The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (33 page)
Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
As Maria Ignazia pointed out, Maria Luisa had resorted to her usual defense: it wasn’t me, it was the devil. This claim wasn’t entirely implausible to her fellow nuns. They had, after all, learned from their refectory readings that the devil had also tried to shame Saint Veronica Giuliani by taking on her shape. The Capuchin nun from the convent of Città di Castello near Perugia died in 1727, and was finally raised to the altars in 1839, following much debate within the Church. The passage in the life of Saint Veronica to which Maria Luisa was referring furnished her with the perfect precedent:
The devil, despairing of being able to subdue her, conceived the idea of blackening her reputation, and of making her appear a sacrilegious hypocrite, by the following stratagem. He frequently assumed her form, and contrived to be caught in the act of eating greedily and surreptitiously, at improper hours, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the refectory, and sometimes in the dispensary. The nuns were extremely scandalized at this, especially when they once or twice saw Veronica go to Holy Communion after they had witnessed one of these unlawful repasts. But it pleased God
to undertake the defense of His servant, by causing the infernal plot to be discovered. One morning, about the time of Holy Communion, some of them found the supposed Veronica engaged in eating, and accordingly ran to the choir to inform the abbess, but there they found their holy sister rapt in prayer.… It may be easily conceived how the malice of her infernal enemy increased when he found himself so utterly scorned by Veronica, and when he beheld her at the same time so closely united to her divine Spouse. There was no art to which he did not resort for the purpose of making her unfaithful. He would present to her the most dreadful images of guilt, and in company with other fiends under the forms of wicked young men, he would enact scenes, the very thought of which is abhorrent to nature.
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Like Veronica Giuliani’s fellow nuns, Maria Ignazia had also been taken in by the devil, and on his orders had tried several times to kill Katharina. She was now left alone with her questions and her guilt: the madre vicaria knew no pity, and had condemned her to absolute silence. But there came a point where it was no longer possible to avoid a conversation between Maria Ignazia and Padre Peters, who had become unsettled by the poisonings. The novice mistress gave her precise instructions for this:
When the princess was returning to health, the mistress called me to her and said to me: “you will be called by Padre Peters. Think about the promise you made me not to say a word about the medicine and the poison for the princess. Say only that I came into her cell now and then to give her courage, and that you and Maria Felice saw me one night at the princess’s bed, but you felt a certain dread. Say that the princess behaved strangely, and I reassured her that I had been in bed that night and had not been to her room, and that Maria Giacinta threw me out of the cell in contempt.”
I went to Padre Peters and he questioned me about the medicine and the poisoned remedies that were given to the princess. I answered that there was no truth in this and, just as I had promised the mistress, disagreed with everything he said. I denied every point, though he asked me the most detailed questions.
Peters told me he was questioning me in order to find out what
lay behind this business. He did not think the mistress capable of such a thing, and he mentioned that she had foreseen it all a long time ago. Furthermore, the princess was supposed to die as a punishment from God, but the devil had interfered to make it look like murder.
He told me about the alum they had found in the bottle of soup. When I asked him how the devil had brought this about, he replied that the devil was truly able do such things, and had mixed it into the soup so that something would be found in it.
Before I went to Peters, the mistress gave me the same explanation, word for word: she said the Lord wanted to punish Luisa Maria and that the devil had interfered to place the blame on the mistress’s shoulders.
I spoke to Padre Leziroli about these matters, and he said: “In truth everything that has happened to the princess was the work of the devil; we have carried out the necessary tests and we are sure that it was the devil’s art, and that the mistress Maria Luisa neither thought nor said such things, and did not carry out these deeds.”
I replied: “So was I speaking to the devil?”
And he:
“Certainly. It was most certainly the devil who caused you these troubles.”
During spiritual exercises, this same Padre Leziroli preached in front of the entire community that the worries that some—in fact almost all—the nuns had experienced with regard to the princess, whom all the sisters knew, had been a deception by the devil. He could assume the shape of other people, and had poisoned the soup and the medicine. He did all this to disrupt the peace of the community. But we should remain calm, as none of us had done any of the things we saw. The princess was present at this sermon.
I know that in the end Leziroli also tried to convince the princess of this deception by the devil. He said she should not judge the mistress so harshly and should not hate her—for if she did, she could not remain in the house of God. Leziroli concluded the above sermon by saying he had firm evidence of the mistress’s innocence.
Maria Ignazia’s testimony was corroborated by several other nuns and the abbess.
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Even after Katharina had left, the nuns were repeatedly told that all the poisoning attempts had been the work of the devil.
Maria Francesca had to write another letter for Maria Luisa, this time using the name and handwriting of Maria Felice, who had just died. This letter said that the princess had been a “strange woman” who “carried on with the devil” and falsely believed somebody was trying to poison her. The dead nun complained about having to nurse this peculiar woman during her illness. Maria Stanislaa confirmed that the novice mistress had tasked Maria Francesca with writing out this letter.
In the fall of 1859, when the Apostolic Visitation that the pope had requested was already under way, the confessors instructed the nuns to treat the statement “The devil assumed the shape of Maria Luisa to poison Katharina” like an article of the creed. Any dissenting nuns were pressured and persecuted. Maria Giuseppa was treated particularly harshly for her stubborn refusal to comply with this. When she insisted in the confessional that Maria Luisa was responsible for the poison attacks against Katharina, Leziroli forced her to make a formal retraction. She had to swear to Maria Luisa’s “holiness and extraordinary gifts” before Leziroli, with her hand on the gospels, and reject her suspicions as a “great sin.” “He said I had to speak his phrase about Maria Luisa’s holiness, if I wanted to save my soul,” Maria Giuseppa recalled.
Maria Luisa also followed this pastoral strategy, in her own way. Notes suddenly started appearing and being passed around the convent, supposedly originating from the Americano. According to Maria Ignazia, these explained “how the demons took on the shape of the mistress and other sisters, to poison the princess.”
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The Americano addressed the notes defending “the mistress’s innocence” to Padre Peters. “She read one out to me, to convince me of her innocence in the poisoning affair. Before the mistress was taken away, she told me I should defend her innocence, just as she would defend mine when I was taken away. Now I know why she said this. She was afraid because of what she had done.”
MORE MURDERS
By “what Maria Luisa had done,” Maria Ignazia didn’t just mean her attempted murder of Katharina von Hohenzollern. The madre vicaria had also made several attempts to kill other nuns.
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First, there was the case of Maria Giacinta, which must have played out in the first half of 1859. Luigi Franceschetti’s sister had observed Maria Luisa grinding glass and mixing it into the princess’s food. She was also well informed about other “deceits” involved in Katharine’s poisoning. She spoke to the abbess, Padre Peters, and other nuns about these, and finally confronted Maria Luisa herself with her knowledge: “Yes, I saw it, I saw it.”
Maria Luisa started to feel threatened by what Maria Giacinta knew, and decided she had to get rid of her. At once, she gave Maria Francesca instructions to write several letters to Padre Peters in the name of her guardian angel and the Virgin. The Virgin spoke about her former “favorite little daughter” Maria Giacinta, who had been “destined for something great, alongside her mistress.” But now she was just another “haughty” and “proud” nun, whom the confessor and abbess had to “humble.” Finally, the Virgin announced, “Maria Giacinta will die of her illness; her life will be shortened by many years because she has fallen from the elevated step of glory beside her mistress.”
As a result, the confessor placed Maria Giacinta under pressure. She was utterly bewildered and feared for her life, thinking she was about to be poisoned. Giuseppe Maria confirmed this suspicion. Maria Giacinta was then struck down by a severe inflammation of the intestines and ulceration of the throat, from an overdose of opium or something similar. The illness exhausted her, and she was on her deathbed. Franceschetti corroborated the testimonies of Maria Francesca and Giuseppa Maria: two pills of opium, given to his sister by Maria Luisa, had brought her close to death. She would have died, had the convent doctor not given her an antidote at the last minute. The medical man had said this quantity of opium was enough to kill a horse.
This, along with other evidence and witness interviews, gave the Inquisition enough information to prove that in the days after Maria Giacinta was poisoned with opium, the madre vicaria tried to give her an even larger dose of another poison to finish her off. This was probably
vinum colchici seminis
, made from the flowers of the autumn crocus. It was usually used in small doses to treat gout, but in larger quantities it was a deadly poison. Maria Luisa had also announced this murder in a letter from the Madonna to Padre Peters, which foretold the death of a nun as a punishment from God. It even pinpointed the exact timing and the circumstances of the death. However, Maria
Giacinta realized what was afoot and stubbornly refused to take the liquid.
When nothing came of this divine prophecy, Maria Luisa put aside the first letter from the Virgin and wrote another, in which Mary now proclaimed that her firstborn daughter Maria Luisa’s prayers, penance, and services had worked, and Maria Giacinta didn’t have to die after all.
The same good fortune was not granted to the novice Maria Agostina, whose tragic story played out in October 1858. The young nun was starting to get a reputation for having visions and ecstasies. The mother founder, in particular, had appeared to her several times. A number of the other nuns had started to follow the new visionary and believe her prophecies. Maria Luisa was consumed with envy, and devoted all her efforts to unmasking Maria Agostina’s ecstasies as “duplicitous pretenses.” First, in her capacity as novice mistress, she made Maria Agostina “unburden her conscience to her as to a father confessor,” giving her a biographical confession. The novice mistress then told the other sisters about all the weaknesses and miseries in this young woman’s life. She spoke widely and at length about the “shameless relationship” Maria Agostina had conducted in Ferrara with her confessor, the Jesuit Vincenzo Stocchi.
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Maria Luisa forced the young novice to retract her visions in public—not just in the novitiate, but also in the choir, in front of the whole community of Sant’Ambrogio. But this ritual humiliation still wasn’t enough for her. Claiming she was making a zealous attempt to set this lost soul back on the right path, she placed Agostina under massive psychological pressure. She was evidently trying to drive her to madness, and ultimately to death.
In her hearing, Maria Giuseppa recalled that “last summer, the late Sister Maria Agostina … fell ill. She was young, robust and in good health. But it seemed that her illness had an unnatural cause, and I later began to suspect that something had been mixed into her food. This sister had a constant fever, and she pined away.… The sick are usually given Holy Communion every eight days, but I remember that she was not given it for quite some time. Around last October, she was taken ill with a severe fever, and they said it brought on a stroke. She was 21 or 22 years old. The stroke left her dazed, and she stuttered. Ulcers built up in her mouth and throat. She wasted away to a skeleton in just a few days, and finally died.”
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Several witnesses confirmed in their statements that the novice
mistress had a crazed notion that Maria Agostina was out to get her. They expressed their unanimous conviction that Maria Luisa had poisoned her. The vicaress hated Agostina so much that she had forbidden Maria Ignazia, the mortally ill woman’s biological sister, from visiting her in the infirmary. Maria Ignazia’s testimony shows how obedient she was to Maria Luisa: this was the reason the latter had recruited her as an accomplice.
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I never visited my sister, as I knew this would not have pleased the mistress. But in the end, the father confessor and the mistress went to my sister. She made her confession and took Holy Communion. Then I visited her too, but she was close to death, and I do not think that she recognized me.
The reason the mistress brought Padre Peters in to take my sister’s confession, was to free her from the demons. The mistress told me that Peters laid a stole on her head and she resisted strongly. Padre Peters drove out her seven demons, and the mistress told me she saw them. After this, my sister lived another eight days, but she was no longer sensible.
Giuseppa Maria was convinced that Maria Luisa had made the sick woman “take a powder orally. This led to inflammation of the chest, made everything appear yellow, caused ulcers in her throat and left her completely dazed.”
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The second nurse was absolutely certain of her facts: she had taken the same powder as a medicine, and had observed the exact same symptoms in herself as in Maria Agostina, with whom she had spoken several times as she was nursing her. In her hearing, she stated:
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