The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (24 page)

The pope instructed that, due to Beckx’s high standing, his hearing before the Inquisition in March 1860 should be conducted not by Sallua, but by the assessor, Monaco La Valletta. The Jesuit general conceded that he had relieved Padre Benedetti of his office in Sant’Ambrogio at the “request of the nuns.” He characterized Padre Leziroli as a “simple man,” generally believed to be a “good priest who followed the rules.” Beckx claimed the same “about Padre Peters, although he did not [enjoy] the same reputation for piety as Padre Leziroli.”
⁵²

Naturally, Sallua was interested in exactly how the correspondence between the Mother of God and Padre Peters had taken place. Apparently, apart from Peters and Maria Luisa, this was something only the abbess knew.
⁵³
Sallua did everything in his power to get hold of the heavenly missives as evidence, but without success. Maria Luisa and Peters had ensured the letters wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Holy Office by burning them all. The Dominican was therefore forced to reconstruct the content of individual letters—there must have been several dozen of these—from the witness statements.

The Blessed Virgin Mary’s letter to the Jesuit general Petrus Beckx. (
illustration credit 4.1
)

But the inquisitor did have one piece of luck: under questioning from Monaco La Valletta, the Jesuit general revealed that he, too, had received a letter from heaven. At first, of course, he had no clear memory of it. Then he claimed to have burned the letter. When the assessor pressed him further, Beckx promised to have another look
for it among his papers. And as luck would have it, after a thorough search the general found the letter and handed it over to the Inquisition.
⁵⁴
It bore no date, and was written in French. In translation, it read:
⁵⁵

Why “Marie” didn’t choose to write in Latin, the language of the Church, or Aramaic, the dialect of her homeland, is open to debate. French was the diplomatic language of the nineteenth century, and was also used in the Curia,
⁵⁶
which might have been the reasoning behind the choice of “divine” language. Alternatively, the letter may have been modeled on the widely read missive from the
“mère de Dieu
,” written in French in the eighteenth century. Or the Virgin Mary may have chosen French because it was the mother tongue of Petrus Johann Beckx.

In any case, the letter contained an extraordinary number of errors, proving that its author had only a limited command of French, and had probably learned it as a spoken rather than a written language. In spite of this, the letter’s commands were in fact carried out in 1857. The “unfortunate” Passaglia was duly separated from his companion, Schiader (actually Schrader). On August 3, 1857, the Jesuit general gave orders for Clemens Schrader to be transferred from the Gregorian University to the Catholic theology faculty of the University of Vienna. Petrus Beckx used his authority to override protests from both Passaglia and Schrader.
⁵⁷
As a result, Passaglia resigned from all his offices in the Jesuit order, and gave up his professorship at the Gregorian University.

Carlo Passaglia
⁵⁸
was born in 1812, and was one of Rome’s most high-profile Jesuit theologians. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1827 and, once he had been ordained in 1840, served as the prefect of studies at the Collegium Germanicum. In 1844, he was given one of the two chairs for dogmatics at the Gregorian University. There, he became friends with one of his students, Clemens Schrader, who later became his colleague.
⁵⁹
Schrader was born in 1820 in Itzum, near Hildesheim, and studied at the Germanicum from 1840 to 1848, when he entered the Society of Jesus. That same year, the Roman Revolution forced the Jesuits into exile, and the two men went to Ugbrooke in Devon, England, where they carried on teaching. Passaglia stood for a historical form of Thomism, and therefore found himself increasingly opposed to the new scholastics, who were growing ever stronger in the Gregorian University, and who worked less historically. He also attracted a great deal of skepticism from other members of his order for his pragmatic view of the Italian unification movement, and his attempt to build bridges between the papacy and the nascent Italian state. His works on this topic ended up on the
Index of Forbidden Books
.
⁶⁰
Passaglia was held in the highest regard by Pius IX, as he had been a strong supporter of papal infallibility, and had done sterling work on the 1854 dogma of the Immaculate Conception. But the term “unfortunate” in the Virgin Mary’s letter probably held the unspoken accusation of a homosexual relationship with Clemens Schrader.
⁶¹

Did the letter from the Virgin lead to the separation of Passaglia and Schrader, or was it a kind of
vaticinium ex eventu
, something that claimed to be a prediction of the future, but actually “foretold” an event that had already happened? If it was the latter, it would have to have been written after August 3, 1857, the date that Beckx had Schrader transferred. But if it was written prior to August 3, it might really have influenced the general’s decision.

This question must have electrified Sallua: if the Jesuit general—the “black pope”—had really transferred Schrader on the letter’s instructions, it would mean he had acknowledged the letter as genuine.

Word of Beckx’s letter from the Virgin Mary had clearly spread among the Jesuits, and had also unsettled Padre Leziroli. He instructed Maria Luisa to give him more detailed written information about it. She reluctantly complied, via a letter written on August 5,
1857.
⁶²
Writing “purely out of obedience,” she told Leziroli that the Madonna had recently appeared to her in the convent, and told her “the whole story of the Collegio Romano and these two padres.” The Virgin said: “Listen: Oh! My daughter. The authorities are in error … I have already told you once, you should pray for my dearly beloved Society. I also sent the general a letter regarding the matter of the Collegio, as I told you.” The Virgin added that she was sure her “good son Pietro” would make sure “the Collegio was freed from such a monster.” The Blessed Virgin passed a judgment of annihilation on Passaglia, and Maria Luisa couldn’t entreat her to moderate it. The Madonna simply said, “Well well, poor Carlo, poor Carlo: his great pride drove him into the abyss.”

If Maria Luisa answered Leziroli on August 5, this means Beckx’s letter from the Virgin was written before this date, and could well have played a role in the Jesuit general’s actions against Passaglia. It may seem unlikely today that a heavenly missive could influence the head of an order’s decisions about its members. But were letters from the Virgin Mary such an unusual phenomenon in this period? Or did the Blessed Virgin intervene to alter the course of history on an almost daily basis?

THE MARIAN CENTURY

The nineteenth century was the age of the feminization of religion.
⁶³
In civil society, men and women inhabited separate spheres: men took care of politics, while women looked after the household and religion; men’s involvement with the Church was via Catholic clubs and movements, while women were frequently overrepresented at Mass and religious festivals. The century’s monastic revival was largely based on the establishment of new women’s congregations. These performed good works, caring for the poor and the sick, or working in schools and on behalf of girls’ education. But it wasn’t just that more women were engaging in devotional practices; the practices themselves became increasingly sentimental and emotional, characterized by devotion and humility, but also by hysteria. These were all seen as feminine qualities. This fact was used as a weapon by the anti-clerical
movements—particularly the opponents of the Jesuits. They frequently questioned the masculinity of devout men, calling women the “Jesuitical sex,” while the Jesuits’ male adherents were “weak and womanish.”
⁶⁴

In this context, the Blessed Virgin Mary gained more and more currency as the addressee of prayers. She was invoked in Rosaries, May devotions, and Marian litanies. It wasn’t just members of the lower classes who became enthusiastic devotees of the Virgin, but people from society’s upper echelons and clerics, all the way up to the pope.

This devotional practice was related to a particular development in theology. Over the course of Church history, the Catholic image of God had been purged of all the feminine characteristics that had existed in the Holy Scriptures. Now they were making a comeback, in the form of the Mother of God. The period from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s is therefore known as the Marian century, the end point of which is formed by the 1950 dogma of the Assumption of Mary.

Pius IX’s dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception, meanwhile, stands as a beacon at its start.
⁶⁵
This was the question of whether Mary, due to her special position as mother of the Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ, had been preserved from the stain of original sin, with which every other person is tarnished from the moment of conception.

For a long time, this issue was the subject of a controversial debate within the Church. In the thirteenth century, the Dominicans spoke out against the
Immaculata Conceptio
of Mary, as there was neither written evidence for it nor any clear proof to be won from Church tradition. But by the nineteenth century there was really no need for dogmatization: the question was no longer being debated. Most people believed in the
Immaculata Conceptio
and, until this point, the Church had only resorted to dogmatization in order to defend a fundamental religious truth from attack. This was how the great dogmas had come into being, which formed the core of the Catholic creed. The Immaculate Conception, on the other hand, was something new—a “devotional” dogma.

Pius IX was adamant about instituting this dogma. It had been sparked by his expulsion from Rome, following the Revolution of
1848–1849. And in exile in Gaeta, the pope set the doctrinal wheels in motion—seemingly in the genuine hope that the Mother of God would intervene in world history and help him win back his Papal States.