The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (3 page)

The trauma of the 1848 Revolution shaped his pontificate from then on. All reforms were rescinded; policy in the Papal States, and the Church’s magisterium, became distinctly reactionary. Like his predecessor, Gregory XVI, the pope felt persecuted and threatened from all sides. He developed an almost apocalyptic fear of the Papal States’ occupation by Italian nationalist troops. Only foreign troops could secure Pius IX’s temporal power in the Papal States against the
Risorgimento
, the national unification movement that saw Rome as the natural capital of a new Italian nation-state.

This siege mentality extended to the religious sphere.
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At the start of Pius IX’s pontificate, he had listened to liberal cardinals and prelates as well as hard-liners and intransigents, but now the balance shifted toward the latter. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Rome had been a city of religious pluralism. The various factions and theological movements that existed in Germany and France, for example, were reflected in the offices and congregations of the Roman Curia. Some members of the Curia sought reconciliation between Church and world, modern philosophy and Catholic faith; others were Romantics and new scholastics, who saw the only conceivable basis for Catholicism in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The Jesuit order and the Collegio Romano, whose faculty it dominated, increasingly became a stronghold for hyper-orthodoxy and Rome’s new scholastics, while the Benedictine abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls prescribed a more open, pluralistic model of piety and theology, incorporating newer philosophical approaches.

From 1848, the pope increasingly came down on the side of the conservatives, ordering the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index to pursue any divergent theological opinions. Numerous modern theologians found themselves on the
Index of Forbidden Books
. During the time of Pius IX, the
Index
went from being a means of controlling the book market to a means of disciplining independent thinkers within the Church.

Different theological and political orientations within the Church corresponded to quite different religious practices and mentalities. The reactionary, Romantic faction sought to restore Baroque Catholicism’s
exalted forms of devotion. They rediscovered mysticism, which had been discredited during the Enlightenment, and looked for miracles at every turn. The liberal elements of the Curia preferred a more sober piety: a faith that could endure the demands of the modern age of reason. Here, too, Pius IX’s preferences were very clear: the pope firmly believed that heavenly powers could intervene in the here and now. As a child, he had fallen into a raging river, and he attributed his rescue directly to a helping hand from the Mother of God.
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This was the environment that Katharina von Hohenzollern entered when she finally decided to move to Rome in 1857. At this point, the city of Rome was small and manageable. When Gregorovius, the city’s chronicler, arrived at the Tiber for the first time in 1852, he noted in his diary: “Rome is so entirely silent that one can live in heavenly tranquility and think and work.”
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Gregorovius’s impression is unsurprising, given that the city had just 180,000 inhabitants.
¹⁰
Of these, around 7,500 were priests and nuns. There was no compulsory education, though the elementary schools ensured that roughly a third of the population could read and write. Of the five and a half square miles of the city that lay within its fourteen miles of ancient walls, a good third was built up. The remaining land was given over to farming—the Forum Romanum was used to pasture cattle. There were 14,700 buildings, housing 39,000 families who belonged to fifty-four different parishes. Gas lamps weren’t installed on the streets until 1854, and there was no railway. The nineteenth century’s industrialization and subsequent economic boom had touched neither the Eternal City nor the sixteen thousand square miles and 3.2 million inhabitants of the Papal States.

The disparity in income was immense. A high prelate in the Curia earned just under 2,000 scudi per year, while a middle-class family of six needed around 650 scudi, and a farming family of the same size survived on 250 scudi. An agricultural laborer earned 72 scudi a year, and a shepherd boy received 32 scudi.

A ROAD-TO-DAMASCUS EXPERIENCE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Katharina’s first encounter with Rome, in the year 1834, represented a crucial turning point in her life.
¹¹
She had been born in Stuttgart
on January 19, 1817, to Prince Karl Albrecht III zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, and his second wife, Leopoldine zu Fürstenberg. Her parents had her baptized into the Catholic faith.
¹²
They separated a few years after her birth, her father withdrawing to live on his Hohenlohe estates, and the princess spent most of her childhood in Donaueschingen, with her mother and her Fürstenberg relatives. Her strictly orthodox biographers speak with deep regret about a very liberal upbringing in Baden, lamenting that she had no “real religious guidance” throughout her childhood and youth.
¹³

When the seventeen-year-old Katharina traveled to Rome with her mother in 1834, she had a road-to-Damascus experience. In the pope’s city, Katharina embraced the Catholic faith in its strictest form, and the liberal young girl became a pious Catholic noblewoman. The transformation was due in no small part to Karl August, Count von Reisach.
¹⁴
Reisach, born on July 6, 1800, was a member of the Swabian-Franconian nobility, like Katharina von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst. He had had a difficult start in life. His father, who was constantly on the brink of financial catastrophe, had been accused of misappropriation of funds, and had relieved himself of his responsibilities by committing suicide in 1820. This must have been a formative experience in the life of the young count. Reisach studied law, but his hopes of a professorship in Landshut were dashed, and his marriage plans also came to nothing. Reisach, searching for orientation, and a foothold in the world, then fell under the influence of two men. The first was Clemens Maria Hofbauer,
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a Redemptorist Catholic priest who had converted from Protestantism. The second was Adam Müller,
¹⁶
a professor of constitutional law in Göttingen, who advocated a Romantic, corporative model of society, with the pope at its head. Reisach decided to head for Rome, to take refuge from the uncertainties of his life. He wanted to become a priest, and went to study theology in the only place where, in his view, he would receive orthodox tuition. In October 1824, he became the first German to enter the Collegio Romano since German secularization. The college had recently been reopened by Leo XII, and later became the Pontifical Gregorian University. Reisach moved into the Collegium Germanicum, the Roman seminary for German candidates for the priesthood.
¹⁷
Under the influence of the Jesuits, Reisach developed into a zealot. Ordained in 1828, he was also awarded a doctorate in theology, and became rector of the Propaganda Fide College, part of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. He formed a particularly close and faithful relationship with its prefect, Cardinal Mauro Cappellari. The two men were united by a strictly restorative orientation, and a rejection of all reforms, which Reisach viewed as a “tightly woven conspiracy of liberal theologians and philosophers, with the aim of abolishing the Catholic Church.”
¹⁸
After Cappellari took the papal throne as Gregory XVI, Reisach became his closest ally in the struggle against Church reformers, particularly those in the southwest of Germany, Katharina’s home.

This portrait was painted in 1848, when Katharina was thirty-one. She married Prince Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen the same year. (
illustration credit 1.1
)

Katharina must have been fascinated by this young priest. Reisach immediately became her father confessor and spiritual guide, thereby gaining a decisive influence over her future. The princess not only promised to open her soul to him in the sacrament of confession, but from thenceforth to turn to him for advice and guidance in all things. An intense correspondence developed between confessor and penitent. In her youthful exuberance, Katharina was eager to follow Reisach into the battle for the Church, and expressed her desire to enter a
Dominican convent in Rome. But Reisach seems to have opposed this idea. He probably saw it as the whim of a seventeen-year-old, rather than a mature religious decision. She should do her duty as a wife and mother first—as befitted her status as a young noblewoman.
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And Katharina von Hohenlohe duly put on a wedding dress instead of a nun’s habit. Her niece, Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe,
²⁰
later wrote that Katharina had “fallen passionately in love with a Count Ingelheim, whom my grandparents would not countenance as a husband: the young man, who was otherwise very agreeable, was thought to be a consumptive. But Aunt Katharina got her way, and married him in spite of all resistance.”
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The wedding took place in 1838. Count Erwin von Ingelheim
²²
really did die young, in 1845, and the marriage remained childless. Three years later, Katharina entered the state of holy matrimony once more, though this time it seems to have been a marriage of convenience. In 1848 she married Prince Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen,
²³
who was thirty-four years her senior. His first marriage had been to Antoinette Murat, a niece of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. Prince Karl brought several stepchildren to the marriage, almost all of them older than his second wife. But this marriage didn’t last long, either. The prince contracted typhus on a journey through northern Italy, and died in Bologna on March 11, 1853. After only five years of marriage, Katharina, who was now thirty-six, had been widowed for a second time. From her husband’s family, she received an estate in Bistritz, Bohemia, as her dower residence, and a pension of 12,000 Rhenish guilders, which later rose to 15,000. There was also a lump-sum payment of 100,000 guilders. She used this to set up a fund from which she intended to finance the founding of a convent later in life.
²⁴

But first, she fulfilled her heart’s desire, the ambition she had first expressed in Rome in 1834. Katharina became a nun. On December 18, 1853, she entered the community of the
Dames du Sacré-Cœur
in Kintzheim, Alsace. In many ways, the nuns of the Sacred Heart were like the English Ladies. Their congregation was also dedicated to the education of girls, inspired by a Jesuit concept of pedagogy, and people thought of them as a kind of female equivalent of the Jesuits.
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On March 11 of the following year, Katharina was clothed as a novice. However, it soon became clear that the princess was neither physically nor mentally equal to the strains of serving in the school. She felt
overtaxed and, with her dream of cloistered life shattered, she reacted by falling ill. Medical treatments and rest cures brought her no relief. Was this reaction a typical pattern of behavior for the princess, when faced with failure? Might this not suggest she could have made up a story about poisoning a few years later in a Roman convent? This would mean she wouldn’t have to confess that, once again, she had failed as a nun and become seriously ill.

In any case, her spiritual guide, Reisach, consulted with her doctors and suggested that she withdraw immediately from the convent in Alsace. In the nineteenth century, during Germany’s “convent Spring,” many women joined religious orders and congregations in order to become teachers or nurses—jobs from which they would otherwise have been barred. But this clearly wasn’t the right path for Katharina. Reisach, who had become bishop of Eichstätt in 1836, and archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1846, thought her “not inclined to or trained for the educational profession.” In his view, this teaching order was simply unsuitable for a “sickly widow, doubly bowed by her life’s tribulations.”
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The sources don’t clarify exactly what the princess’s health problems were. In his 1912 biography of Katharina, Karl Theodor Zingeler speaks of a “dropsy”—an abnormal collection of fluid in the body—from which the corpulent princess suffered all her life.
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