The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (27 page)
Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
Giuseppa Maria tried to voice her suspicions to Padre Leziroli in confession. But he firmly rebuffed her concerns, telling her this was the devil at work again, taking the shape of the novice mistress. Over Christmas 1858, Giuseppa Maria then spoke directly to Padre Peters during confession about the smell of tobacco on Maria Luisa:
He admitted that Maria Luisa had been with him on this night and also on other occasions. And he explained to me why she smelled of tobacco. When she spoke of spiritual things, he said, she would start to sway on her chair so much that she would have fallen to the floor if he had not used his arms to hold her upright. And that was why I had smelled the stench of tobacco when I approached her, as this had happened several times. He said: “You don’t understand these things, but I, who have studied, know how holy Maria Luisa is from her high talk of paradise.”
The relationship between the confessor and the madre vicaria had obviously gone so far that Peters was neglecting his duty to provide spiritual support to the dying. And this, after all, was the official reason
he was allowed to spend the night in the enclosure. But the novices guessed what was really going on behind the closed door of their mistress’s cell. She no longer had any time for her novices, and only had eyes for the Jesuit padre. During her hearing on May 7, 1860, Maria Fortunata stated:
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A few times we novices complained to each other that we never got to see the mistress, because she was always talking to Padre Peters. They kept shutting themselves away in the parlatory, but I don’t know what they were doing in there—though I did see the mistress come out afterwards
quite red
, and sometimes she couldn’t even open her eyes. Once, when I said to her: “My mistress, how red you are!” she answered: “Never say such things to me again, or I will give you a hard penance!”
Maria Luisa would beautify herself in preparation for the meetings with her confessor. In the transcript of Sister Maria Fortunata’s hearing of May 14, 1860, the novice says:
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“As a moral obligation I have to say that, when Maria Luisa was lying in bed, she sometimes said to me: ‘Wash me well, for the padre is coming.’ ” She was always in a state of great excitement before meeting the Jesuit. Finally, on May 23, 1860, the abbess was asked whether the confessor’s illicit sojourn in the enclosure was connected to the novice mistress’s “supernatural pain.” She had to admit that she had placed blind faith in Maria Luisa and Padre Peters. After all, these meetings had been foretold in letters from the Mother of God.
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A ritual had developed for the confessor’s intimate encounters with the novice mistress. The Virgin would write a letter, announcing some fresh mystical struggle or supernatural suffering for her favorite daughter, and saying it was therefore absolutely necessary for her confessor to watch over her day and night. The letter setting out the date and place of this meeting would materialize in the locked casket. Having read it, the Jesuit would then write back to the Madonna, saying he was always ready to provide spiritual support. Then Maria Luisa would get one of her “truly unearthly” headaches, which always heralded the ecstasies and battles with demons that were to follow. The confessor was sent for immediately, and was allowed to enter the enclosure.
Taken together, the nuns’ witness statements suggested a new, double offense to Sallua: on the one hand, the intimacies between Peters and Maria Luisa looked like a case of
Sollicitatio
. This charge applied to Peters: if he had seduced his penitent into committing a terrible sin against the sixth commandment before, during, or after confession, or under the guise of pastoral care, he was guilty of a criminal abuse of authority. On the other hand, the beautiful young nun had seduced the confessor and carried out sexual acts with him. She gave the whole thing the “false appearance of the enactment of divine love” by pretending to act “on God’s commands.”
During these hearings, the Dominican had also stumbled across a scandalous rumor. This was that Peters had given a “life confession” before the Virgin Mary,
vulgo
Maria Luisa, telling her of an affair with a woman named Alessandra. The
Fama
claimed that she had instructed the beautiful novice mistress to bestow upon him “special blessings” following this revelation. He would have divine experiences with Maria Luisa, which would be completely different from the “sinful indecencies” that he had committed with this Alessandra. Would Sallua be able to pin this rumor down, or would it dissolve into air? Only the interrogation of Maria Luisa and Padre Peters could provide an answer to this.
LESBIAN INTIMACIES IN A CONVENT CELL
There was one more allegation to be addressed here: the homosexual acts that Maria Luisa had performed with various partners.
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Agnese Eletta’s statement during the pretrial investigations had already given Sallua significant grounds for suspicion. And numerous witnesses had corroborated her story: when Maria Luisa had grown tired of her bedfellow, she used a vision to get this woman, who knew her most intimate secrets, shut away in San Pasquale.
The real reason Maria Luisa ditched Agnese Eletta, who was thirty-nine at the time, was her new favorite among the novices: Maria Giacinta. At thirty-three, she was six years younger than Agnese Eletta. And like the older nun, Maria Giacinta found herself unable to give a verbal testimony before the Inquisition, due to “the total disgust”
she felt at what she had done. Instead, at her hearing with Sallua on March 24, 1860, she submitted a detailed text, which was read out word for word during the hearing, and which she then signed.
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The Mother Mistress showed me singular affection from the beginning. She embraced me after I received my habit, she kissed me passionately and called me “my daughter, my heart, my soul, my love,” and she told me that Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin had a fondness for me, and had instructed her to prefer me in her love. She said the Virgin told her she had great responsibility for my spirit and my body.
When Sister Agnese Eletta had gone—I don’t remember exactly when—the Mother Mistress moved me into her cell. After retiring in the evening, we would engage in spiritual conversation; one evening, as I was kneeling by her bed and she was already lying in bed, she asked me to lay my face on her breast, and she showed me how hard her heart was beating, and then she asked me to suck her nipples; this happened every evening, and she always expressed her affection for me. Finally she told me that, although it did not seem so, she was actually fleshless; I might therefore touch her on various parts of her body, and I remember that I also touched her on the shameful parts.
The following night she did not go to bed first, but told me to do as she said and lie down, and on this particular evening she left the lamp burning, as she wanted to look at my whole body, every part of it. She took a medal and made the sign of the cross on my sexual organs. This happened two or three times.
Over those three, four or five months (though I don’t remember exactly how much time passed before I professed my vows), she also kissed and embraced me very frequently during the day.
The unchaste acts were committed through touching with our hands, bodies, and two or three times also using my tongue. She was the most keen on touching our bodies together, which she called “giving,” and she asked me to lie in a certain position, with my legs raised, while she “entwined” herself with me, as she called it. She then made movements and a sound such as I cannot express in words, and she instructed me to position myself so that I could receive her bodily fluids into me. Or sometimes she wanted
me positioned above her, so that we were body to body and mouth to mouth. She said that this bodily fluid had been given to her by God, to heal the sicknesses of these body parts; sometimes, after the act was completed, she wanted me to make the sign of the cross on my body with a damp finger, and when I used my tongue, she also wanted me to suck, because in this way I would be healed. For a few days these acts took place every evening, and lasted for one to two hours in my bed. After this they happened less frequently.
When I suffered from an ailment of the sexual organs that meant I had to apply a poultice, she wanted to do this herself.
One evening, or on the evening immediately before I professed my vows, she came to my bed for the usual acts, and told me that this would be the last time, that it was all over and I was now healed: the final thing she wanted to do was to shave the hair from these parts of my body.
Still, she kept wanting to touch me even after I had taken my vows, and she also wanted me to touch her with my hands, although there were only a few occasions when she demanded all the other acts of love and intimacy. After I had professed my vows, I remarked that although I was now recovered, I still did not feel well, so she resumed her treatment. In answer, she said many things that I now don’t remember, except that some part of the sickness still remained.
In the inquisitor’s eyes, the exchange of vaginal fluid, the intense passion, and the reference to a “completed act” all amounted to female sodomy. Maria Giacinta also spoke of her pangs of conscience. She found herself faced with an almost impossible dilemma: she was very well aware of the depravity of these sexual acts, but the heavenly voices kept demanding she do things that were forbidden. She wrote:
I did not even want to submit to the very first caresses, because I held them to be a sin, and all the while I repeated to Maria Luisa that these were sinful deeds, and I wanted to confess them. I did not want to carry on living this way. But she did all she could to convince me that I must not say anything to the padre: she said it was not a sin if I did not feel anything and remained like a block of wood. The Lord had given my body over to her, especially that part
of it, to cure it of all sensual feeling. She frequently forced me to relent out of obedience to her, and when I then replied that obedience could not force me to sin, she said that something God had commanded could be no sin.
Several times I fended her off, saying: “You are not the Mother Mistress, but a demon who has taken on the shape of the Mother Mistress.”
“No,” she said, “it is really me.”
To make certain of this, I said to her: “Then kiss the crucifix.”
And she kissed it.
She wore a cross that was said to have miraculous powers, so she probably thought that if she came to me wearing this crucifix I would be happier that it was not the demon, but herself in person.
The crucifix test was evidence enough for Maria Giacinta that she really was in bed with the beautiful madre vicaria herself. The cross was the surest defense against the devil and his demons, and was used in exorcisms.
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The second nurse, Giuseppa Maria, gave her a rather brutal piece of advice: during the sexual act, she should bite Maria Luisa’s face. The following morning everyone would be able to see that it was the novice mistress, and not the devil in her shape, who had done those dreadful things in bed with her. But Maria Giacinta didn’t follow this advice.
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She did, however, have an urgent need to speak to a priest and unburden her conscience. The path she should have taken to the father confessors was barred to her, as Maria Luisa had forbidden her from speaking to them. But she did eventually have a conversation with Peters, who then seems to have broken the seal of the confessional. “Several times it happened that after I had confessed, the Mother Mistress came to me and repeated something that I had said in confession. Once she even said: ‘The father confessor …’ but then she started over, adding, ‘No, another person told me that you confessed so and so.’ I have every reason to believe that the Mother Mistress came eavesdropping while we were confessing, as I used to find the little window to the parlatory open (where Padre Peters heard confession), though I was always certain I had shut it as I went in.”
But as a novice, she was still dependent on her mistress, and the confessors were no help to her, either. In fact, they took Maria Luisa’s
stories about the devil at face value. Maria Giacinta’s frustration mounted when she was transferred to the infirmary, and was no longer sleeping in the novitiate, under the novice mistress’s direct guardianship. When Maria Luisa tried to visit her sickbed, she screamed: “Go away, you evil witch, you idiot, you ass!” At least, on February 22, 1860, Maria Francesca stated under oath that she had heard her use these expressions.
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And Maria Giacinta wasn’t the only nun with whom Maria Luisa exchanged intimacies. Almost all the novices testified that the novice mistress had kissed, embraced, and caressed them. “At the start of my novitiate, the mistress came to me several times and embraced and kissed me,” said Agnese Celeste.”
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Maria Giacinta clearly set an example, as Maria Fortunata related. When Giacinta “impetuously” ran to the madre vicaria, kissed her, and laid her head on her breast, Fortunata and the rest of the novices did likewise.
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Several novices also spoke of a kind of lesbian initiation rite in Sant’Ambrogio, which had come into being under the aegis of the novice mistress Maria Luisa. The night before they were clothed as nuns, each novice had to share a bed with the novice mistress. They lay face-to-face and breast-to-breast, often in a fierce embrace. If several novices were professing their vows at the same time, they all slept together in Maria Luisa’s cell. “It became a permanent bordello.”
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The novices, dressed only in their nightshirts, would dance around the cell holding hands. After a night spent in this manner, rather than—as the Rule dictated—in prayer, the novices would be led into church by their mistress for their ceremonial profession of vows.
The inquisitor had little to add to the witnesses’ statements in his summary report for the cardinals. The lesbian acts committed “under the guise of special virtue” turned out to be yet another consequence of Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness.