The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (37 page)

It would have been quite surprising for a high-ranking cardinal of the Curia to hurry to the convent at the request of a mere vicaress, and to discuss his charge’s mental state with her in rather disrespectful terms. This would mean that there must have been a very close bond of trust between Maria Luisa and the cardinal. How could this have come about? Perhaps Maria Luisa was talking up her acquaintance
with Reisach to give the Inquisition the impression that she was already on a firm footing with one of the cardinal inquisitors, Sallua’s superior. Her subtext here was: watch out! The cardinal is keeping an eye on you. The reference may have been a tactical maneuver—but perhaps there was more to it than this.

Cardinal Reisach had a pronounced weakness for women with mystical gifts, and frequently took their visions and auditions to be the real thing. Even while he was still the archbishop of Munich and Freising, he had been an eager follower of the stigmatized seer Louise Beck
²¹
in Altöstting. She passed on messages from the Virgin and the “poor souls” to the people of the world. These “poor souls” were people who had died and remained in purgatory, awaiting final redemption. In the nineteenth century, a lot of Catholics believed they would be able to send messages to the living once they had passed on, either telling them to pray for their salvation from the purifying flames, or warning them of sinful behavior. The spirit of Juliane Bruchmann, the late wife of the Redemptorists’ provincial, acted as mediator between the Virgin Mary and Louise Beck.
²²
Her spirit, or soul, was known as the “mother,” while Louise Beck was the “child.” Beck’s followers, who had to subordinate themselves entirely to this “higher guidance,” were known as “children of the mother.” Many of the Redemptorists, and believers outside the order, followed the cult. Reisach, too, became a child of the mother in 1848. Following a lifetime confession, he had fallen under Louise Beck’s religious spell. Is it not plausible, then, that after Reisach had moved to Rome in 1855, Maria Luisa had taken the place of Louise Beck, and he had found a new saint to follow?

After mentioning Reisach, Maria Luisa brought the subject back to the princess’s sudden illness, starting with the scene in the choir on December 8, which she claimed was still incomprehensible to her. Maria Luisa gave the following version of events:

As a cardinal member of the Inquisition and a confidant of the pope, Cardinal Reisach was able to intervene in the trial at any point. (
illustration credit 6.1
)

The “violence of this act” caused Katharina to suffer a stroke two or three days later. The whole poisoning business had been nothing more than the imaginings of a sick mind—and perhaps also a result of the stroke, which had caused severe damage to the princess’s brain. Maria Luisa also claimed that Katharina’s exit from Sant’Ambrogio had gone without a hitch. Nobody put any kind of obstacle in the princess’s way. When he came to collect Katharina, her cousin Hohenlohe told Maria Luisa the princess was so upset at the death of her young relative (the queen of Portugal) that he now had to take her to his country villa in Tivoli. However, both she and the abbess feared that when she left, the confused princess might try to pin something on them in connection with the cult of the mother founder.

In an attempt to ward off this accusation, Maria Luisa consistently tried to shift the blame for this cult, which she called “fanciful,” onto Padre Leziroli.
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She said that he alone had been responsible for the veneration of the mother founder’s relics: her hair, a tooth, numerous
items of clothing, scourges, writings, and letters had been treated as relics in Sant’Ambrogio. Leziroli had also written a saint’s life of Firrao. He had sermonized about her constantly, and included her as a saint in the liturgy. He had believed her writings to be the product of divine inspiration, and the nuns always called him “the Mother’s vicar.” Maria Luisa’s own attempts to put a stop to this false cult had, alas, been in vain.

In her interrogations throughout the first half of June, Maria Luisa also distanced herself from any responsibility for the policy of secrecy that the visitators and inquisitors had encountered at every turn in Sant’Ambrogio. She claimed that the confessors and the abbess were solely to blame for the nuns having hidden (and in some cases destroyed) the mother founder’s writings, Leziroli’s saint’s life, and texts by the Jesuit Giuseppe Pignatelli. The abbess also told her she had no need to fear the Visitation: “We will have to bear the burden, if they keep coming back. We will do as they ask; I will say yes and no, as they wish, and this virtue will see us victorious.”

Maria Luisa repeatedly told the court she was ready to beg for forgiveness, while at the same time making it very clear she had done all this because she believed “neither in the mother founder nor in her cult.” She was just doing everything she could to stop the nuns venerating a false saint. As she couldn’t display her opposition to this openly in Sant’Ambrogio, she had proceeded with extreme caution, “but not in order to claim holiness or anything else for herself.” It had simply been necessary to act as she had done, “to provide a remedy for this sickness.”

Just as in March 1860, the Dominican Sallua remained unconvinced by Maria Luisa’s account of events in Sant’Ambrogio: “She began to speak about the main charges
ex se
; she reported every incident and conversation in a way that was favorable to her, and did not correspond to the truth of the witness hearings,” he told the cardinals in his
Ristretto
.
²⁴

EVIDENCE AND FIRST CONFESSIONS

During her first interrogations, Maria Luisa denied all guilt. Now Sallua began to confront her with the evidence and the witness statements; now the investigating court started calling the shots. Its task
was to prove the charges that had been formulated during the informative process, point by point. Ideally, this would be topped off with a confession from the defendant.

Over the course of several days, the investigating court gave Maria Luisa a series of “harsh warnings” as it confronted her with witness statements that corroborated each other in detail. Only then, during the month of June, did she gradually begin to confess her responsibility for the offenses with which she had been charged.
²⁵
Still, her confessions remained incomplete, and her statements often contradicted each other.

Her first admission concerned her participation in the cult of Firrao. In her interrogation on June 24, 1860, she said:
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“I freely confess that I supported and spread the veneration and the cult of the mother founder in various ways, and through various pretenses.” But, at least to begin with, she had only been doing what was required of the nuns, as they had been instructed by the confessors—in particular, Padre Leziroli. Everyone in Sant’Ambrogio had joined in the “adoration” and “glorification” of Maria Agnese Firrao. She herself had only gone along with all these “deceptions” because she didn’t know any better: ever since she was young, since she entered the convent, this was all she had learned from the example of the older nuns and superiors, and the readings from the founder’s texts.

Maria Luisa was also finally prepared to confess to her own pretense of holiness. “Not just with my tongue, but with my heart I confess that I feigned all these things.” She said she had been motivated by “pride.” She wanted to appear “favored by the Lord” in order to gain power, so that she, too, would be venerated within Sant’Ambrogio.

The inquisitors were particularly interested in the practice of confession in Sant’Ambrogio. When questioned, Maria Luisa admitted forcing the novices to make a detailed confession of all their sins before they entered the convent, especially their “dishonesties”—by which she especially meant their sexual transgressions. She also made the novices confess to her before their weekly confession, and then told them what they could and couldn’t say to the father confessor. And she had dispensed absolution. For this, the novices had to fall to their knees as she “gave them the blessing, assigned a penance and let them take Communion.” She used the “information” gleaned from these confessions to steer individual nuns in whatever direction she thought best. “It is true that the father confessors Peters and Leziroli
imparted to me what they had heard from the novices and some of the nuns in confession.”
²⁷
This proved to the investigating court that the seal of the confessional had been continually broken, via “intimate communication” between Maria Luisa and the confessors.

Maria Luisa then confessed to the financial misdemenors of which she had been accused. She had embezzled the “money from heaven” from the nuns’ dowries. She had also failed to observe fast days and other Church commandments, such as the obligatory Liturgy of the Hours. She admitted to having a relationship with the Americano, though without making it clear exactly how far this relationship had gone. Kreuzburg, she said, came to the parlatory every day, and wrote her a letter after each meeting. These letters were very muddled. He was unable to believe that “one day, once he had been released from the devil, he could become a Jesuit.” He kept giving in to the “vice of dishonesty.” “He went to the Pincio, where he met women and sinned with them.” In several of his letters, he wrote “that we nuns tended toward this same vice; that even we harbored unclean desires. Once he even made one of these claims about me personally.”

MARIA LUISA AND HER NOVICES

On June 21, 1860, Maria Luisa was questioned about the lesbian practices and initiation rites in Sant’Ambrogio.
²⁸
Before giving her testimony, she wept bitter tears, and knelt in humility to beg for forgiveness for what she now had to describe. “As I said yesterday evening towards the end of the hearing, I want to confess all the wicked deeds I committed. When Agnese Eletta was still in Sant’Ambrogio, after her so-called conversion, I began to allow myself deceitful intimacies with her, in that I studied her private parts very closely with my eyes, and also touched them with my hands.”

Then she explained how she had happened upon the idea of “these villainies”:

But what sort of purification was this?