The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (53 page)

The Verdict and Its Consequences

CONSULTORS, CARDINALS, POPE: THE VERDICT

Once the investigating court had concluded the offensive process, it turned to the deciding level of the Holy Tribunal once more. The judges had summarized the interrogations of Maria Luisa, the abbess, Leziroli, and Kleutgen into four written
Ristretti
, listing the misdemeanors for which they had obtained confessions or conclusive proof. Based on these, the consultors of the congregation had to formulate a suggested decision. Then the cardinals would arrive at a verdict, which the Holy Office’s assessor would present to the pope for a final pronouncement.

The consultors always met on a Monday, and on January 27, 1862, they discussed the case of Sant’Ambrogio at length.
¹
There were sixteen members present.
²

First, they addressed the consistent disregard that the nuns and confessors of Sant’Ambrogio, and their supporters in the Curia, had shown for the verdict passed on Agnese Firrao in 1816. The Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition saw this as an assault on its authority, and the wound had to be treated. The consultors were united on the first point of their
votum:
under threat of the harshest punishment, the nuns and confessors—in particular the special devotee of Firrao,
Padre Leziroli—should be made to acknowledge once and for all that the decree against Firrao of February 8, 1816, had “never been lifted.” From that moment on, nobody would ever be allowed to say it had. There was to be no more veneration of Agnese Firrao, “whether verbal or written, private or public, direct or indirect, through word or deed.”

In the second point of their
votum
, the consultors declared themselves unanimously in favor of dissolving Sant’Ambrogio. The pope had already been considering this, in any case. Furthermore, the nuns and confessors should be given an ultimatum: they must hand over every copy of the order’s Rule and constitutions, and all Firrao’s other writings to the Holy Office at once, on pain of excommunication.

Turning their attention to the principal defendant, the former novice mistress and vicaress Maria Luisa Ridolfi, all the consultors present agreed that the charge of pretense of holiness had been clearly proven. The heresy of Molinosism was at work here once again, and was named as the root cause of all the other crimes. Maria Luisa should therefore make a formal abjuration of her faults before the Inquisition, and should be sentenced to monastic imprisonment in absolute isolation. She should not be allowed to communicate with anyone outside the convent walls. She must also stay away from the convent gate and the outer walls; this was a total ban on contact with the outside world. For three years, she should take only bread and water on Fridays, and for the rest of her life she must pray the Rosary every Saturday and beg forgiveness for her sins. She should also be assigned an “educated, clever” confessor, who would lead this lost soul back onto the right path.

The consultors couldn’t agree on how long Maria Luisa should remain in prison. Four voted for a sentence of ten years, with strict fasting and other ascetic exercises. She should also be made to wear a cilice. In view of the severity of her crimes—in particular the poisoning attempts, and the “sin of sodomy”—one member was in favor of lifelong imprisonment, and denying her the sacraments. In his opinion, she should only be allowed to receive Holy Communion on the feasts of Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas.

Abbess Maria Veronica Milza should also renounce her errors and misdemeanors in a ceremony before the Inquisition. After this, she should remain in monastic imprisonment and no longer be permitted
to wear the black veil of a choir nun. She should be barred forever from making any contact with the former nuns and confessors of Sant’Ambrogio, or any other persons who had been connected to the convent. The length of the abbess’s sentence was the only thing the consultors couldn’t agree on. While ten of them advocated a term of three years, another four wanted to leave the decision entirely up to the cardinals. After serving her sentence, Maria Veronica should be accommodated in a suitable house of pious women, and live there as a simple nun.

The consultors had a lengthy discussion on the fate of Giuseppe Leziroli, the first father confessor and spiritual director of Sant’Ambrogio. All were naturally agreed that he should perform a vigorous ceremonial abjuration, the
abjuratio de vehementi
.
³
But they couldn’t agree on whether he should be banned from acting as a confessor for a limited period only. Two of the consultors wanted to ban him from taking confession from women. Five thought he should still be allowed to take confession from monks. But in all eventualities, he should be prohibited from contacting the nuns, and anyone else connected with Sant’Ambrogio, for the rest of his life.

When it came to sentencing Leziroli, six consultors voted for a term of five years’ imprisonment. Four voted for one year, and one even argued for a single month. One consultor—probably a Jesuit—even tried to exonerate Leziroli entirely, and argued for a lenient punishment on these grounds. Another raised serious accusations against him, and advocated a drastic escalation of his punishment. He saw the Jesuit as the principal perpetrator in this case, since he was the driving force behind the propagation of Agnese Firrao’s false holiness. And this was “a false doctrine, wayward, erroneous and unjust to the Holy See, as well as a suspected heresy.” This consultor suggested ten years’ imprisonment in a house belonging to the Jesuit order, with ten years of silence and ten days of spiritual exercises every year as penance. One consultor abstained from this controversial discussion altogether. As the consultors were divided on Leziroli’s case, the cardinals were asked for their thoughts.

Eleven of the consultors voted that Joseph Kleutgen should perform the
abjuration de formali
, the most rigorous renunciation the Inquisition could demand—though one argued for the
abjuratio de vehementi
. This should be followed by ten days of spiritual exercises in a house
belonging to the Society of Jesus, to be chosen by the order’s general. He was also to serve his sentence there, rather than in the Inquisition’s cells.
⁴

The length of Kleutgen’s sentence was the subject of some debate. Four consultors wanted to leave the decision up to the cardinals; three argued for five years; two for three years, and another two for ten years. Four consultors viewed his “sexual intercourse with virgins”—which he claimed to have performed with noble, spiritual intentions—as a heresy against the Decalogue’s commandment: “Thou shalt not commit fornication.”
⁵
These four viewed his sexual acts with Maria Luisa, including the French kisses and the special erotic blessing in the context of confession, as the effects of the same “Molinosistic heresy” already condemned elsewhere. They thought that, as a convicted heretic, Kleutgen should serve out his sentence in a correctional facility, the Pia Casa di Penitenza at Corneto,
⁶
rather than in a Jesuit house. Two of these four consultors were in favor of five years in Corneto, one suggested ten years, and the last just a single year.

One consultor (probably one of the two Jesuits) argued that Kleutgen had been deceived, and had corrected himself as soon as he had realized his error. Numerous bishops and cardinals had repeatedly praised Sant’Ambrogio as an exemplary convent. Kleutgen, the consultor said, had merely started following a tradition that had been sanctioned by the Church authorities, without asking too many questions. This consultor also tried to shield Kleutgen from the charge of heresy: “As far as I am aware, no religious verdict has been passed in this case, only a criminal verdict.” This would have made Kleutgen a morally unreliable priest—possibly even one who was involved in criminal actions—but not a heretic. However, the consultor was unable to get this suggestion past his colleagues.

The consultors may not have been able to agree on the length of Kleutgen’s sentence, but they were all certain that he should be banned from taking confession from men or women. He should also be forbidden from contacting any of the nuns from Sant’Ambrogio. Petrus Beckx, the Jesuit general, should appoint a suitable spiritual guide for Kleutgen, who, acting under the secret of the Holy Office, would inform him of the heretical principles that he had been accused of following. He should then renounce them all.

The Inquisition might have been expected to pass a long sentence for the offense of
Sollicitatio
—particularly as contemporary Catholic writing presented seduction in the confessional as a disgusting crime. An 1853 Catholic encyclopedia stated that monastic priests convicted of this should be punished with “exile, the galleys, life imprisonment, degradation and being delivered up to the secular judges.”
⁷
But in reality the Roman Inquisition treated these priests with extreme leniency: they were usually just assigned a penance, and had to spend a few days saying psalms. Members of their order who also happened to be consultors or cardinals of the Holy Office often made sure that the defendants could lie low in another monastery for a while.
⁸

The cardinals of the Holy Office considered the case of Sant’Ambrogio on February 5, 1862, on the basis of the votum from the consultors’ meeting.
⁹
They passed their advisors’ suggested decision on the first point (inculcating the validity of Firrao’s 1816 conviction) without further discussion. And the cardinals even went one step further than the consultors, who had suggested that all memory of the former convent of Sant’Ambrogio, and its mother founder, Agnese Firrao, should be destroyed. They ruled that her corpse should be exhumed from its grave in San Marziale in Gubbio, and placed in an anonymous, unidentifiable grave in a public graveyard.

The judgment that the sixteen consultors had suggested on Maria Luisa Ridolfi was passed with no alterations, and the sentence was set at twenty years. The cardinals also agreed with the consultors’ proposal for Abbess Maria Veronica Milza. Her sentence was to be one year; after this, she should be allowed to move to another suitable convent, with the permission of the cardinal vicar. Giuseppe Leziroli also received a year’s sentence, and a lifetime ban on taking confession. Joseph Kleutgen was to be given three years. He would also receive a special caution regarding the moral principles against which he had offended. The judgments against the abbess and the novice mistress were to be communicated privately to the nuns and confessors of the former convent.

On the evening of February 5, the Holy Office’s assessor, Raffaele Monaco La Valletta, read out the cardinals’ verdicts in the case of Sant’Ambrogio in a private audience with Pius IX.
¹⁰
The pope approved the decisions, with a few small changes. He requested that the exhumation and reburial of Firrao’s body be conducted under the
supervision of the bishop of Gubbio, and with the greatest secrecy, to avoid any public furor. The pope reduced Maria Luisa’s sentence to eighteen years—a comparatively mild punishment, considering she had confessed to the murder of several nuns. At the time, this would have incurred the death penalty in many countries. Pius IX reduced Kleutgen’s sentence to two years.

Was two years really an appropriate punishment for the serious offenses Kleutgen had committed? It’s clear where the pope’s sympathies lay in this trial. Kleutgen was an important theological advisor who, with Reisach acting as mediator, wrote texts and votums that allowed Pius IX to implement his policies and support his claim to universal power in the Church and the Papal States. The padre was part of his Jesuit network. Kleutgen and the Jesuits shored up the pope’s sovereignty—this called for care and leniency.

On February 12, another assembly of the cardinals made an addendum to the judgment.
¹¹
Sallua was unclear on whether the “formal and definite abjuration” in Kleutgen’s and Leziroli’s cases also meant they should be suspended from their priestly duties. This wasn’t stipulated in the text of the judgment, so the judges had to fall back on customary law. The Holy Office consistently forbade priests who had to abjure from celebrating Mass for a certain period. In the normal course of things, they were expected to lead Mass on a daily basis. The cardinals erred on the side of caution here and left the decision up to the pope, who banned both Jesuits from celebrating Mass for twenty days. The cardinals also noted that the previous week, they had discussed the destruction of Firrao’s grave in Gubbio, but not the final resting places of the two other abbesses, Maria Maddalena and Agnese Celeste della Croce. These women had also been venerated as living saints in Sant’Ambrogio. Their bodies would now also be exhumed and reburied in an anonymous place, without a headstone or any other marker.

These measures amounted to nothing less than a complete
damnatio memoriae:
everything that held the slightest memory of Sant’Ambrogio was to be wiped from history. This time, the Holy Office’s tribunal wanted to leave the field of battle as the ultimate victor. All graves that might be regarded as memorials had to be removed. All written records of the convent and, most importantly, its two false saints, had to disappear off the face of the earth—or rather, into the most
secret of all church archives, where the public wouldn’t be able to read them.

INTERNAL ABJURATIONS AND EXTERNAL SECRECY

The ceremonial abjuration was the high point of an Inquisition trial. The Spanish Inquisition’s public
auto-da-fés
, as captured in many famous paintings, shape our idea of these events to this day.
¹²
Galileo Galilei was forced to abjure on June 22, 1633, when the Inquisition made him renounce views based on his scientific observations. The event was made famous by, among other works, Bertolt Brecht’s play
Life of Galileo:
“I, Galileo Galilei, teacher of mathematics and physics at The University of Florence, renounce what I have taught, that the sun is the centre of the universe and motionless in its place, and that the Earth is not the centre and not motionless.”
¹³
However, there was no such public
abjuratio
in the case of Sant’Ambrogio. The ceremony was conducted in secret, and the public was not admitted. The convent’s secret was to be kept even (and especially) after the judgment.