The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (19 page)

But why are there hardly any known cases of feigned holiness from the nineteenth century?
¹¹³
Three possible explanations suggest themselves: the phenomenon may simply have ceased to exist in this period. Or there
were
cases, but these haven’t yet attracted the attention of researchers. Or—and the find in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s archive certainly speaks for this—cases of feigned holiness continued to arise in the nineteenth century, but were frequently handled as something other than
affettata santità
. The offense may, for example, have been
Sollicitatio
, seduction in the confessional.
¹¹⁴
After all, the Inquisition frequently connected the offense of feigned
holiness with Molinosism and its attendant sexual misdemeanors. However, the user guide for collections held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reveals that files dealing with offenses committed in the celebration of the sacraments (the so-called
graviora delicta
) are still classified, and inaccessible to researchers.
¹¹⁵
This makes the case of Firrao a truly valuable find.

PROOF OF THE CONTINUING CULT OF FIRRAO

Tellingly, the continued veneration of Maria Agnese Firrao also formed the kernel of the first strand of the informative process that Pope Pius IX ordered in December 1859. The second part of this investigation focused on the pretense of holiness of Sister Maria Luisa, and the third on the reprehensible moral practices and crimes committed in Sant’Ambrogio. Over the course of the hearings, Sallua gradually formed a more detailed picture of the case, and was able to subdivide each of the three main charges into several
Titoli
. He then presented the result of this process to the cardinals.

In preparation for the hearings, Sallua had composed a historical overview of the old Firrao case for himself and the congregation of cardinals. However, there was one crucial question he failed to ask: did the verdict against Firrao from 1816 still hold even after Leo XII’s 1829 brief, which released Sant’Ambrogio from all Church censures and judgments?

If Leo XII’s brief had quashed Firrao’s conviction for false holiness, then the sisters were doing no wrong in venerating their mother founder. But Sallua’s consideration of the case took no account of this brief, thus editing out a fundamental part of the 1816 judgment’s history. In Sallua’s eyes, the veneration of Firrao was clearly a crime. He just had to prove that it was happening, and the nuns would have committed a punishable offense.

In her denunciation, Katharina von Hohenzollern had referred to a continued cult of the mother founder in spite of her conviction for feigned holiness. Sallua’s initial interrogation of Luigi Franceschetti, the convent’s legal representative, provided strong evidence to substantiate this.
¹¹⁶
The lawyer said that the young vicaress, Maria Luisa, had told him several times of the founder’s extraordinary holiness.
She believed the trial before the Inquisition in the early nineteenth century had been “slanderous.” To her mind, it was no coincidence that some of her denouncers had since “suffered an agonizing death”: this was a punishment from God. According to Franceschetti, Maria Luisa thought of Agnese Firrao as a true saint. The novice mistress pointed to Firrao’s stigmata as hard evidence of her holiness: on Good Friday, sister Maria Agnese had always “suffered the agonies and pains of Jesus’ passion”; furthermore, the lawyer said, Maria Luisa had told him that even years after her death and interment in Gubbio, the founder’s body remained undecayed.

Here, Maria Luisa was pointing to a typical marker of true holiness. While the apostle Paul said that man’s earthly body was “corruptible,” Psalm 16 claimed that God would not “suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” At first, this idea was applied exclusively to Jesus, but it was soon extended to the saints. Texts from the Middle Ages often speak of bodies being exhumed intact even decades or centuries after burial. The undecayed body soon became a trope and a sign of sainthood, especially for martyrs and people who were sexually abstinent.
¹¹⁷

The novice mistress evidently succeeded in convincing Franceschetti that her own visions and revelations were genuine. The lawyer testified: “I believed in them completely.”

When the nuns were questioned, they corroborated Franceschetti’s testimony. And, as the inquisitor discovered, they were unanimously convinced that the Inquisition had judged the mother founder unfairly. They all spoke of miracles, visitations, and healing the sick; they all believed the founder would guide their souls to heaven when they died. Their testimonies tallied right down to their choice of words—as the Dominican noted in his summary of the hearings of the three dozen nuns, for the cardinals of the Inquisition.
¹¹⁸

The fifty-five-year-old abbess, Maria Veronica, displayed an initial unwillingness to speak plainly about the whole thing.
¹¹⁹
It was only when the inquisitor confronted her with the other nuns’ statements that she gave up “her discretion.” Even so, he didn’t manage to convince her that the retraction the Inquisition had eventually forced from the mother founder was legal. Maria Veronica continued to refer to the
Beata Madre
, and to speak of Firrao’s extraordinary self-discipline in penance and fasting. She termed the founder’s practice of flagellating herself until she drew blood exemplary. She herself had cured several
illnesses through the laying-on of the mother founder’s veil. The abbess admitted that, by way of numerous visions and visitations, the founder had also imparted specific instructions to her for the leadership of the convent. Finally, she also admitted to venerating the founder as a saint. She said that a portrait of Agnese Firrao stood on the novitiate altar between two candles, and that the nuns had venerated it over a period of several days, coming to kneel and pray before it.
¹²⁰

The abbess went on to say that in prayers of supplication and litanies,
¹²¹
the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio called on the mother founder instead of Saint Clara (the companion of Saint Francis), saying: “Holy Agnese di Gesù, pray for us!” The inquisitor suggested that the nuns had performed “cult acts, which one would usually perform only to a canonized saint,” and the abbess replied: “This allegation is correct. We believed she had been glorified by God in heaven, and hoped that one day we would also see her glorified by the Church. These feelings and convictions were shared by the father confessors. For this reason we—and I, in front of the nuns—referred to her as
beata e santa madre
.”
¹²²

The mother founder’s first companions and old friends, who had entered the convent under Abbess Agnese Firrao, proved particularly recalcitrant under questioning. They were Sisters Maria Caterina of Saint Agnes, Maria Gertrude of Saint Ignatius, and Maria Colomba of Jesus of Nazareth, who were now all around seventy years old.
¹²³
All three claimed they had witnessed several miraculous healings following the holy founder’s intercession, both during her lifetime and after her death.
¹²⁴
The three old nuns were using these medical miracles to allude to a central element of the official Catholic canonization process: nobody could be raised to the altars without evidence that they had performed at least one miracle, interceding to heal a sick person whose recovery had no medical or scientific explanation. Martyrs were the only exception to this, as they had borne witness to Christ with their blood.
¹²⁵

Even forty years after the fact, the founder’s three companions believed the Holy Office and Pope Pius VII had made a fatal error in convicting her for feigned holiness. During her interrogation on January 31, 1860, Maria Caterina also stated:
¹²⁶
“After the founder was convicted by the
Sanctum Officium
and the judgment was read out to us, which said so many serious and terrible things, we, who were witnesses to the Mother’s innocence and the falseness of all parts of the judgment, thought the Holy Father had said in his judgment:
‘that he condemned her for all the things he had heard from the Holy Office.’ And so we said: ‘he did not condemn her as the pope and successor to St Peter, but only as the result of things he had heard from the
Sanctum Officium
, which were completely false.’ And so we remain convinced of the Mother’s holiness and innocence.” Maria Caterina believed the pope had erred in his judgment of Maria Agnese because he had spoken as a man, and had been taken in by human errors made by the Roman Inquisition. As evidence of this, she mentioned that the head of the Scottish College in Rome, Paul MacPherson,
¹²⁷
had told her that “Padre Merenda said on his deathbed: ‘The Holy Office committed a grave error in condemning Maria Agnese; if we could undo it, we would.’ ”

It took a certain amount of chutzpah to tell the investigating judge of the Holy Office that one of his predecessors had admitted to an error of judgment. Padre Merenda was in fact Angelo Merenda, commissary of the Inquisition from 1801 to 1820. It was his signature on the
bando
that proclaimed the judgment against Agnese Firrao.

The three older nuns backed their claim that the Holy Office had made an error in the Firrao case, by saying that senior people in the church hadn’t accepted the validity of the notification, either: “More than a few cardinals, who had always venerated Maria Agnese, continued to venerate her after she was convicted.” Among them were Placido Zurla, Alessandro Mattei, and Giacomo Filippo Fransoni.
¹²⁸
Sister Maria Colomba went so far as to say: “Even if you were to cut me into little pieces, I would still say she is a saint.”
¹²⁹

To Sallua’s mind, the remarkable agreement between all the witnesses he had questioned proved the first
Titolo
without a doubt. With one accord, and in spite of formal prohibition, the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio had venerated their condemned mother founder as a saint during her lifetime, and all the more so after her death. And, as the Dominican noted, they were entirely unrepentant, refusing to abandon this false cult even during the trial.

THE SECRET ABBESS

In Sallua’s mind, the second
Titolo
arose unavoidably from the first.
¹³⁰
The judgment of 1816 not only forbade the continuation of the cult; it
also threatened to punish any contact between the convent’s founder and its nuns. And if the false cult had continued, it was to be suspected that the “mother” and her “daughters” had remained in uninterrupted contact.

Sallua had plenty of forthright witnesses and handwritten evidence for this charge. The principal witnesses were the abbess, the prioress, and the father confessors of San Marziale, as well as some women from Gubbio who had taken dictation from Agnese Firrao in the last years of her life, after she went blind. On November 29, 1859, Sallua asked the local inquisitor of Gubbio to question these witnesses, and after the New Year he informed the head office in Rome of the results.
¹³¹

The abbess of Gubbio, Sister Matilde Bonci, had no doubt that Firrao had been in constant written communication with the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio. “On some occasions all of them, or almost all, wrote to her.” They had “a great admiration for her, both as founder of the convent, and due to her reputation for holiness.” The prioress of San Marziale, Teresa Serafina Salvi, and other sisters there, corroborated the abbess’s statement. Filomena Monacelli, who had taken dictation from Agnese Firrao, stated: “I recall that some of the sisters of Sant’Ambrogio believed Sister Agnese to be a saint; for her part, she thought some of the sisters of Sant’Ambrogio were saints, too”—namely Maria Metilde and Maria Maddalena. Filomena Monacelli read out letters to Firrao from the nuns and a “certain Jesuit Padre Leziroli from Rome.” These not only expressed a deep admiration, but also contained statements of accounts, and news that her previous instructions had been carried out. The mother founder had dictated these instructions to her in letters to Rome. Firrao had also exercised a direct influence on the elections to convent offices. From exile in Gubbio, she used the authority of heavenly visions to decide whom the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio should choose as abbess, novice mistress, or vicaress. The same went for the acceptance or rejection of novices. The confessor at San Marziale, Canon Bruno Brunelli,
¹³²
even told the local inquisitor in Gubbio that the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio were “totally dependent” on Firrao, as “daughters depend on their mother.”
¹³³

The San Marziale witnesses were, however, unable to provide evidence of Agnese Firrao’s saintly life and death, even though she had lived with them for around forty years. “We never noticed any deeds
of special and exceptional virtue,” the sisters agreed. Firrao died without being anointed, or receiving absolution and the
Viaticum
of Holy Communion, although she had been ill for more than a year and therefore had ample time to request the last rites.

This was a serious omission. The understanding at that time was that the last rites were the only guarantee that a “good” Catholic would have a good death and safe passage to heaven. Until the mid-twentieth century, death notices commonly contained the words: “died fortified with the last sacraments of the Church.”
¹³⁴

In fact, Firrao’s death frightened her nurses. Filomena Monacelli said that when she died, there was “a great commotion, like the loosening of iron chains.” A report on the death of a devout Catholic—a saint, even—would make very different reading. Rattling chains sounded more like a sign of the devil, who might have been at work in Firrao’s death.
¹³⁵
At least, this was how the nurses in San Marziale interpreted it. In spite of this, the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio petitioned to have Firrao brought back to Rome for reburial. She had been laid to rest by the outer wall of the church in San Marziale, away from the nuns’ graveyard. The nuns of Sant’Ambrogio wanted her body returned to them, so they could create a saint’s tomb as a place of veneration.
¹³⁶
Their abbess, Maria Veronica, had written to the abbess of Gubbio on June 15, 1859: “We still think of our treasure being with you; you will understand that I speak of our dear and much beloved Mother.”