and miracles were often attributed to these people: they healed the sick through the laying-on of hands, multiplied bread, or averted storms. A few particularly “blessed” among the faithful even bore the stigmata, the wounds being a sign of their special devotion to Christ.

This was a form of religious behavior that largely evaded the rational foundation and controls of the Church. These “mystics”—often women—claimed to have a direct line to God and the saints, and could therefore pose a threat to the Church hierarchy. Anyone who could communicate directly with heaven had only a limited need for the Church as an institution and a mediator of God’s blessing and sacrament. If these “blessed” people then claimed to be living saints, or were honored as such by simple Catholics, the Inquisition was forced to impose harsh measures to protect the hierarchy. Where would the Catholic Church be if its flock was able to choose its own saints without the pope’s blessing? What would happen if unworldly mystics, who protested long and loud about how the Catholic Church was becoming nothing more than a clerical and judicial institution, were raised to the altars by these “subversive” means?

The Congregation of Rites was founded in 1588, as the sole authority responsible for carrying out the canonization process. At this point the expression “pretense of holiness” appeared for the first time in the catalogue of responsibilities and rubrics of the Holy Office.
⁹⁸
The pope was laying claim to a new monopoly: it was now only possible to become a saint by decree from the
Summus Pontifex
, rather than through popular devotion.

Following a long period of trial and error, a process for canonization began to develop in 1634, and was given its eventual form by Pope Benedict XIV in 1741. This remained in place until the publication of the
Codex Iuris Canonici
in 1917.
⁹⁹
At the same time, a new Roman
Catholic model of sainthood was taking shape. The traditional markers of sainthood such as ecstasies, prophecies, and other supernatural apparitions, food for the sensation-hungry masses, retreated into the background. Rome became especially skeptical of stigmata.
¹⁰⁰
“Heroic virtue in a moral or social field” was now the crucial criterion.
¹⁰¹

Since the end of the sixteenth century, the history of canonization shows each pope raising people to the altars according to his own Church-political leanings. If a pope flew the flag for the fight against Protestantism, he would canonize martyrs who had been killed by Protestants. If he was aiming to intensify the Church’s missionary work, new saints would be successful evangelists. If a pope wanted to cultivate a close bond with the Society of Jesus, he would canonize a large number of Jesuits.
¹⁰²
From 1519 to 1758, a total of fifty-two new saints were canonized, forty-one men and eleven women. Only two of them were members of the laity; most belonged to religious orders, or were bishops or archbishops. However, there was only one pope among them: Pius V, canonized in 1712.
¹⁰³
In 1625, the Holy Office expressly forbade Catholics from honoring any deceased person rumored to have been holy without prior authorization from the apostolic throne.
¹⁰⁴

Unsurprisingly, this monopoly met with both private and public opposition. Many of the faithful didn’t agree with their saints being moral rather than magical. They didn’t want saints to show special virtue and moral strength in everyday life, but to do something extraordinary: saints were supposed to float through the air, work miracles, heal the sick, and receive secret messages and revelations from the afterlife. A saint was a prophet who could see into the future, go for months without nourishment, or live exclusively off the strength he derived from the Host at Holy Communion. The wounds of Jesus Christ that he bore on his body were an unmistakable sign that he had been chosen by God; they forced him to reenact Christ’s Passion over and over again. Mystics who bore the stigmata sometimes caused outbreaks of hysterical devotion, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which saw the emergence of Anna Katharina Emmerick, Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth, and Padre Pio.
¹⁰⁵
It is the fascination held by supernatural phenomena with no rational explanation that drives people to create a cult around a (living) saint, and explains the
“persistenza del modello mistico
.”
¹⁰⁶

Many men at the top of the Church hierarchy, especially Pius IX, were also susceptible to the fascination of transcendent phenomena. This meant the Church hierarchy didn’t always combat the new forms of popular piety as thoroughly as it might. Instead, churchmen put all their energy into channeling and controlling these movements according to their political interests and theological ideas. Even so, the kind of contemplation that was supposed to lead to a mystical vision of God, in the mold of Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, was often viewed as a protest against the utilitarianism of the Counter-Reformation’s “heroic” saints. In the eyes of the faithful, a mystic’s direct connection with God gave him an advantage over the Church hierarchy, whose power came via the objectivity of the authority that ordained them, and not the charisma of a divine encounter.

The Inquisition’s “invention” of the concept of feigned holiness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must be viewed in the context of the changes within the Catholic Church during this period. In the wake of the Counter-Reformation and confessionalization, the Church became more uniform and centralized, with a set hierarchy.
¹⁰⁷
The diverse
Catholica
of the Middle Ages had to be subsumed into a unified Roman Catholic Church, in order to distinguish Catholicism from the other Christian denominations. Clear Catholic principles and precepts had to be drawn up, and these were to be guaranteed and overseen exclusively by Rome and the papacy in an attempt to discipline Catholics into denominationally correct behavior.
¹⁰⁸

Feigned or simulated holiness was initially seen as just a moral misdemeanor, a strategy used by the “saint” to gain social, financial, and religious capital. This was dealt with on the level of Church discipline. Over time, however, the Roman inquisitors turned it into a crime against the Faith, which the highest religious authority could punish with the thunderbolt of excommunication. It was frequently ranked alongside the heresies of Molinosism and Quietism. “Until the start of the 17th century, false holiness is
fraud
and deceit, subtle human artifice, then a
sickness
, and finally and above all a
heresy
.”
¹⁰⁹

For his history of the Inquisition in Italy, Andrea Del Col found verifiable records of 114 Inquisition trials for feigned holiness between 1580 and 1876. There were at least thirty-two other cases formally handled under the rubric of
“falso misticismo,”
where the offense also amounted to feigned holiness. For this period, then, there were twice
as many saints condemned as “false” as there were “true” saints raised to the altars.
¹¹⁰

False or fraudulent holiness, as the Roman source material also calls it, was an especially incendiary matter when the suspect was a woman. The Roman inquisitors regarded women as being particularly susceptible to the devil whispering in their ear. And it was almost a matter of course for the guardians of the Faith to see the demons of sexual seduction at work in cases where women pretended to be saints. But mysticism and extraordinary occurrences were pretty much the only way for women to make their voices heard in the male-dominated Church. Significantly, the overwhelming majority of people who displayed stigmata were women. Of the 321 documented cases up to the end of the nineteenth century, 281 were women and only forty men. Of the fifty to sixty cases of full stigmatization, only two were men: Saint Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio.
¹¹¹

The relationship of these “holy” women to their spiritual guides and confessors was an important factor.
¹¹²
Agnese Firrao and Domenico Salvadori were certainly no exception in this respect. Confessors provided an interface between the holy mystics and the general public. A confessor might dismiss and suppress his charge’s ecstasies, prophecies, miracles, and stigmata as deception and superstition. Or he could become an advocate for her status as an authentic saint. But this didn’t necessarily mean he held the position of power in the relationship: the confessor might also have fallen under the influence of the “seer” and become fascinated by her himself. Unsurprisingly, such a close spiritual relationship between a man and a woman sometimes led to physical intimacy and sexual contact. And here, too, the roles were by no means predetermined: the “saint” might have seduced the cleric, or it could be the other way around.