The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (56 page)

But, following the judgment of 1862, there was a growing distance between Hohenlohe and the pope, who turned increasingly toward the Curia’s Jesuit-dominated faction—in matters that went far beyond Church politics. His personal relationship with Hohenlohe also deteriorated. The German came from a noble family, and following an intervention from King Wilhelm I of Prussia he was made a cardinal in 1866, but he no longer had any influence in the Vatican. Hohenlohe had firmly positioned himself as a liberal, an opponent of new scholasticism, and a bitter enemy of the Jesuits. Now the empire struck back. Hohenlohe was sidelined. Nobody dragged one of
I Nostri
—“one of our own,” as the members of the Jesuit network described themselves—before the Holy Roman Inquisition and went unpunished. Each of Hohenlohe’s candidacies for a bishop’s see in Germany was shot down by the Jesuit faction. From 1868 to 1881, he made every effort to become bishop of Freiburg, and when this finally came to nothing, he was convinced it wasn’t the cathedral chapter there but his enemies in the Curia who were to blame. “The Jesuits have the pope so wrapped around their little finger that there is nothing to be done for me.”
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This lasting snub made Hohenlohe increasingly anti-Jesuit. He was the strongest opponent of papal infallibility within the Roman Curia, seeing it as a typical move by the Jesuit faction. “It is a bad time now, especially here,” he wrote to his brother Chlodwig, during the First Vatican Council. This meeting defined the infallibility and
universal jurisdiction of the pope as dogma. “Stupidity and fanaticism join hands and dance the Tarantella, making such a caterwaul that one cannot bear to look or listen.”
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Despite being a cardinal of the Curia, he felt he had been sidelined, shut out of the preparations, advice, and discussions. The supporters of the infallibility dogma, led by the Jesuits, had arranged things so that “the cardinals who do not belong to their faction are given as little as possible to do.”
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Hohenlohe didn’t take part in the final vote on the new dogma. He found its definition of papal infallibility “inopportune.” In his view, the council wasn’t free, and therefore the dogma was invalid. The day Pius IX “imposed” his agenda upon the council spelled the end of “the conciliar existence of this sad gathering.” As far as Hohenlohe was concerned, the First Vaticanum was no longer an ecumenical council. Up to this point, his argument had been no different from those of other opposing bishops and cardinals; around four fifths of the German episcopate had declined the infallibility dogma, and had left Rome before the final vote. But then Hohenlohe began an anti-Jesuit tirade, speaking with heavy sarcasm of the council’s progress without the now absent dissenting foreign bishops: “One can only imagine all the decisions being made in these meetings. Perhaps they are declaring the infallibility of the Jesuits and all their schemes.”
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Hohenlohe felt more and more isolated in Rome, and increasingly withdrew from public life. He spent most of his time at the Villa D’Este in Tivoli, which became his Tusculum. Here, he soon made a name for himself as a patron of the arts. The composer Franz Liszt spent a long time in Hohenlohe’s idyllic country manor, which the liberals celebrated as the “last echo of a life that was once so potent, like that of the Farnese and other Renaissance cardinals.”
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For Hohenlohe, it was an escape from Vatican intrigues and political machinations. The Curia cardinal was on the losing side, and his notion of a Church that was open to the world had no place in Pius IX’s Curia. Hohenlohe saw Rome as dominated by a pathological idea of the Church, of which Sant’Ambrogio was an extreme manifestation.

Once Rome had been occupied by Italian troops, Hohenlohe called for an agreement between the Italian king and the pope, and the Curia therefore began to view him as a traitor. In 1872, as a cardinal of the Curia, he even got Prince Otto von Bismarck to propose him as the German ambassador to the Holy See. This made things
impossible for him with both the Church and the state. For six years, from 1870 to 1876, he remained exclusively in Germany. He became an “aristocratic vagabond,” “haunting” the various residences of his many relatives and their extended family, like the Hohenzollerns in Berlin, and making marriage plans for all his single nieces.

Katharina von Hohenzollern and her onetime savior became increasingly estranged during these years. She couldn’t understand Hohenlohe’s opposition to the dogma of infallibility, or to Pius IX, with whom she remained in regular correspondence. She still had the greatest reverence for the pope, and spoke to him of her cousin’s “blindness.” “The poor man,” she said, was “not really aware of the great inconsistencies in his life, or he would not tarry so far from his post.”
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Since 1862, Hohenlohe had lost his head for politics completely. He gradually fell victim to a persecution complex, imagining a murderous Jesuit hiding behind every tree. The poison that had been administered to Katharina in Sant’Ambrogio had made the cardinal extremely paranoid about being poisoned himself. Hohenlohe was convinced that Kleutgen had been the real initiator of the attacks on his cousin, and placed him at the end of a long line of famous Jesuit poisoners. The idea that Jesuits not only prayed their adversaries into the grave, but also did away with them using poison, had been part of the standard repertoire of anti-Jesuit polemic for centuries.
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Unlike his great adversary Cardinal Reisach, Hohenlohe was unable to get a glimpse into the court files. He therefore didn’t know the exact outcome of the Inquisition’s investigation, which exonerated Kleutgen to some degree on this charge.

In 1878, the Old Catholic Johann Friedrich claimed that the Jesuit had been convicted by the Inquisition for his involvement in the poisoning of a Princess von Hohenzollern in the convent of Sant’Ambrogio. This information may have originated with Hohenlohe: Friedrich had been the cardinal’s council theologian during the First Vatican Council of 1870.
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Frustrated that Kleutgen and his movement were now steering the Church despite the Sant’Ambrogio affair, and that a convicted heretic was helping draft papal dogma, Hohenlohe had told the German theologian the whole story of the poisoning.
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And Friedrich then discredited the triumphant new scholastic Kleutgen in the press, calling him a poisoner and a
murderer—which was, in all likelihood, exactly what Hohenlohe had intended.

But in the cardinal’s eyes, the Jesuits had more than just the near-death of his cousin Katharina on their conscience. He was convinced they were trying to poison him as well. This meant he stopped eating and drinking anything at receptions and dinners outside his own household. Even when staying with his relatives, he no longer trusted the servants, imagining that they had all been bribed by the Jesuits. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe reported that, when he came to visit, her uncle had not accepted anything at all to eat or drink, “not even a glass of water, as he always imagined the Jesuits were trying to poison him. He could not bear them, and thought they were trying to pay him back for this.”
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It was only when his secretary and servant, Gustavo Nobile, whom he trusted absolutely and made his sole heir, had tasted food in his presence that Hohenlohe would eat it. His fear of poisoning was so great that every time he celebrated Holy Mass, Nobile had to try the Host and the Communion wine at the start of the service. Only if the taster still felt quite well at the start of the offertory did Hohenlohe allow them to be carried to the altar.
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Still, by the time of the conclave that followed Pius IX’s death in 1878, the cardinal seemed to have regained some political influence. His first aim was to get the liberal cardinal Alessandro Franchi elected as pope.
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When this proved impossible, he steered the Franchi group toward Gioacchino Pecci, who was then elected and became Pope Leo XIII. In return, Leo XIII made Franchi his cardinal secretary of state. Hohenlohe believed he could once again wield great political influence in the Vatican, through this member of the anti-Jesuit faction. However, Franchi died unexpectedly after only five months in office. Rumors immediately began circulating through the Curia that the Jesuits had had a hand in this. Hohenlohe was firmly convinced that Franchi had been poisoned by a member of the Society of Jesus.
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Three and a half decades after the poisonings in Sant’Ambrogio, Hohenlohe’s life was still shaped by his poisoning paranoia and his terror of the Jesuits. He even spoke of a “war of annihilation” being waged against him in the Vatican, and of “scoundrels” in the Curia.
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He tried to harm the Jesuits to the same degree he felt he was being persecuted by them. In March 1896, six months before his
death, he heard that Cardinal Georg Kopp
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had finally persuaded Hohenlohe’s brother, Reich Chancellor Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, to readmit the Jesuits to the German Empire. They had been banned there since 1872. Hohenlohe was outraged: “If this happens, I will excommunicate both of them”—the cardinal and the reich chancellor.
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Hohenlohe died of a heart attack on October 30, 1896, and was buried in the German graveyard, the Campo Santo Teutonico, in the shadow of Saint Peter’s.
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With him died a model of Catholicism that favored reconciliation with Protestants and the modern nation-states, the pragmatic solution of the Roman Question, and, above all, a simple, late-Enlightenment faith, suspicious of any tendency toward exaggerated mysticism, pseudo-Catholic irrationalism, and exalted forms of piety. The judgment in the Sant’Ambrogio affair had also been a judgment against a pathological form of Catholic mysticism, and at that time the skeptical Hohenlohe had had the authority of the Holy Office behind him. But Hohenlohe himself was now defamed as being un-Catholic. There was no longer a place for someone like him in a Church where—as he remarked—“infallibility … has become an epidemic.”
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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Hohenlohe’s political and theological opponents in the College of Cardinals, Reisach and Patrizi, fared rather differently. Their careers were not affected in the slightest by the Sant’Ambrogio affair. On the contrary, they continued to rise unhindered through Pius IX’s Curia. And no wonder: after all, neither of them had been in the dock, where they really belonged. Instead, the pope had installed them as judges of the highest religious tribunal specifically for this trial, even though both cardinals actually bore the ultimate responsibility for the catastrophe.

Reisach had introduced Katharina von Hohenzollern to the sisters of the Regulated Third Order of Holy Saint Francis. And he must have known what was going on there, since the convent’s second confessor was none other than his close friend Kleutgen. Reisach
apparently also had direct contact with Maria Luisa. The Virgin Mary had written a letter foretelling the founding of an offshoot of Sant’Ambrogio, with help from the “dowry of a foreign princess” who would enter the convent. This fact suggests the cardinal had informed the madre vicaria of the existence of Katharina’s convent fund—something only he knew about.

Reisach’s sympathies for the mysticism in Sant’Ambrogio in general, and for Maria Luisa in particular, were of a piece with his dependence on the stigmatized medium Louise Beck in Altötting. Even though the affair of “higher guidance” had overshadowed his personal life and made it impossible for him to continue as archbishop of Munich and Freising, or in Germany more generally, he didn’t learn from his mistakes. He allowed himself to be hoodwinked by Maria Luisa, just as he had by Louise Beck before her. And Reisach must have known that the goings-on in the convent wouldn’t remain hidden from Katharina for long: she was an educated lady, who came from an enlightened, aristocratic, interdenominational milieu. But his veneration of living female saints and mystical mediums blinded him to the approaching catastrophe.

In spite of this, he was still on the winning side in his struggle against modern theology and for new scholasticism. He was also very successful in his advocation of Ultramontanism, and a strict centralization of the Catholic Church. His problematic piety and a penchant for false mysticism didn’t hamper his rise through Pius IX’s Curia. In fact, he and the pope were united by their belief in the working of the supernatural in the natural world, and their weakness for the supernatural in general. Pius IX also gave Reisach a substantial role in the preparations for the First Vatican Council, making him the head of the influential Commission for the Secular Policy of the Church. In return, the cardinal made sure that only new scholastics were called as consultors, deliberately excluding renowned liberal German academic theologians.
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Reisach had been promoted to cardinal bishop of Sabina in 1868, and Pius IX gave him the honor of being named first president of the Council on November 27, 1869. But Reisach wasn’t able to take up this politically important office. Nor was he granted the opportunity to experience the greatest triumph of his lifelong labors: the dogmatization of papal infallibility. He fell ill in the fall of 1869, and retired to the Redemptorist monastery
of Contamine-sur-Arve in Savoy, where he died on December 16, 1869. His final resting place was a tomb in his titular church, Sant’Anastasia in Rome.
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When Pius IX announced the new dogma in the Vatican amid thunder and lightning on July 18, 1870, one of the most important advocates of papal infallibility had been dead for more than six months.

As cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio, Patrizi was also party to the convent’s secret. His mother had been an enthusiastic devotee of Agnese Firrao, so the young Costantino may even have known about the mother founder a great deal earlier. Leziroli and the abbess started sending him written updates on the continuing veneration of Firrao, and Maria Luisa’s visitations, after the Revolution of 1848. The cardinal was also the recipient of at least one letter from the Virgin. Patrizi was part of the network that kept a protective hand over the convent (which at this point had officially been suppressed), and tacitly tolerated its inhabitants’ consistent disregard for the Inquisition’s decree of 1816. In spite of this, no allegations were made against the cardinal secretary of the Inquisition during the trial. Even a highly motivated Dominican inquisitor like Sallua couldn’t investigate the head of his own authority. The members of the tribunal enjoyed self-evident immunity; any inquiry into their affairs was taboo.