The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (5 page)

What happened inside the walls of Sant’Ambrogio, in the ten months from September 1858 to July 1859? The archbishop couldn’t make head nor tail of what his cousin said when he met her in the convent on July 25. He thought she had become confused and was talking nonsense—at least, Katharina’s
Erlebnisse
describes his reaction in these terms.
⁵⁴
At first, he could see no danger to the princess’s life. Hohenlohe seemed convinced that Katharina had overtaxed herself again, just as she had at the convent in Kintzheim, and was seeking some way of extricating herself from the situation. It was no coincidence that he had written to her at the start of July 1859, urging her “to show perseverance in her chosen profession.”
⁵⁵
To his mind, it was simply out of the question for her to leave another convent. He had, of course, been against her entering Sant’Ambrogio in the first place. He knew what a delicate state her health was in, but she had listened to her spiritual guide, Reisach, instead of him.

In spite of all his persuasion, Hohenlohe was unable to reassure
his cousin, and when she carried on talking about poisoning and how she feared for her life, he reluctantly decided to help her. He went to the pope and begged permission for the princess to leave the convent the following day, on grounds of ill health. Pius IX granted his wish immediately.
⁵⁶
This speedy solution was only made possible by the direct access to Pius IX that Hohenlohe was granted as a Secret Chamberlain. Anyone else would have had to set in motion a lengthy process in order to fulfill the requirements of canon law for being released from a convent.
⁵⁷

On July 26, 1859, Archbishop Hohenlohe collected Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen from the convent and had her taken to his estate at Tivoli. In these rural surroundings, she would be at peace, and then they could see what was to be done. Katharina believed she had managed to convince her cousin “that her fears were not unfounded,” and that there had been real attempts on her life.
⁵⁸
However, it isn’t certain whether Hohenlohe grasped the true extent of the scandal that had played out in Sant’Ambrogio. It may merely have been pity that prompted him to let Katharina draw a line under her second attempt at convent life.

The Villa d’Este, Hohenlohe’s summer residence in Tivoli, lay some eighteen miles northeast of Rome. Its gardens, with their fountains and sprawling parklands, were an ideal place for Katharina to recover from the tribulations of her life in the convent. Here, she could finally bring the Sant’Ambrogio chapter of her life to a close. But she needed to get back on her feet in more than the physical sense. She also had to work through what had happened to her inside the walls of the Roman convent from a spiritual point of view. Although Cardinal Reisach visited Hohenlohe in Tivoli at the end of July, Katharina didn’t open up to her long-term spiritual guide.
⁵⁹
Instead, she started talking to a Benedictine padre from Saint Paul Outside the Walls, a Catholic abbey in Rome. He was taking a rest cure in Tivoli, to escape the heat of the Roman summer. Rudolf Wolter had been born in Bonn in 1825, obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the university there in 1849, and was ordained in 1850.
⁶⁰
In 1856, he followed his brother Ernst
⁶¹
into the abbey of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, taking the religious name Maurus. The abbot at the time, Simplicio Pappalettere, was very receptive to modern ideas.
⁶²
His aim was to create a synthesis of Benedictine spirituality and contemporary philosophy within Saint Paul Outside the Walls, a counterbalance to
the Jesuit-dominated Gregorian University. He was guided in this by the thought of the Viennese priest and philosopher Anton Günther.
⁶³

Maurus Wolter clearly made a big impression on the princess. His spirituality, and his exuberant enthusiasm for the cause of Saint Benedict, the “flame that consumed him,” was as great a source of fascination for Katharina as the young Reisach had been in 1834.
⁶⁴
Wolter became her new spiritual guide and confessor almost overnight. When his rest cure in Tivoli came to an end, the princess wrote to his superiors “with the urgent plea to grant an extension to Don Mauro Wolter’s holiday with us.” It had been a great comfort to her to have found a countryman, whom providence had “delivered for my spiritual guidance.” She implored them “not to rob me of such a father confessor.”
⁶⁵
And a month later, she thanked the “sons of Saint Benedict” for “graciously listening to the humble pleas of a poor Franciscan child.” They had, she said, “shown a deep understanding of her painful orphaned state, kindly [allowing her] to find her homeland in the hearts of German priests.”
⁶⁶

During these pastoral conversations, which sometimes took place in the sacramental context of confession, the idea took shape in Katharina’s mind that—as she reported in her
Erlebnisse
—she “should not be content with her own rescue from Sant’Ambrogio.” It was her duty to bring “the abuses there to the attention of the Holy See.”
⁶⁷
A few weeks after Archbishop Hohenlohe had rescued her, Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen contacted the Holy Tribunal of the
Sanctum Officium
, and made serious allegations against the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio.

DENUNCIATION AS A MORAL DUTY

The first files in the case of Sant’Ambrogio date from August 23, 1859.
⁶⁸
On this day, Katharina von Hohenzollern appeared in person before the investigating judge of the Roman Inquisition (known as the
Sanctum Officium
, or Holy Office), First
Socius
Vincenzo Leone Sallua. Sallua, a highly experienced inquisitor, accepted the denunciation and questioned the “denunciator” about her allegations.
⁶⁹
The interview took place in Archbishop Hohenlohe’s apartment in Rome.

The princess first placed her hand on the Gospels, and swore to
tell the truth. Then she said: “It is out of a moral duty, imposed by my current father confessor, that I turn to this holy tribunal.” She explained that the German mother tongue she shared with her new spiritual guide, Padre Wolter, had allowed them to discuss at length all the “doubts and anguishes” that had plagued her during her stay in Sant’Ambrogio. With his help, she had finally managed to impose a degree of order on the confusing events of that period. As Katharina told the inquisitor, four issues had taken shape in her mind during these discussions, and she wanted to bring them to the attention of the highest tribunal. First, there was the forbidden cult of the nun who had founded the Franciscan community of Sant’Ambrogio, Maria Agnese Firrao. She had been found guilty of “false holiness” by the Holy Office at the start of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the nuns doggedly persisted in venerating her as a saint, both while Firrao was still alive, and to an even greater extent after her death. The second issue was the highly suspect relationship that the young novice mistress and madre vicaria, Maria Luisa of Saint Francis Xavier, had conducted with “Pietro N., called the Americano,” under the pretext of attempting to free him from demonic possession. The third was this same Maria Luisa’s claim to sainthood. She gave the appearance of having an “extraordinary soul.” She was said to be capable of “supernatural things,” and to possess “heavenly gifts.” Katharina’s fourth point encompassed all the things that had “befallen” her in the convent, up to and including the attempts on her life.

Following “careful consideration” and “thorough reflection,” her confessor had declared it her absolute moral duty “to denounce everything to this
Supremo Tribunale
.” She therefore sat down and wrote about her experiences in German,
“in modo narrativo,”
before translating this into Italian. The princess added that she wanted to submit her denunciation in written form, since she would find it “far too oppressive and complex to do this verbally.”

The incendiary power of this
Denunzia
was not fully revealed in Katharina’s verbal complaint. Clandestine relationships between attractive men and beautiful young nuns—women whose parents or guardians had often forced them to enter a convent against their will—were, after all, a classic and frequently aired rumor. The Nun of Monza from Alessandro Manzoni’s
The Betrothed
, and Denis Diderot’s novel
The Nun
are probably the best known literary examples of
these stories.
⁷⁰
And Katharina was a “stately” matron, making allegations against an attractive young novice mistress with “angelic looks”: Sallua couldn’t entirely rule out envy as a possible motive.

But the allegation of “pretense of holiness” against Maria Luisa must have made the inquisitor prick up his ears. Combating women who claimed to be living saints, or were honored as such by their devotees, was one of the Holy Office’s “sacred duties.” And Katharina was making a double accusation: first against the dead founder, and secondly against the young madre vicaria. The Inquisition had to act on this. Katharina’s use of the words
affettata santità
, for the religious offense of feigned holiness suggested she had received professional advice. This must have come from either Hohenlohe or Wolter. If the princess hadn’t been able to name a specific offense against the Faith—if she had continued to focus on the poisoning attempts—then her complaint wouldn’t have fallen within the Inquisition’s remit. Her cousin and her new spiritual guide had considered this carefully. They also seem to have coached Katharina on the reason for making her complaint, which she cited several times: she was simply fulfilling the moral obligation that had been laid out for her in confession.

THE SECRET OF SANT’AMBROGIO

Sallua was confronted with the monstrous scale of Katharina’s accusations against the convent only on careful reading of her written denunciation. It must have taken his breath away.

Sant’Ambrogio had a secret. At first, Katharina had no idea what this might be. But three months after she entered the convent on March 27, 1858, she knew that something that “frequently occupied the community” had been kept from her.
⁷¹
Through her conversations with the madre vicaria, she became aware of the existence of “some kind of secret.” “She led me to understand that the father confessor had decided it was not yet time to reveal it to me.” She soon sensed this was somehow connected with “influences of a supernatural kind,” but comforted herself with the thought that “such naïve souls” as her new Roman sisters could more easily obtain their spiritual edification from those miraculous tales than from abstract theological tracts.
⁷²

Of course, had she been able to interpret Reisach’s cryptic remarks, she might have been forewarned about this, as Katharina remarked self-critically in her
Erlebnisse
. Before she entered the convent, the cardinal had explained to her that in a southern country such as Italy one was frequently confronted with unusual or supernatural occurrences. “Strange and remarkable things might take place around her.” The Italians’ lively characters would make things seem very different from what she was used to, coming from cool, rationalist Germany. But in a place like Rome, where a “living faith grasps and maintains everything with a freshness and strength that we Germans can hardly conceive of … there also exist struggles and temptations quite alien to our experience.” Reisach had warned Katharina not to let herself “be unsettled or disturbed by such things.”
⁷³

The cardinal’s words reveal his own enthusiasm for Latin European sentimental forms of Catholic devotion, and his rejection of an Enlightened, rational religious practice that was common in Germany. He was particularly fascinated by transcendental religious phenomena: in every single hour he was prepared for manifestations of the Sacred, especially in Rome. There was no doubt in his mind that “poor souls,” the spirits of the dead, could take up contact with this world from the other side at any time.
⁷⁴
So the princess saw nothing unusual in the fact that the refectory readings in Sant’Ambrogio often mentioned “ecstasies, miracles and apparitions.” Admittedly, she criticized these readings for overstimulating the imagination of her fellow nuns, and would have preferred solid “religious instruction.” This might have imparted the necessary basic Christian knowledge that the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio were wholly lacking—as the princess soon noticed.
⁷⁵
But, following Reisach’s advice, she put their enthusiasm for supernatural religious phenomena and miracles down to their southern mentality and their lack of educational achievement. At first, she didn’t see anything dangerously heretical. And her new father confessor, Padre Peters, managed to allay the princess’s “first serious concerns.”
⁷⁶

However, the nuns were still hiding something from her: they would stop talking abruptly when Katharina approached them; they would slip into a Roman dialect that the princess didn’t understand; they dropped obscure hints. It was only after she was admitted as a novice on September 29 that Padre Peters and Cardinal Reisach were finally prepared to come clean and lift the veil of secrecy. They had
kept from her the fact that the founder of the Franciscan community of Sant’Ambrogio, Mother Agnese Firrao, had been condemned as a false saint by the Roman Inquisition, and sent into exile. They evidently feared that this revelation would have kept the princess from entering the convent.

This secret was the first point of Katharina’s denunciation. She complained that despite her conviction, Agnese Firrao was still being honored as a real saint in Sant’Ambrogio. The nuns, and in particular Padre Peters, had played down the implications of the Holy Office’s verdict on their mother founder. Once Katharina had become a novice, they referred to Firrao in her presence as
La Beata Madre
and venerated her as a saint, even though the Church stipulated that this kind of cult was only for people it had officially beatified. “They showed me her scourges, and other instruments of mortification, and told me of the three pounds of raw flesh that fell from the Mother after a single flagellation. They always praised her extraordinary virtue,” the princess noted in her report. “In this convent they don’t even blush when they proclaim the holiness of Sister Maria Agnese; she surpasses almost all other saints.” In Sant’Ambrogio, the Inquisition was criticized for having passed a clearly wrong judgment when it found Agnese Firrao guilty of false holiness. According to Katharina, the nuns regarded numerous items owned by their “saint” as contact relics: clothes, embroidery, and in particular three portraits done in oils. The confessors were working on a “saint’s life” of Firrao, which would be read aloud to the community once it was finished. The founder’s prayers, mottoes, letters, and messages had been painstakingly collected. On high feast days, “poems were recited, glorifying the blessed Maria Agnese, depicting her surrounded by angels, and nuns who had passed on.” On these occasions, “words of praise for the current madre vicaria were put into the mouth of the ‘Beata Madre,’ calling her ‘her joy, her treasure, the brightest of her stars.’ ”