The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (45 page)

The Interrogation of Giuseppe Peters

PADRE PETERS’S TRUE IDENTITY

Padre Giuseppe Peters had been Sant’Ambrogio’s second confessor since 1856. The decree of February 27, 1861, which marked the official start of the offensive process, brought charges against him and Padre Leziroli. Both Jesuits were forbidden from making contact with each other, and from taking confession from men or women. The interrogation of Padre Peters began on March 11, and lasted until August 2, 1861.
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When he first appeared before the Holy Office, Peters accepted the decisions it had made in his case up to that point “with reverence”—the phrase all defendants were expected to use.
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But there was a surprise to come, when the court began proceedings by taking down, as customary, his personal details. The name Giuseppe Peters, by which the Jesuit was known in Sant’Ambrogio and many other places besides, was just a pseudonym. He had adopted this alias on the advice of superiors of the Society of Jesus, when he started his novitiate in Switzerland. They had suggested he change his name to help him avoid police investigation by the Protestant government of Prussia.
He continued to use the name Peters, which was easy for Italians to pronounce, in his day-to-day activities—particularly pastoral care. But when it came to “matters of importance”—books and votums for the pope, or for one of the Roman congregations—he always used his real name: Joseph Kleutgen.

In the convent, acting as confessor and spiritual advisor, he was simply the pious Jesuit Giuseppe Peters. But when he was writing books, debating issues central to the Catholic Church, providing inspiration to cardinals like Reisach, or advising the pope, he was the great theologian and philosopher Joseph Kleutgen—an illustrious master of the arts of scholastic argument and distinction. This posed a special challenge to the Roman Inquisition’s investigating court. They weren’t dealing with some naive little Jesuit padre; this defendant was a skilled rhetorician, and a member of a far-reaching social, political, and theological network.
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Joseph Wilhelm Carl Kleutgen
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came into the world on April 9, 1811, in Dortmund, Germany. He was the second of five children born to Wilhelm and Anna Catharina (née Mergendahl) Kleutgen. His formative years coincided with one of the greatest periods of upheaval in modern Church history.

The French Revolution of 1789, and the secularization of Germany in 1803, shattered the thousand-year-old structure of the German Catholic
Reichskirche
and swept away the spiritual basis of classical Catholicism as well.
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When Germany’s prince-bishoprics were dissolved, most of the country’s Catholics came under Protestant rule. Kleutgen’s hometown of Dortmund, which was part of the archbishopric of Paderborn, became Prussian. There was no more religious unity within the various German states. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia meant each state had been governed according to the motto
cuius regio, eius religio
, but now the Christian denominations were competing with each other within states, each attempting to mark out its own territory. Ecumenical approaches to the problem were the exception rather than the rule. In Germany, the nineteenth century is often called the second age of confessionalization. While Protestants and Catholics were equal in number and—on paper—had equal rights, Catholics were de facto denied entry to higher offices. The result was Catholic inferiority, as authoritarian Protestants marginalized Catholicism’s influence in government and society. The Catholic population became increasingly ghettoized.

It was the early 1830s before the bishoprics were reestablished in Germany, allowing at least partial restoration of the Church’s outward structure. Internally, the Catholic Church of the early nineteenth century was characterized by spiritual turmoil and theological uncertainty. Wildly different models of Catholic faith vied with each other for supremacy. There were enlightened and liberal Catholics, adherents of a state church, and Romantics. German Catholics also became more strongly oriented toward Rome, a movement that eventually crystalized into Ultramontanism.

Following the July Revolution of 1830, there was an increasing polarization within Catholicism. On the one side stood the liberals, who sought to reconcile the Church and the world, faith and knowledge; on the other, the intransigents, for whom all new ideas were polluted by the malignant spirit of the revolution. They held the modern world and the old Church to be fundamentally irreconcilable. These Church-political parties and groups followed different theological or philosophical models. For the intransigents, who were strongly canonical theologians, Romantics, and new scholastics, Saint Thomas Aquinas held the answers to all questions. They therefore rejected modern philosophy and its representatives—like Immanuel Kant and his school—as dangerous heretics. The modernizers, on the other hand, believed that new questions called for new answers, which could only be found by engaging with modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant. This was the position held by theologians like Johann Sebastian Drey
⁶
in Tübingen, Johann Baptist Hirscher in Freiburg, Georg Hermes
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in Bonn, and Anton Günther in Vienna.

Joseph Kleutgen, along with a whole generation of young Catholics, found himself in the middle of this great quest to reform Catholicism. At first, he seems to have had relatively liberal leanings. After finishing school in 1830, he went to Munich University to study philosophy and classical philology. There he joined the student fraternity “Germania,” which was influenced by the emotionalism around contemporary notions of liberty. Through Germania, he became involved in student unrest, which led to the temporary closure of Munich University and the expulsion of students from outside the city. Kleutgen was judged to be a subversive, and forced to leave the city on the Isar River. He had fallen victim to the spirit of Carlsbad, which saw dangerous revolutionary ideas behind every national movement for liberty. Led by the Austrian chancellor, Prince Clemens
Wenzel von Metternich, the most important states of the German confederation had met in the Bohemian spa town in 1819. There they had formulated the “Carlsbad Decrees,” which included extreme restrictions on freedom of speech, and a strict oversight of the universities. But Kleutgen did not stay “liberal” for long.

Following the premature deaths of two of his contemporaries, he underwent a radical change of religious direction. Now he regarded only the strictest ecclesiasticism as truly Catholic. All experiments with freedom were passé; Kleutgen allied himself wholeheartedly to what he saw as Catholicism’s eternal values: the pope in Rome, and the
Theologie der Vorzeid
. This was to become the title of his major work, the four volumes of which appeared between 1853 and 1870. In 1832, he began to study theology in Münster. Within the faculty, he immediately sided with the reactionary opponents of the Hermesians. Following their teacher, Georg Hermes, the Hermesians had a sort of bourgeois Catholicism, which sought to reconcile faith and reason, attachment to the Church and modern philosophy. Hermes had worked as a professor of theology in both Münster and Bonn. In 1834, three years after his death, he was denounced by Metternich and other right-wing Catholics, and Pope Gregory XVI added him as “revolutionary” to the
Index of Forbidden Books
. In condemning Hermes, the chancellor and the pope also met the religious sensibilities of the young Kleutgen.

Kleutgen made his basic standpoint clear in one of his very first theological text, his
Memorandum
of 1833.
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His thought was born of an anxious search for security in an age of upheaval and uncertainty. It was, after all, only just over three years since the July Revolution. Kleutgen didn’t want to keep searching for new answers to new questions. He was weary of the Enlightenment’s “independent thought” and was looking for eternal truths. “People left the old literature to molder in libraries, and the pope on the other side of the mountains. They ignored all the achievements of the past, believing the only way to attain salvation is to lay an entirely new foundation,” he complained. He saw this “double dispensation,” from being “led by the supreme head of the Church” and from “looking at the Church’s past,” as the fundamental problem in the Catholicism of his time. He placed the blame for this on the widespread “mania for liberty,” which he attributed to modern philosophy in general, and in particular the
thought of the French Revolution, which perforce ended in chaos and the guillotine.

For Kleutgen, true freedom “blossomed” “precisely from obedience.”
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The
Theology of Times Past
provided eternally valid answers to contemporary questions. For him, the only true philosophy was that which took “its form from Greece’s most acute thinker [Aristotle], its ideas from the leading light of Christianity [Augustine], and its instruction from Thomas Aquinas.” This theology ranged from Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century to writing produced in the mid-eighteenth century.
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Combating Catholic authors whom he believed had been infected by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and defending the
Theology of Times Past
against all modern concepts, became Kleutgen’s life’s work. His goal was nothing less than the comprehensive restoration of scholastic thought; new scholasticism would become the official Catholic philosophy.
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Kleutgen rose to become the leading proponent of new scholasticism. At the same time, he began to view the pope as the eternal rock of Peter, to which he could cling through all the storms of the modern world. The dogmatization of papal infallibility and the primacy of jurisdiction, at the First Vatican Council of 1870, was very much in line with the program he had sketched out in 1833 as a young man of twenty-two.

From April 1833 Kleutgen, a member of the Paderborn Diocese, continued his studies at the seminary there, and in February 1834 he was ordained as a subdeacon. In April of the same year, however, he entered the Jesuit novitiate of the order’s German province. At the time, the Society of Jesus was banned in Germany, so the novitiate was located in Brig, in Valais, Switzerland. Dortmund, Kleutgen’s hometown, was part of Prussia, and the Prussian ambassador to Bern demanded that Kleutgen go immediately to Berlin to answer for his involvement in the events connected with the “Germania” fraternity. Kleutgen didn’t give himself up to the Prussian authorities—who, among other things, expected him to do military service. Instead, he heeded the advice of his order’s superior and took Swiss citizenship under the pseudonym Joseph Peters.
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From 1836 to 1840, Kleutgen studied philosophy and theology at the Jesuit University in Fribourg. He was ordained as a priest in 1837. From 1841 to 1843, he worked as a teacher at the Jesuit school in Brig,
the Spiritus Sanctus College. When the school was nationalized in 1843, there came a crucial turning point in Kleutgen’s biography: he was called to Rome to work in the administration of the Jesuit order. He began work there as an employee of the order’s secretary, and confessor at the Collegium Germanicum. From 1847, he also taught rhetoric at the Germanicum. The 1848 Revolution forced him and the rest of the Jesuits underground. But in 1850, when the pope returned from Gaeta, Kleutgen was made a consultor to the Congregation of the Index, where he had a substantial influence on the condemnation of high-profile modern theologians.
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From 1858 to 1862, he was secretary of the order—an influential position, involving a close working relationship with the Jesuit general, Petrus Beckx. This gave him a nuanced insight into the Society’s politics. At the same time, he used his position to build up a network of important contacts both inside and outside the Roman Curia.

In 1847, Kleutgen started using his given name again on official documents, although the pseudonym Peters remained in brackets in the order’s internal list of members.
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As he ascended through the Jesuit hierarchy, and achieved his greatest successes in Church politics and theology under the name Kleutgen, he was also working as the second confessor in Sant’Ambrogio.

Kleutgen’s biography was shaped by sickness and failure, conflicts and persecution. A serious illness stopped him attending school for two years, and meant he had to put off taking his final exams. After his father’s death in 1825, his mother embarked on a new marriage, and bore five more children, meaning Kleutgen had a total of nine siblings. Two of them caused trouble for him within the Church. A half-brother who also wanted to become a Jesuit was dismissed from the Society for morally reprehensible conduct in Fribourg. Another, a priest in the Diocese of Paderborn, converted to Protestantism. He married and started working as a Lutheran pastor in Kleutgen’s hometown of Dortmund. Having a “heretic” for a brother—a man who had converted and betrayed the “true” Catholic Church—must have been a bitter pill for the Catholic hard-liner to swallow. In addition to these personal catastrophes, Kleutgen was a member of the Society of Jesus, which meant he spent his whole life being subjected to persecution and oppression from “anti-clerical and anti-Jesuit propaganda.”
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The experience of persecution, coupled with a fragile mental state, may well have forced him into a kind of habitual defensive position. This made it almost impossible for him to compromise and develop a flexible attitude to the challenges of his age and to look for compromises. He wrote to a friend: “It seems to me that for some time now, divine providence has created circumstances in which everyone is forced into a decision. ‘Whoever is not for me is against me.’ Half measures will not work any longer. Anyone who is reluctant to declare himself a Roman Catholic with all his heart soon finds himself on the opposing side. Our times demand this division.”
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In the past, Kleutgen has been characterized as a “depressive” with an “underdeveloped sense of self-worth” who required “strict order and clear authority” to stabilize his personality. He found this in the Jesuits, the Ultramontanist papal Church, and, not least, the
Theology of Times Past
.
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