The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (36 page)

Maria Luisa’s strategy boiled down to portraying the princess as confused, if not mentally ill, and therefore unfit to testify. She gave a detailed account of all kinds of “mad” things the princess had done during that period. Katharina had apparently conducted a painstaking search “for a way to give her life to save the Holy Father.” At this point, there were battles raging in Lombardy, and the possibility that Italian troops might take Rome and imprison Pius IX was much discussed.
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Maria Luisa also described “certain letters that the princess wrote and sent to the Holy Father, in the name of two peasants. These contained warnings and accusations against the pope.” She herself had received numerous “secret assignments” from Katharina—in particular, requests for various pieces of jewelry. For example, the princess asked her to have an “expensive bracelet” made. The task caused Maria Luisa some “difficulties and problems” due to the strict enclosure in Sant’Ambrogio. This was her attempt to explain how a poor daughter of Saint Francis of Assisi had come to be in contact with Roman goldsmiths—a connection arranged by the lawyer, Franceschetti. She had been trying to procure a bracelet for the princess, and not heavenly rings for herself.

Maria Luisa also complained at some length about a second nun: Agnese Eletta, her onetime bedfellow. It was her statement about lesbian practices in the convent that had really set the Inquisition trial in motion. The former vicaress characterized Agnese Eletta—who was, after all, the niece of the revered mother founder—as corruption personified, or possibly even a witch. Her description made use of nineteenth-century Church teaching on witches.
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Coming to the convent at the age of just four, Agnese Eletta had “improper and blasphemous dealings with the devil since she was first able to reason.” Several times she had spoken in detail of her contact with Satan, which lasted over thirty years. Coming to her “in the shape of a very dashing young man,” the devil had whispered the “most obscene and repulsive words and intimacies” in her ear, and had “sated all her lusts.” Her pact and her coupling with the devil had even been signed “with the blood of her monthly period.”
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With this compact, Agnese Eletta had signed her soul over to the devil for eternity. To please
him, she had defiled “holy pictures and the crucifix,” and even abused “the sacred Hosts.” According to Catholic doctrine, Christ is literally present in the Host after it has been consecrated.
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“She polluted them by putting them into her private parts, and other things.”

Maria Luisa described Agnese Eletta “as a nun without a vocation,” whose presence had been a singular “affliction” for the whole community. She herself had tried several times to release her from the devil. At first, she had some success: Agnese Eletta had made “a general confession of her whole life” to her, which was the source of all the information she was now giving to the court. After this, Agnese Eletta had been “virtuous and tractable,” and had become one of her “trusted bosom friends.” At this point, Maria Luisa wanted to have Agnese Eletta “with her at night as well.”

This was the only reference to a possible sexual relationship between the two women. In March 1860, Maria Luisa wasn’t prepared to say anything more; she had no way of knowing what Agnese Eletta had already said. In any case—according to Maria Luisa’s statement—the conversion was only temporary. Agnese Eletta soon went back to her usual “deceits and villainies with the devil,” and had even made “attempts to kill” the novice mistress. It was for this reason alone that she had been removed from Sant’Ambrogio.

Maria Luisa also provided a detailed exposé of Maria Agostina, another nun whose fate she had been responsible for. The novice mistress attributed Agostina’s inexplicable sickness and premature death at the age of twenty-one to her pride, and the hubris of the claims she made about having visions and auditions of the mother founder. As the novice mistress, she had been responsible for Maria Agostina, and had to force her to confess these false pretenses and desist from her “tricks.” But even after Agostina made her retraction in front of the community, things did not improve. This young nun, the bloom of life itself, had been carried off by Satan and destroyed. Padre Peters performed an exorcism on her, and clearly established that she was possessed by the devil. Hearing this, Agostina just murmured something barely intelligible, which Maria Luisa interpreted as: “Damned Agnese Eletta … I am finished.” In the end it was either the devil, or Agnese Eletta, possessed by the devil, who had killed Maria Agostina—in any case, it certainly hadn’t been Maria Luisa. That was the message Sallua was intended to take away from this.

The investigating judge’s commentary was unambiguous. Sallua
characterized Maria Luisa’s eighty-eight-page text as “a sham of the cleverest and most sophisticated kind,” in which the former novice mistress emphasized her own “modesty, patience, chastity, and also her extraordinary gifts from the Lord, and boast[ed] of herself as a brave soldier in the fight against the devil.” He believed the entire report from cover to cover was “counterfeit, slanderous, and twist[ed] the truth.” It was a systematic attempt to blame others for offenses that Maria Luisa had committed herself.

Sallua also regarded Maria Luisa’s personality as pathological, from a religious point of view. The four months she had spent in the convent of Purificazione had, he realized, had almost no effect on her. At the end of her report, she even claimed she had experienced supernatural phenomena during this period of monastic imprisonment. The habit of styling herself as a saint was evidently too much ingrained for her to simply lay it aside like her convent robes. She said she had been “favored by the Lord in these dark days.” He had appeared to her in her cell, “in the middle of a consecrated Host, in all His splendor,” to comfort her. But the devil, too, had come several times to torment and beat her. He had “ripped her habit to shreds, spilled the ink on the paper she was writing on, and said to her: take that, you ugly witch! Here is the man who was driven out of Sant’Ambrogio … you are damned. Oh, welcome—you are the fallen ambrosial giant, the dirty ermine. Victory! Take that, this is for you … go, go and preach … die a miserable death, take that, go to your damned brothers and tell them, and prepare yourself: it is my will that you should face a trial, which goes from earth to heaven.”

The meaning of these cryptic phrases is not immediately obvious. Saint Ambrose, for whom the convent was named, stands for erudition and the courage to stand up for the Church. The ermine, which is white in winter, is a symbol of purity and innocence on the one hand, and of royal majesty on the other. The devil is delighted with Maria Luisa’s tainted innocence; she is the fallen giant of Sant’Ambrogio. Her undeserved situation and the Inquisition’s unjust accusations against her are ultimately the work of the devil—this is Maria Luisa’s message to her judges.

By the end of April 1860, Sallua was convinced that the former vicaress and novice mistress was the main culprit for the whole affair. His submission to the Holy Office’s congregation of cardinals was
immediately successful: on May 2, 1860, the cardinals acted on his suggestion without further ado, and decreed that Maria Luisa should stand trial. With the utmost secrecy, she was transferred from the convent of Purificazione to the jail of Buon Pastore.
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Maria Luisa’s interrogation began on June 11, 1860, and lasted until November 12, 1861. The Inquisition also examined other witnesses during this period. As was the custom in all Inquisition trials, Maria Luisa had an initial opportunity to give her side of the story. In her first interrogation she was asked if she knew, or could guess, why she had been arraigned before the tribunal.
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Once again, Maria Luisa said she suspected that Agnese Eletta and Katharina von Hohenzollern might have slandered her. She also said the Jesuit padres Leziroli, Benedetti, and Paolo Mignardi
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could have played some role in having charges brought against her. “Padre Leziroli because, in his naivety, he may have gotten mixed up about the extraordinary things; Padre Benedetti, because he claimed that the late sister Maria Agostina had an extraordinary soul and was a saint; Padre Mignardi, because he said that there was a nun who ruled over Sant’Ambrogio.” Here, Maria Luisa was alluding to herself as Sant’Ambrogio’s Reverend Mother. “I also suspect that Sister Maria Giuseppa … might have spoken about me disrespectfully.” When she was probed on this point, Maria Luisa declared these women to be her “enemies,” who wished her nothing but ill. Finally, she named the convent’s estate manager, Pietro Bartolini, and her confessor, Padre Peters, as possible adversaries—the last of these on the grounds that he hadn’t wanted her to devote her energies to the convent as she did.

The following day, Maria Luisa volunteered information on the main charges she suspected had been raised against her.
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She started with her lesbian relationships, which, in contrast to the statement she had made in March, she now addressed openly. However, she placed the blame on Agnese Eletta, saying that when she had been a girl of twelve or thirteen, Agnese Eletta forced her to perform acts she found deeply repellent. As soon as Maria Luisa arrived in Sant’Ambrogio, she said, the older nun had come to her and examined her private parts. Eletta claimed her aunt, the mother founder, had given her “the privilege” of “imparting chastity by this means.” This had led to “immodest acts.”

Maria Luisa then told an entirely new story about the origin of her
visions, saying she had been trying to protect herself from Agnese Eletta’s sexual predilections. “I began to conceive of some dreams in which the late abbess told me what was necessary to prevent such wrongdoing.” Maria Luisa told Padre Leziroli about these “dreams” in confession, and he “believed in them, treating them as if they were visions and revelations.” The abbess at the time, Agnese Celeste della Croce, was likewise convinced that they were genuine. Still, at least this meant Maria Luisa was able to keep Agnese Eletta at a distance for a little while. As she was undertaking the spiritual exercises in preparation for professing her vows, she told Padre Leziroli during confession that all the visions were her “inventions,” “and not true things.” But the confessor dismissed this as an expression of her “scruples and modesty,” and cleaved to the authenticity of the visions against her wishes. Maria Luisa also told the extraordinary confessor, Padre Peters, that she had only been pretending. He praised her “spirited manner” and forgave the offense. But he said that she must use “such stratagems only in extreme cases.”

Maria Luisa distanced herself from the false cult of the founder, Maria Agnese Firrao. She tried to convince the court that she had only invented her visions in order to help her combat the false cult of Firrao: an attempt to present herself as the Inquisition’s enthusiastic ally. It had been her aim, she said, to get Sant’Ambrogio to recognize the 1816 verdict. Everything she did was done to achieve this end—even taking over the role of novice mistress. That way, at least she could try to immunize the convent’s younger generation against the dangerous Firrao virus.

Maria Luisa claimed that at Christmas 1854, when a “secret procession” was due to take place in honor of Maria Agnese, she had invented “one of the usual dreams.” Her goal was to prevent this procession, and influence the elections for abbess, vicaress, and the other offices as she wished. With the help of another vision, foretelling that Cardinal Protector Patrizi would be poisoned if he didn’t come to the convent for the election, Leziroli finally managed to draw the cardinal to Sant’Ambrogio. “The cardinal came, and everything was done according to my dream.”

In her interrogation on June 13, 1860, the defendant steered the subject back to the case of the late Maria Agostina and her supposed visions. Maria Luisa said she had fought against these from the start,
believing them to be deceptions.
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“The abbess, the nuns and Padre Benedetti believed in them. They annoyed me tremendously. I was the only one who did not believe in the visions.” On several occasions, Benedetti used his sermons to criticize an “arrogant soul” in the convent, who harped on about her own holiness, but refused to acknowledge that of another. “I was well aware that Padre Benedetti was aiming this speech at me.” With the help of more visions, she managed to get the Jesuit general to remove Benedetti from his position as confessor. After this, she could do as she pleased with Maria Agostina. When the latter carried on talking about the mother founder, and the founder’s ring that had healed her, “I decided not to invent any more dreams, because they weighed on my conscience. Instead,
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would wear a ring, to expose her illusions and make her confess.” She got the first heavenly ring from the statue of the Madonna in the choir: “I took the ring she wore on her finger, which looked like a little rose with a small red gemstone in the middle.”

In fact, the ring brought her immense power in the convent.
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“Bigot young women” who thought they were something special were refused entry to the novitiate, supposedly on the mother founder’s orders. Those who had already been taken in were now removed. But the ring also helped her discipline more seasoned nuns. “Using the ring, I made all kinds of revelations, in order to keep them in check.”

Maria Luisa also continued to portray Katharina von Hohenzollern as deranged—a strategy she had begun to adopt in March. On June 14, she flatly denied ever having given the princess an obscene letter in German—the Americano’s obscene letter. This had all been a figment of Katharina’s imagination. When Katharina continued to talk nonsense, Maria Luisa even sent for the princess’s spiritual guide, Cardinal Reisach, and begged him to exert his influence on her. The cardinal had managed to calm the princess temporarily. Reisach told her Katharina was to be pitied: her nerves were in a terrible state. Her life’s many sufferings had filled her head with fanciful ideas.