The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (35 page)

Second: charges should be brought against Abbess Maria Veronica for continual perjury and as an accomplice or at least a confidant in all the above-mentioned offenses.

Third: charges should be brought against Agnese Firrao’s old companions, Sisters Maria Gertrude, Maria Caterina, and Maria Colomba, all now around seventy. They had “promoted her condemned holiness, immoral precepts and practices” as well as Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness.

Fourth: the other nuns who had spoken for the holiness of Firrao and Maria Luisa should be considered “accomplices,” although “some of them have revealed themselves to be more fanatical and obstinate than others.” However, Sallua conceded that a number of the younger nuns and novices were “more led astray than spoiled, and actually had no ill intentions.” The verger Maria Maddalena; the novice mistress’s bedfellow Maria Giacinta; Maria Luisa’s accomplice Maria Ignazia; the secretary and scribe of the heavenly letters Maria Francesca; the “poison expert” Agnese Celeste; the second nurse Giuseppa Maria; and Sister Maria Gesualda had all come to realize the scale of the “evil and the deceptions” over the course of their hearings, “and felt honest regret.” They had won Sallua’s respect with their brutal honesty and openness before the tribunal, and had obviously mollified him. And because of this, they had felt the wrath of the other, more stubborn nuns of Sant’Ambrogio. “They confided in us, saying they found themselves in constant danger.” No charges should therefore be brought against them. But if the situation was not thoroughly redressed, Sallua argued, then Sant’Ambrogio would continue to operate just as it had done for the past fifty years.

On February 27, 1861, the congregation of cardinals met without the pope, and discussed the results of the informative process in detail, on the basis of the printed
Relazione
. The cardinals largely followed Sallua’s suggestions. More specifically, they decided to bring charges against Abbess Maria Veronica, and to move her from Sant’Ambrogio to the convent of Santa Maria del Rifugio. The two confessors would also be charged, though at first neither of them should be suspended from their priestly offices. The Jesuit general should ensure that Peters and Leziroli couldn’t communicate with each other, either in writing or verbally through middlemen. Beckx was also instructed to hand over every piece of writing that could possibly have a bearing on the Sant’Ambrogio case. The defendants were to be interrogated by the assessor, Raffaele Monaco La Valletta, together with the investigating judge, Sallua, and the fiscal, Antonio Bambozzi, supported by a substitute from the Holy Office’s Chancellery.
⁶⁴
Bambozzi’s involvement came as a surprise: he had been fiscal from May 1841 until July 1851, before moving to the Secretariat of State and being replaced as fiscal by Giuseppe Primavera. The pope redeployed Bambozzi as fiscal specifically for the Sant’Ambrogio case.
⁶⁵

The pope’s initial reservations about the validity of Katharina’s
Denunzia
were set aside by Sallua’s compelling body of evidence. The pope approved the decisions made by the congregation of cardinals the same day, adding that both confessors should have their right to take confession suspended with immediate effect. In a private audience with the assessor, Pius IX made him responsible for sending all the postulants and simple novices, who had not yet professed their vows, away from Sant’Ambrogio immediately. The pope formally gave the assessor, fiscal, and investigating judge the necessary authority to interrogate the defendants and conduct the rest of the trial.
⁶⁶

Sallua at once set out his suggestions for how the interrogations should be organized. The cardinals gave their unanimous agreement to them a week later, on March 6, 1861.
⁶⁷
The course was set for the second phase of the Inquisition trial in the case of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. The deciding authority, the tribunal’s upper section, tasked the investigating authority with carrying out an offensive process, which would concentrate on the interrogation of the four principal defendants.

CHAPTER SIX

The Offensive Process and the Interrogation of the Madre Vicaria

“I ALWAYS WANTED TO BECOME A NUN”

Unlike the other three main defendants—the two confessors and the abbess—Sant’Ambrogio’s vicaress and novice mistress, Sister Maria Luisa of Saint Francis Xavier, had been a suspect ever since the preliminary investigation. She was therefore removed from the convent on December 7, 1859, on the pope’s orders, and transferred to the convent of Purificazione, near Santa Maria Maggiore.
¹

After Maria Luisa had spent more than three months there without hearing any news of the case, she became restless, and asked for a hearing before the Inquisition of her own accord. “Even after repeated examination of her conscience,” she said, she had been able to find no reason for her “transfer.” After consulting her confessor, she asked to make a “voluntary” appearance before the Holy Tribunal. And on March 20 and 26, 1860, Sallua gave her the chance to put forward her side of the story.
²

The daughter of Domenico Ridolfi and Teresa Cioli, Maria Ridolfi had been born in 1832, in the parish of San Quirico in Rome.
³
The parish is in the Rione Monti, which, in the mid-nineteenth century, had a good twenty thousand inhabitants. Monti was one of Rome’s poorest districts, and was home to a lot of the city’s day-laborers,
winegrowers, and market gardeners. Maria’s father was a
ciambellaro
, selling pastries, which put him firmly in Rome’s underclass.
⁴
As a child, Maria attended the Franciscan school, where she was taught the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. She spent only a few years in school, however, as her mother died young, leaving Maria to take over the management of her father’s household. Her two sisters, one older and one younger than herself, remained single, and in 1860 were still living in their father’s house.

Maria soon tired of housework. “When I was about six years old, I took the
vow of chastity
, following an inspiration, and on the advice of a good old lady who has since died. Before I took this vow, on several occasions the above-mentioned old lady had taken me to see her father confessor in a church near Monte Cavallo, which can be reached via two staircases.” This was the church of San Silvestro di Monte Cavallo, which today is called San Silvestro al Quirinale. The confessor there, whose name Maria Luisa couldn’t remember, had advised her to take this step. “I took the eternal
vow of chastity
in that church on the Feast of the Madonna,
⁵
under the guidance of the above-mentioned old lady, Francesca Palazzi.” Maria took her first Communion at the age of nine or ten, in San Quirico’s parish church. After this, she developed a desire to do more than just live as a virgin dedicated to God “in the world.” She wanted to enter a convent and become a nun. However, her confessor advised her to think very carefully about this decision.

When she was eleven or twelve, Maria made the acquaintance of Maddalena Salvati, the wife of Giacomo Salvati, who lived on the Campo Corleo. Giacomo worked closely with Vincenzo Pallotti (who was later canonized), and had founded a house for vulnerable young girls. The Pia Casa di Carità was housed in the building in Borgo Sant’Agata where Agnese Firrao’s reformed Franciscans of the Third Order had originally been accommodated.
⁶
From her conversations with the Salvatis, it soon became apparent to Maria that the Ridolfis could never afford to place her in a convent. In order to be accepted into a nunnery in Rome at that time, an applicant had to provide evidence that she could contribute a dowry of at least 300–500 scudi. This sum was equivalent to the entire annual budget of a middle-class family in Rome. And as the Ridolfis had to get by on 70–100 Scudi a year, it would have been completely impossible for them to raise this
amount. Maria’s only hope was to find an upper-class or aristocratic patron to finance her dowry. Her last resort was the archconfraternity of Santissimo Rosario, which offered the annual prize of a dowry for a Roman girl from the lower classes.
⁷
Maria Ridolfi seems to have been successful in this. Having secured the money, all that remained was to find a suitable convent for her in Rome.

Maria then revealed her intentions to her family, who strongly opposed her decision to enter a convent. But with the help of her confessor, Monsignore Pastacaldi,
⁸
and Maddalena Salvati, whose apartment became Maria’s second home, she finally obtained her father’s permission. Maddalena Salvati introduced Maria to several convents, but they all rejected her for being too young. Finally, Mrs. Salvati took Maria Luisa to the convent of Sant’Ambrogio, where she was at least permitted to remain for a day. After pleading with the abbess, she was granted a second day there. This time, she spent most of the day locked in a room. It was only toward evening, when she wanted to leave, that the abbess told her she would have to prove herself. “Then she said that I should wait another year; but after a little while, she wrote to say I could spend that year in the convent. This was how I entered the convent, on April 21, at the age of 13.” The year was 1845, and on June 22, 1846, Maria was duly clothed as a novice. After a year in the novitiate, she professed her vows, and took the religious name Maria Luisa.

The unrest in the city during the period of the Roman Republic (1848–1849) meant that the nuns had to leave Sant’Ambrogio and take refuge in the convent of Santi Quattro Coronati,
⁹
where they remained for almost a year.

THE STORY OF AN INNOCENT LAMB

Maria Luisa made use of the four months between early December 1859 and the end of March 1860, while she was being held in the convent of Purificazione, to figure out her defense strategy. On March 20, she submitted an eighty-eight-page report to Sallua, set down in her own hand at the suggestion of her confessor.
¹⁰

The mantra that ran through Maria Luisa’s text was that, even after the most thorough examination of her conscience, she could find “no reason” for her removal from Sant’Ambrogio. However, she was evidently well aware of why she had been locked up, and of the fact that the Princess von Hohenzollern had made accusations against her. She therefore painted a picture of Katharina as a high-strung German noblewoman who had been ill at ease and required special care throughout her time in the convent.

First, Maria Luisa broached the subject of the scene in the choir, which the princess herself and various other witnesses had already described. Maria Luisa said that on December 8, 1858, Katharina had knelt before her with the belt of her habit around her neck. (This was confirmation that the “cord” really was the belt that held together the habit of the Franciscan order.) Maria Luisa knew that several of her fellow nuns had witnessed this incident, so she brought it up of her own accord. However, her account of what she and the princess had argued about was completely different from the testimonies of Katharina and the other nuns. Maria Luisa’s story made no mention of the Americano’s obscene letter as the catalyst for this scene. She claimed Katharina tried to “convert” her in a way that was totally incomprehensible to her. She really hadn’t understood what the princess wanted from her. A few days later, Katharina had suffered a stroke or a syncopation of the brain—only, she claimed she was being poisoned. But this had simply been a product of her own fevered imagination.
Maria Luisa said she herself had never visited the princess’s bedside during her illness, so there was no way she could have mixed anything into her food or drink. And if anyone claimed to have seen her there, they were either mistaken or they had seen the devil in her form.