The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (22 page)

And the novice mistress went still further, acting out her God-given authority in quasi-sacramental rituals. One Easter Saturday, when she had spoken to the novices about the Passion of Christ, she took “a large glass, which she called a chalice.” After drinking from this glass herself, she passed it to the novices, declaring: “This is the chalice of Christ.… My daughters, you must never forget that you have drunk from this chalice, as the apostles did with the Lord. Take courage.” The chalice of the Passion tasted (as one young nun put it) extremely bitter. One of the novices suspected a bitter liqueur, another “pistachio ice-cream from the infirmary.” Maria Luisa was giving a word-perfect imitation of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples, as described in the Gospel of Luke.
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Maria Luisa cast herself as the Lady of the Supper. The glass of liqueur or pistachio ice cream did, however, lend the whole tableau a note of absurdity.

A series of nuns reported that God had bestowed other heavenly “gifts” on Maria Luisa. Among these were her mystical translations into heaven, hell, and purgatory. Maria Luisa frequently told her fellow nuns that she had been taken up to heaven, where once she had even celebrated the Feast of the Assumption.
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She had experienced the mystery of the Trinity at close hand, and had other deep mystical experiences there. The Mother of God had also taken her into hell many times, where Maria Luisa had “trampled the devil with her feet” and commanded him not to attempt any more campaigns of deceit. Here, Maria Luisa was using a familiar liturgical trope, which celebrated the Virgin Mary as a warrior who “trampled the head of the hellish serpent.”
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However, Maria Luisa’s actions in hell attracted the devil’s “particular hatred.” He often came at night to do battle with her. “The
morning after, her face and mouth looked terribly bruised; her scapular
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was torn into long shreds.”

Furthermore, Maria Luisa claimed that in purgatory, where she was a frequent visitor, she had released many of her order’s sisters, reducing their time in the purifying flames and allowing them to go straight to heaven. There she had also received from God “the privilege … of being present at the judgment of each sister who died,” and thus being able to plead their case. In classical Catholicism, the intercession for the dead at the throne of heaven is one of a saint’s most important tasks.
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By implication: a person who you believe capable of divine intercession should be honored as a saint.

According to the numerous witness statements given by the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, discussions with heavenly beings were part of Maria Luisa’s everyday life. During her mystical fits, she often broke into “prophetic expressions,” when she could be heard talking to Christ. And she was always speaking “with the Virgin, and with the angel, and often with the dead mother founder and Maria Maddalena.”

Saints are frequently given the gift of prophecy.
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Maria Luisa made good on this expectation, too, as her fellow nuns told the inquisitor. Of particular interest to the investigating judge was a prophecy concerning Pius IX: Maria Luisa warned that the pope was in danger of falling into “eternal damnation.” But she had “secured his salvation through prayer.” With all these phenomena, Maria Luisa was building on the tradition of the female mystics of the Middle Ages.

MYSTICISM

In everyday language, the word “mystical” carries a whole raft of undertones. The things we call mystical are typically opaque and shrouded in mystery, magical and occult, hidden and extrasensory, inexplicable and intangible, or even demonic and spiritualist.
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Mysticism doesn’t quite seem to fit into a modern, rational world. But over the last few decades, a new kind of spirituality or esotericism has led to a widespread resurrection of mystical practices—initially outside Christianity, with shamans, Sufis, neo-Hindu gurus, yoga cults, and Zen meditation. And within Christianity, there has also been a revival of forms of devotion influenced by mysticism, as demonstrated
by the sightings of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina that began in 1981, or the veneration of Padre Pio in Italy.

In the history of the Catholic Church, mystical experiences have been regarded with a high degree of skepticism for both theological and political reasons. According to Catholic belief, Jesus’ message of divine revelation was passed from His apostles to their successors, the bishops, forming an unbroken line of witnesses through the ages. The vital task of imparting Jesus Christ’s divine revelation thus falls to the Church as an institution. Faith comes from listening to the proclamations of ordained, male witnesses, and Christ only comes in a mediated form, via the office of the Church.
¹⁵

But alongside this there has always been a second, extraordinary and immediate route to Christ, often called mysticism. The mystic movement centered on the unmediated experience of the absolute, the ascension of the soul to God, and its union with Christ.
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The initiative for this
unio mystica
clearly came from God. The mystic could prepare himself by means of meditation, asceticism, or fasting, but ultimately he would be “graciously seized by the divine reality.”
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This unmediated experience of the divine was very often bestowed upon women, who were then able to use their extraordinary route to Christ to compensate for their exclusion from religious office.
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The Church was rather distrustful of these “private” revelations.
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Many mystics drew political conclusions from their direct experience of God, and went to the hierarchy with calls for reform. As a result, mystics were often met with hostility. Many were prosecuted, locked up, or even executed for heresy. It was only after a long struggle that great mystics like Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Avila gained official Church recognition. From the Inquisition’s point of view, real mystical occurrences were rare, and false mysticism was the norm.

The unmediated “vision of God’s being” might be a purely spiritual experience for a mystic, but it could also take on physical and even erotic characteristics. The female mystics of the Middle Ages were particularly given to describing their experiences in the erotically charged language of the Old Testament’s Song of Songs. The
unio mystica
could be interpreted as a divine wedding to Christ in heaven.
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As a sign of this bond, some female mystics even received a heavenly ring, to symbolize their marriage to their divine bridegroom.
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The “mystical wedding” of Saint Catherine of Siena may be the best known of these bridal experiences.
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In his
Legenda maior
, the Dominican Raymond of Capua
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spoke of this event in detail. Catherine had been praying for a union with her “divine Spouse” Christ “with more fervor than ever.” The Lord replied: “I intend … to celebrate the wedding which is to unite me to thy soul. I am going, according to my promise, to espouse thee in Faith.” At this, the Virgin Mary took Catherine by her right hand and gave it to her Son. Jesus “offered her a golden ring, set with four precious stones, at the center of which blazed a magnificent diamond. He placed it Himself on Catherine’s finger, saying to her: ‘I thy Creator and Redeemer, espouse thee in Faith.’… The vision disappeared, and the ring remained on the finger of Catherine.
She
saw it, but it was invisible to others!”
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Raymond of Capua laid particular emphasis on this point. The ring came from heaven, and, as it was only the mystic herself who had been elevated to this sphere, only she was able to see it. It was and remained part of that supernatural reality, even after Catherine returned to earth. Her confessor, who had not been granted a role in this mystical union, was therefore unable to prove the ring’s objective existence. It existed only in the mystical world.
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As an extraordinary route to Christ, mysticism played a substantial role in Church history until the era of the Reformation. In the seventeenth century, however, it reached a crisis point. At the same time, the Roman Inquisition began to keep a very close eye on mystics—particularly female mystics. The increasing emphasis on the absolute “passivity” of a person undergoing a mystical experience, during which God alone was the active party (which was, apparently, a false understanding of grace), made many members of the Inquisition suspect crypto-Protestantism. The Enlightenment’s rationalist outlook then gave rise to a general suspicion of mystical experiences, which were seen as the spawn of irrationalism.

But countermovements also started to spring up. The century of materialism and science saw a rediscovery of the supernatural. The rise of spiritualism, with its séances, mediums, and table-tipping, can be interpreted as an esoteric counterweight to the nineteenth century’s rationalist drive toward science and modernity.
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Enlightenment thought and Romantic art, rationalism and mysticism, secularization and resacralization in private devotional practices were all closely interrelated.
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Even educated Catholics longed for a “re-enchantment
of the world.” Some of Romanticism’s leading exponents were Catholics, or at least Catholic sympathizers. Clemens Brentano, for example, wrote a literary interpretation of the visions of the stigmatized nun Katharina von Emmerick.
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In this context, Christianity made its peace with mysticism once again. Protestantism experienced a renaissance of pietistic movements “inward.” The Allgau revival movement is particularly worthy of mention in this respect.
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Justinus Kerner’s 1829 bestseller,
Die Seherin von Prevorst
(The Seer of Prevorst), brought worldwide attention to the case of Friederike Hauffe, a young protestant woman who heard voices from the next world and saw supernatural lights. Divine powers also gave her the ability to make prophecies.
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Within Catholicism, the publicist Joseph Görres developed a new concept of the mystical.
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He was particularly interested in beatific visions that had visible, tangible consequences in this world. During a vision, he said, a person became a medium, a “gateway to the other side—both the good and the evil.”
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Evidence of this mystical union appeared in the form of “wounds,” the “lovely fragrance of holiness,” or a “halo of ecstasy.”
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Stigmata were interpreted as proof of God’s continuing action in history, and as a miracle of His potent presence. For Catholics, this was an opportunity to challenge modern science, by “producing quasi-scientific evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit, and the factual existence of miracles, in the shape of tangible extraordinary phenomena.”
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Viewed in this way, miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary weren’t irrational and unexplained at all: they were a deliberate response to the age’s materialism and faith in science.

The “physical side-effects” of mystical experiences became increasingly important in this regard.
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Mystical phenomena were increasingly seen as “explicit, experimentally verifiable confirmation” of the Catholic belief in God.
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But the devil and the evil side of the supernatural realm were also able to use female mystics as a gateway to the mortal world. This called for caution and constant vigilance, to tell the good from the evil spirits.

This
Glauben an das Wunderbare
(Belief in Miracles—the telling title of a work published in Münster in 1846) became widespread in Catholic circles by the middle of the century. The author, J. W. Karl, spoke enthusiastically of numerous apparitions of the Virgin, ecstasies, and women with stigmata. The time for automatically doubting all revelations
and supernatural phenomena was finally over. There was a direct line running from the miracles of Christ and the apostles to the “supernatural apparitions of our century.”
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“Mysticism seems to be opening up again, and things that have long been considered fables and stories are … once again being justified as facts.”
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A real miracle came when a supernatural experience wasn’t confined to the mystic herself. The “supernatural effects” of a mystical union with Christ then became visible in nature, on the human body of the mystic.
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According to J. W. Karl, the belief in miracles wasn’t just the private opinion of a few theologians, but a “religious truth” that a “Catholic [must] not doubt.”
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This belief that the supernatural had a tangible effect in nature was a crucial feature of Catholic mysticism in the nineteenth century: the next world materialized here on earth. Stigmata; apparitions of divine beings on earth; the divine fragrance rising from the body of a bride united with Christ in heavenly marriage—all these were a natural part of this belief. For Catherine of Siena, the heavenly ring given as a symbol of this marriage had been immaterial, only visible to her. Now it had to be material, a sign of God’s proximity that everyone could see and touch.

The supernatural phenomena of Sant’Ambrogio should be viewed against this background. The “belief in miracles” made visions, ecstasies, and other mystical phenomena an everyday occurrence. In the nuns’ refectory readings, holy mystics from Catherine of Siena to Teresa of Avila and Gertrud of Helfta were continually held up to them as role models. So how did Maria Luisa and her miraculous gifts fit into this canon? Was she a true or a false mystic? Or could this even be the work of the devil?

THE EARTHLY ORIGINS OF HEAVENLY RINGS AND THE SCENT OF ROSES

These were the very questions Sallua put to the nuns and other witnesses.
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In his letters to Patrizi, which the cardinal vicar had handed over to Sallua at the start of the trial, Padre Leziroli had started talking about Maria Luisa’s “marriage to Jesus Christ” in heaven as
early as the 1840s. Apparently the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, and the two late nuns Maria Maddalena and Teresa Maddalena had also been present at this ceremony.
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Maria Luisa had received a divine ring, which the nuns and the abbess had seen “over the course of several years and on various occasions,” as they stated to Sallua when he questioned them. Over time, this ring changed shape and size, each time growing more ornamental and beautiful. Sometimes it was “so large and sparkling that it covered her ring finger almost entirely.” At first, it had been a gold ring with a little cross, then one with a larger cross “like a tree trunk.” Filled with “embarrassment and blushing in shame,” Maria Luisa had revealed the mystery of the heavenly ring’s variability. She confided to the abbess that the Lord had “decorated” her with not just one but several rings, and the “most beautiful and brightest” of these had come from the Virgin Mary.