The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (49 page)

The investigating judge had to grit his teeth and admit that Leo XII had confirmed the convent’s Rule, but he also stressed that this didn’t mean the pope had rehabilitated Firrao as an author. The judgment upon her remained valid until her death. “And so the Church authority, in accepting or permitting the use of this Rule and the constitution never
—even indirectly
—thought that the author had written these through divine inspiration, or in fact that they had even sprung from her own mind.” Most of her texts had been copied from elsewhere.

The scholarly debate continued. However they might try and reinterpret it, the judges were unable to deny the existence of Leo XII’s brief. Kleutgen tried to argue that it represented indirect permission to venerate Maria Agnese as a saint—which was hardly something the brief suggested. The Jesuit admitted to having glorified Agnese Firrao himself, and argued that he was justified in this, for the reasons he had set out. The judges accused him of “ecclesiastical arrogance.”

Kleutgen refused to climb down on this matter—and, ultimately, Sallua was unable to refute him. On a factual level, all anybody had were claims, interpretations, and readings: it was Kleutgen’s word against Sallua’s, and so the matter remained undecided. At the end of this disputation, the Jesuit was prepared to make only the most minimal of confessions. He said that the judges shouldn’t take his text, which argued that the veneration of Maria Agnese was permitted, to imply that there was no cause to criticize his behavior. He had merely wanted to give the court some arguments for his “good faith” in the legitimacy of the cult. He stuck to his guns on the issue of Leo XII’s confirmation of the Rule and the constitutions as well as on the rehabilitation of Firrao he had derived from it, maintaining that text and author could not be separated. An orthodox Rule could not be written by a heretic. And vice versa: a false saint could not write a sacred constitution. The Catholic Church’s teaching authority couldn’t contradict itself by approving a text and, at the same time, condemning its author.

On the central question of whether the cult of Firrao was allowed, Kleutgen had cheerfully passed the buck to the Church authority—or
rather, to various Church authorities, and ultimately the pope. But if the Church had sanctioned the cult of Saint Maria Agnese, even indirectly, by confirming the Rule and lifting all its previous censures and prohibitions against Sant’Ambrogio (in the words of Leo XII’s brief), then perpetuating the cult could no longer be a charge in an Inquisition trial.

The other defendants and witnesses who admitted to following the cult of Firrao also accepted the Inquisition’s premise that this was a punishable offense. Kleutgen, on the other hand, called this supposition into question. The practiced theologian Joseph Kleutgen used theological argumentation to justify the spiritual practice of the confessor Giuseppe Peters. There was no conflict between these two roles: Peters and Kleutgen were perfectly in tune.

THEOLOGY AND FRENCH KISSING

Was Maria Luisa a genuine saint? The inquisitors devoted a particularly long time to this question.
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From the day of his first interrogation, March 11, through to July, they questioned Kleutgen continually on this issue. He gave them a lengthy back-and-forth, constantly quibbling and splitting hairs. Confronted with incriminating witness statements, he would answer evasively. The following day, he would submit a well-structured text, admitting only to what the evidence had already shown. Everything else, he denied. Then the game would begin all over again.

In his second interrogation on March 12, 1861, Kleutgen submitted a handwritten text, in which he put this uneducated nun’s excellent theological knowledge down to her holiness, and the authenticity of her supernatural experiences.
³⁸
“In order to speak of the experiences that I took to be superhuman, I made Sister Maria Luisa talk about the most sublime mysteries of our religion: not just the Holy Trinity in general, but the intra-Trinity procession of divine beings,
³⁹
and the qualities of God and their relation to each other.
⁴⁰
She spoke about creation,
⁴¹
salvation
⁴²
and, above all, the working of God in the soul.”
⁴³

Only people with a robust philosophical and theological education
would be able to discuss these demanding subjects. The
processiones ad intra
—the ontological origins of the Trinity—are still one of the most difficult issues in the dogma on God and the Trinity. Any knowledge Maria Luisa was able to demonstrate here certainly wasn’t the result of years of study. Kleutgen argued that she could only have acquired it through her translation into heaven, and an immediate encounter with God.

“I must say that I never noticed her make an error, and that the sister spoke about all these mysteries with admirable clarity. She answered my objections with precision and a quick wit, always using the correct expressions—often those that only learned men know. I could not think but that this insight had been instilled in her directly; I knew for a fact that before she joined the convent, she had only a pauper’s schooling, and I could not discover where she could have got such an education inside the convent.” For him, this had been compelling evidence both for Maria Luisa’s holiness, and the authenticity of the heavenly letters.

Here, the Jesuit voluntarily moved on to an issue in which Sallua had a burning interest. The sum total of the Inquisition’s
corpus delicti
on the letters was the heavenly epistle to Beckx, intended to bring down the theologians Passaglia and Schrader. Sallua wanted to know how the Virgin, or rather Maria Luisa, had come up with the idea for this letter, seeing that it required a detailed knowledge of the relationships within the Gregorian University and the Jesuit order.

The Dominican was, of course, able to make a few deductions himself. The Jesuits were fundamentally divided on the theological direction their order should take. While Passaglia advocated a pluralistic model, Kleutgen favored a monopoly for new scholasticism. The blow to Passaglia must have come at a very opportune moment for Kleutgen.

As usual, the Jesuit’s answer was long-winded and full of qualifying clauses. Yes, he had once spoken about Passaglia’s theology to Maria Luisa, though without mentioning him by name. Then how had Maria Luisa come by the name of this Jesuit theologian? It was quite simple: Maria Luisa knew all about the theological dispute within the Society of Jesus from her visits to heaven. But Kleutgen then admitted he had spoken to Maria Luisa directly about Schrader and Passaglia, their relationship with each other, and their theological
positions. Of course, he added, by this time the whole affair had become public knowledge anyway, and Maria Luisa could have heard the relevant information from “other persons.” To the question of exactly how the supernatural letter about Passaglia had come about, Kleutgen gave the cryptic reply: “I believe it happened as you say, although I have no clear memory of these details.”

The judges weren’t satisfied with this, and demanded more precise answers. And so the Jesuit said that the madre vicaria had claimed the Virgin Mary wrote the Passaglia letter in heaven, in her presence. Kleutgen stressed that in the conflict with Passaglia, the Jesuit general had to support “the teaching of Saint Thomas.” This gave Sallua Kleutgen’s motive for inspiring the letter. Maria Luisa knew of his heart’s desire—the resurrection of scholasticism—and tried to serve him in this aim by writing a letter from the Virgin. Significantly, Kleutgen didn’t reveal whether he had reacted in any way to learning that the heavenly letters, and therefore also the letter to Beckx, were earthly forgeries.

Sallua also put several questions to Kleutgen about the special Jesuit blessing, which had caught the tribunal’s attention in Maria Luisa’s testimony. Having given evasive answers during several interrogations, Kleutgen once again submitted a written document on April 22, 1861.
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In this, he admitted to dispensing the extraordinary Jesuit blessing, which involved embraces and kisses. He called it a “ministry”: an “extraordinary” and “superhuman” pastoral service. He had always carried out these acts in good faith, and in obedience to the Virgin Mary. God had chosen Sister Maria Luisa, through the Blessed Virgin, to vanquish the wickedness of the world and rebuild God’s kingdom. “And God determined that I should assist her in a particular way, protecting and safeguarding her.” The actions involved in the blessing had admittedly “confused” him at first, but the heavenly letters had always reassured him. They told him that God demanded these actions only at this particular stage; it was part of a process that would lead to the “perfect connection” of Maria Luisa’s soul to God. The letters also spoke of a “union” between himself and Maria Luisa, but this was of a purely spiritual nature. There had been no suggestion of any other kind of “love,” or of a physical union.

The reference to other sorts of love gave the Inquisition the perfect opportunity to inquire about the exact circumstances of the affair
between Kleutgen, at that time in his mid-thirties, and a certain Alessandra N. Kleutgen now had to reveal his lover’s full name: Alessandra Carli.

Alessandra and her twin brother, Domenico, had been born to Isabella Fellitti and Carlo Buonafede Carli in 1814 in Comacchio, which now belongs to the province of Ferrara. In 1835, her father was appointed vice consul for the United States in Rome. Alessandra came from a prosperous family, and may well have come to the Eternal City with her parents.
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Kleutgen answered in writing, as he did on all delicate topics—and this time not in Italian, but in Latin.
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He was unable to deny the sexual details that Maria Luisa had already given the judges. Now everything came down to how these facts were interpreted. After the Jesuits had been driven out of Rome in 1848, Kleutgen said, he temporarily became a secular priest, and spent two months living with Alessandra Carli as man and wife, in her apartment in Rome. He presented himself as the victim of a seductress. He, the poor innocent priest, had fallen for Alessandra’s feminine wiles. At the time, he had so little experience of acting as confessor to female penitents. Up until that point, he had always lived in protected monastic houses, hardly ever coming into contact with “worldly people,” let alone young women. Using “false revelations and promises,” Alessandra had persuaded him to commit “shameless and improper acts” with her. But during sexual intercourse, he had never had “any debauched or bad intentions,” and “during these acts never ceased my inner prayer.” He had “not wanted to offend God.”

Kleutgen’s interpretation was designed to convince the court that the whole affair had been purely mechanical, with no eroticism, excitement, or the involvement of libido. From a moral-theological point of view, it was an attempt to mitigate the fact that he had broken his vow of celibacy and chastity.
⁴⁷
Up until the mid-nineteenth century, any sexual misconduct on the part of a priest would be made public, and punished by the Church authorities, as a matter of course. Enlightenment thought influenced the perception of priests, who were seen as educators of the people and moral examples. But the rise of Ultramontanism brought with it a renewed, cultish overelevation of priests, who were now more strongly associated with sexual purity. While sexual impurity and defilement through intercourse with a
woman didn’t make priests unworthy of their cult status according to canon law, they did in the eyes of conservative churchgoing citizens. This meant their sins couldn’t be allowed to become public. When a vow of chastity was broken by an ordained man, or in a consecrated place, the moral theology of the time termed it a
“sacrilegium
.”
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Kleutgen must have done everything in his power to keep his misstep a secret.

For the tribunal, of course, the crucial task here was to clarify whether Kleutgen’s sexual relationship with Alessandra Carli was in any way connected to his function as her father confessor. This would have made it the serious offense of
Sollicitatio
. But the Jesuit continued to skirt around this central point. Yes, he had met Alessandra when she came to him for confession. No, nothing had ever happened in the confessional itself. Yes, they had slept together in Alessandra’s apartment. In short: he, the inexperienced Jesuit, had been the victim of an experienced woman. He had been attacked by the devilish serpent, working its evil through Eve. Yes, he had “sometimes spoken with Alessandra about such delusions.” But later he, too, had become “deluded.”

These excuses got him nowhere: the court then made him confess that, having described this whole affair by order of heavenly letters, he had received replies from the Virgin Mary. They told him his relationship with Alessandra had involved a dirty, lustful sexual union. By contrast, with Maria Luisa he would be permitted to experience a pure, divine, lustless relationship with a woman. And Kleutgen had never denied this juxtaposition.

So what sort of divine experiences had he had with Maria Luisa? Were they really so different—simply divine—from the sexual dalliance with Alessandra that he’d described with such sadness? The Jesuit attempted to whitewash the facts the court presented to him using theological distinctions. He did his best to come up with “just” causes for his actions. Once again, he denied having felt any sensual, bodily lust, or
delectatio carnalis
.
⁴⁹
The embraces, caresses, and kisses he had dispensed had left him quite cold; he had merely been fulfilling his pastoral duty.

The new scholastic had read his Thomas Aquinas thoroughly, and Aquinas had provided him with eternally valid answers to all questions of dogma and moral theology. Aquinas’s
Summa Theologiae
declared that an unchaste glance, touch, embrace, or kiss “in and of itself” was not a mortal sin. It only became so when “lust” entered the equation.
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