The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (55 page)

The more time elapsed following these terrible events, the more the princess tried to find excuses for Kleutgen’s behavior. She must have remained oblivious to the fact that her denunciation had been the stick that stirred the theological wasp’s nest of Güntherians and new scholastics, enabling Wolter to take his revenge on Kleutgen. Most importantly, she never learned of Maria Luisa’s testimony, which painted Kleutgen as the real initiator of the poisoning attempts. If she had, she could hardly have judged her former confessor so charitably.

In her
Erlebnisse
(Experiences) dictated in 1870, Katharina was troubled by the question of how a “sensible man, an experienced priest, a great scholar” like Kleutgen could have fallen for a hoax perpetrated by “an uneducated nun” like Maria Luisa. “The certainty with which Kleutgen believed in her holiness is astonishing, as it can have been manifested to him through nothing more than what she
told him of it. But he would rather believe the most audacious claims than cast doubt upon her virtue.” The princess was sure that anyone would think “such a deception impossible”—and yet the Jesuit had been “completely deceived.”

She saw two main reasons for this. Women, she said, were naturally possessed of a fine, unerring sense for the detection of superficiality and dishonesty in members of their own sex, and could see through the “cunning and subtlety” with which they “sought to hide their failings.” But this quality was often absent in “knowledgeable, worthy men.” While they cast a “serious and critical” eye on all other facts and relationships, these men were blind when it came to women. “There may be a feature of the female character, which a man lacks completely, and which is therefore almost unfathomable to him”: namely, the ability “to present themselves differently, to take on an appearance that in no way corresponds to the reality.” Katharina’s second reason was that Kleutgen was totally inexperienced in pastoral care. “He had not lived much in the world. His main work was scholarly research. From the books by which he was almost always surrounded, he could have gained no knowledge of the world or of people.”
²⁹

A decade later, in 1879, the Sant’Ambrogio affair appeared in the German press for the first time, following a statement by the Church historian Johann Friedrich, who had become an Old Catholic (a movement that had come into existence in the wake of the First Vatican Council as a protest against the new infallibility dogma). But even then, Katharina refrained from speaking of it in public. This was the era of the
Kulturkampf
, an attempt by the Prussian government to undermine the Catholic Church’s influence over its state. Against this backdrop, Friedrich claimed that the Inquisition had sentenced Kleutgen to six years in jail as a result of his involvement in the poisoning of “a princess von Hohenzollern.”
³⁰
The princess wrote Kleutgen a sympathetic letter on March 23, 1879, in which she reminded him of “many a proof of priestly diligence and sympathetic concern” that he had shown her twenty years earlier. She said she had gathered from the press with “active regret” “that you have become the focus of lies and persecutions.” Katharina assured the Jesuit of her sympathy, and added that she would “remember [him] with respect.” She seemed to have forgotten the disappointment she had expressed over
her former confessor in her denunciation of 1859. Instead, she reiterated the conclusion she had reached in her
Erlebnisse:
the Jesuit hadn’t been a perpetrator, but a victim of Maria Luisa, like herself. In her letter, she remembered sadly “that we both experienced a very painful deception. We have both had to gaze into an abyss of errors committed by an unhappy soul, estranged from God.”
³¹

How did Pius IX behave toward Katharina? From the outset, the pope played a double game. For as long as he could, he internally conveyed the impression that the denunciation was not to be taken seriously. But in his personal dealings with the princess, Pius IX was affection personified. Once Katharina had spent some time with her cousin in Tivoli, and was on the road to recovery, the pope even allotted her an apartment in the papal palace. He jokingly called her the “Prioress of the Quirinal”
³²
and, when she expressed a desire to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he lent her his wholehearted support. This was actually quite convenient for him: it meant the plaintiff in the Sant’Ambrogio case would be absent from Rome from February 12, 1860, until well into the summer, and could take no further part in the trial. Three German Benedictines from Saint Paul Outside the Walls accompanied her on her journey to Palestine: her confessor, Maurus Wolter, his brother Placidus, and Anselm Nickes
³³
—all of them pupils of Günther.
³⁴
On September 29, 1860, the pope bade Katharina and the Wolter brothers farewell in a private audience.
³⁵
Katharina’s influence on the trial was eliminated long before it entered its most crucial phase. And from then on, she devoted her energy to another religious project: with Pius IX’s support, the Wolter brothers and Katharina wanted to found a Benedictine monastery. They first considered Altenburg, in the district of Mülheim am Rhein, then the village of Materborn in Kleve, and finally Beuron on the upper Danube.
³⁶

After many trials and tribulations, two marriages, and two attempts at convent life, the princess had finally found her true calling. God had put her to the test many times, but now He had given her her life’s work. In retrospect, she began to interpret her awful experiences in Sant’Ambrogio as a benevolent act of divine providence. Without the poisoning attempts, she would never have fled from the convent; without her escape, she would never have met Wolter Brothers; without them, she would never have come to know Benedictine spirituality or become the founder of a Benedictine monastery.

Princess Katharina during the last years of her life. She entered the history books as the founder of the Benedictine abbey of Beuron. (
illustration credit 9.1
)

At least, the princess described her experiences to her family on several occasions as providential, as her niece Maria von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe mentions in the memoir of her youth. After leaving Sant’Ambrogio, Katharina had been “a poor stray creature,” “without husband or child, without a goal, wandering through life looking for a path to follow, a work to which she could commit herself.” Then she encountered the Wolter brothers, “two enthusiasts in whom the fire of the first confessors burned.” Their aim was to renew the order of Saint Benedict. “And there it was: her path, the work that was worthy of her, and of her illustrious name and her burning heart! With unprecedented passion, she threw herself into this task. All her worldly wealth was poured into the service of the order. Her rare spirituality, her iron will, the influence that her rank and family gave her—all this now belonged to the two padres and their great plans.”
³⁷

The princess was to have her convent after all. The usual roles were reversed here: as a rule, powerful men founded convents for pious
women, but here, a powerful woman was founding a monastery for pious men. The founding of Catholic monasteries was prohibited in the Kingdom of Württemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden—a ban that lasted from German secularization in the early nineteenth century to the end of the German empire in 1918. However, Katharina was still able to do this within the Hohenzollern Duchies. The former Augustine abbey of Beuron on the Danube had been secularized in 1802, and now belonged to Katharina’s stepson, Karl Anton von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The princess bought it from him for the order of Saint Benedict in 1863.
³⁸
By 1868, the priory of Beuron had been made an independent Benedictine abbey, and Maurus Wolter was elected as its first abbot. During the
Kulturkampf
, from 1875 to 1887, the monastery was suppressed and the monks had to flee abroad. While they were away, the princess—as a good founder should—took care of the maintenance and administration of the buildings and lands. Once the conflict between state and Church was over, the monks were able to return to Beuron without any problems, and the Benedictine tradition continued almost uninterrupted.

For twelve years, Katharina had been “the protector of the abandoned monastery.” But when the Benedictines returned, she made the surprising decision to leave Beuron forever, and move to Freiburg. Her official line was that her baby had grown up, and she could now leave it to take care of itself. She longed for “complete freedom of my heart in silence and seclusion.” The climate was milder in Freiburg, she said, and she could obtain treatment from doctors in the university town whenever she needed it.
³⁹
But were these her real motives? There were rumors within her family about an increasing estrangement between the princess and Abbot Wolter. They wondered “what was going on between Saint Francis and Saint Clara?” On leaving the upper Danube valley, Katharina was said to have cried: “No, you will never have me here again, living or dead!”
⁴⁰
The day the princess left Beuron, July 7, 1890, marked the end of the abbey’s founding phase. And it was to be a double farewell: the following day, July 8, Maurus Wolter died suddenly.
⁴¹
His brother Placidus, whom Katharina had also met in Rome, was elected as the new abbot.

“What she was to Beuron is engraved for all time in the history of this blossoming archabbey.” This is how the princess’s biographer, Karl Theodor Zingeler, described her life’s crowning achievement.
⁴²
Katharina went down in history as the founder of the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron, which became the center of the important Beuronese Benedictine Congregation, and the famous Beuron Art School. The latter had a historical impact far beyond the confines of the Church.
⁴³

Princess Katharina Wilhelmine Maria Josepha von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, née Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, died in Freiburg on February 15, 1893, at the age of seventy-six. She was interred in the royal tomb in Sigmaringen.
⁴⁴
Her final resting place in the family vault befitted her status—though as the founder of a monastery, she could have been laid to rest in a founder’s grave beneath the high altar of the abbey church. She had already selected the place there for her sarcophagus.
⁴⁵
In spite of the apparent bad blood between abbot and founder in their final years, the princess’s name remains associated with a monastic success story unparalleled to this day. By contrast, her failure as a Catholic nun, and the convent scandal bound up with this, have been largely forgotten. Katharina—and of this she was firmly convinced—had found the place designated for her by God. Once again, He had worked in mysterious ways, and turned a curse into a blessing.
⁴⁶

A CARDINAL’S POISON PARANOIA

Hohenlohe, Katharina’s rescuer, made use of the unique chance that Kleutgen’s involvement in the Sant’Ambrogio affair gave him to take his revenge for the condemnation of Anton Günther. The Jesuit may have been formally convicted, but the titular bishop of Edessa ultimately failed in his aim. And Kleutgen’s friends and supporters—the cardinals Patrizi and Reisach and their Jesuit network, including the pope himself—knew exactly who had placed their comrade in this hot water. They may well have believed that Hohenlohe initiated the Sant’Ambrogio trial as a strategic move against new scholasticism and its chief thinkers. Whatever his motive, Hohenlohe had now taken up a clear position within the complex factions of the Roman Curia.

The case of Sant’Ambrogio acted as a catalyst for political and theological polarization within the Roman milieu. When Hohenlohe
had arrived in Rome in 1846, his thought had still been informed by the “religious romanticism of a seminarian” and an “enthusiasm for the Jesuit mastery of spiritual exercises.” The members of the Society of Jesus did everything they could to win over the German nobleman for their Counter-Reformation order. But, disillusioned by the flunkyism of the papal Curia, Gustav Adolf’s initial “desire to enter the Jesuit order, and fascination with the closed nature of Thomist philosophy,” soon grew into a preference for a more open, liberal Church.
⁴⁷
Hohenlohe’s charm allowed him to establish a good connection with Pius IX, even though the two men were starting to diverge politically and theologically. When the pope made his escape from the Revolution of 1848, Hohenlohe accompanied him into Neapolitan exile. Pius IX didn’t forget this, and, after his return to Rome, Hohenlohe was admitted to his innermost circle.