The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (57 page)

Costantino Patrizi was able to continue establishing his position as “the most influential Roman cardinal of the Pian era.” His bigotry was notorious. When Pius IX returned, exhausted, from his exile in Gaeta, and requested a cup of meat broth to fortify him, Patrizi was deeply dismayed. The pope was trying to break the fast: his return fell on a Friday, a fast day. Visions were as much a part of his piety as they were Pius IX’s.
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While people admired Patrizi for his piety and his strictness, they also maligned his modest intellectual abilities and lack of political skill. Patrizi was the “epitome of the donkey’s ignorance combined with the stubbornness of a mule, the whole united with a strong dose of piety, which towers above his bigotry, and borders on fetishism.”
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Despite this, Patrizi’s heritage, his excellent connections, the Jesuits’ support, and the numerous offices he held made him the most influential cardinal in the city of Rome. While remaining cardinal vicar, he also became prefect of the Congregation of Rites, and secretary of the Holy Office. In 1860 he was made a cardinal bishop, and was
given the suburbicarian episcopal sees of Porto and Santa Ruffina. In 1870, when he was cardinal bishop of Ostia and Velletri, he even became deacon of the College of Cardinals. He died on December 17, 1876. An insider in Rome is said to have remarked after his death: “With him, the College of Cardinals and Church have lost no leading light, but they have lost a model of piety and priestly virtue.”
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Patrizi’s wealth of offices makes the fact that he probably never understood the real background and implications of what happened in Sant’Ambrogio all the more tragic.
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Patrizi wasn’t honored with all these titles because of his abilities or services, but because of his noble pedigree and his spiritual kinship with Pius IX. If competence and professionalism, rather than patronage and clientelism, had determined how leading roles in the Curia were assigned, and if the cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio had really understood his duty, Maria Luisa probably wouldn’t have been allowed to perpetuate her false cult and gain such a hold over the convent. This was a personal failure by Patrizi, but it was also the failure of a system that didn’t perceive his incompetence, and even rewarded it by continuing to promote him through the clerical hierarchy of the Curia.

A SAINT IN THE MADHOUSE

Maria Luisa Ridolfi must have been an extremely self-confident and attractive young woman. Many people spoke of her extraordinary beauty and her winning charm. She was well aware of the effect she had on both men and women, and made deliberate use of her attractiveness. She wound the Americano around her little finger. She spent the night in bed with the learned theologian Joseph Kleutgen, who put her beauty and grace on a par with the Virgin Mary’s. But her physical allure wasn’t her only weapon: Maria Luisa also had an irresistible charisma. Even the Princess von Hohenzollern, who was not easily moved, had been wholly enthusiastic about her to begin with.

Maria Luisa came from a humble background, which she had tried to escape through her entry into a convent.
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As a young girl, she was sexually abused by the then abbess of Sant’Ambrogio, and immediately afterward started to have visions and ecstasies, which gradually
escalated over the years. It is impossible to say for sure whether these supernatural activities were an awful reaction to the things she had experienced. But the possibility is suggested by the fact that in the nineteenth century, Marian visions were frequently associated with a “collection of symptoms: poverty, dependency, sickness, the role of a social outsider, or a crucial experience of physical and emotional vulnerability.”
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The stigmatized seer Maria von Mörl’s mystical experiences started after she was abused by her father.
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Maria Luisa’s suffering—in her case, severe headaches—was something else she had in common with other ecstatic women, like the “bride of suffering” Anna Katharina Emmerick. However, Maria Luisa took things even further. She used the “language of the ecstatic body” not just as a “feminine crisis-management strategy” and a “way of expressing suffering,” but in a conscious and targeted way to manipulate those around her.
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Maria Luisa never wanted to find herself standing in the shade again. She wasn’t going to carry on being one of life’s losers. It was only natural that she should follow the example of female mystics from history, and portray herself as a nun with a direct line to God. And she had the perfect environment for this: supernatural phenomena weren’t exactly rare in Sant’Ambrogio, as things stood. Backed by a divine authority, Maria Luisa was gradually able to accumulate power, first within the convent, and then in parts of the Curia. Her direct connection to heavenly powers made her closer to God than any priest or bishop, and even the pope himself. She could always answer objections from ordained men by saying: and did the Mother of God tell you that herself? And—as crazy as it sounds—Maria Luisa and her feminine, mystical strategy made some headway in the masculine, clerical hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
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The fact that theologians and cardinals genuinely believed in Maria Luisa is only understandable against the backdrop of the miracle addiction of Rome’s religious milieu in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the apocalyptic mood stirred up by the gradual shrinking of the Papal States, and the prospect of Rome’s occupation by Italian nationalist troops, people expected heavenly powers to intervene at any moment, to protect the pope and the Curia. And naturally, the pope himself performed miracles on an almost daily basis, as more than a few of his contemporaries believed.
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But Maria Luisa wanted more. She wasn’t content with controlling the simple, pious women in Sant’Ambrogio, and manipulating men of the cloth. She wanted to create a legacy that would forever be associated with her name. And so she began to formulate a plan that would make her the next Agnese Firrao: she would found a new convent, an offshoot of Sant’Ambrogio, with herself as abbess. But she needed money for this—a lot of money, and the protection of influential churchmen.

Part of the tragedy of this beautiful young nun’s story is that it was the preparations for this masterstroke that led to catastrophe. Cardinal Reisach had finally put the money to finance the new institution within her reach. Katharina von Hohenzollern was very wealthy, and had put her widow’s inheritance into a convent fund. The Virgin Mary soon laid claim to her: “She must be mine, the princess.” But nobody had reckoned with the German noblewoman’s mentality, which was radically different from that of her Italian sisters. The princess saw through Maria Luisa, and the story ended with poisoning attempts and a trial before the Holy Office.

The churchmen who had previously hung on Maria Luisa’s lips and breasts, and venerated her as a living saint, now dropped her like a hot potato. The Holy Office’s all-male tribunal believed them when they said they’d been deceived. Their claims chimed with contemporary clichés about women: what else could one expect from the weaker sex, the daughters of Eve, who were so easily seduced by evil and then seduced men in turn? The powerful men, the cardinal protectors, members of the Curia, and father confessors, should have realized what was going on from the start. They should have provided pastoral support to Maria Luisa when she was abused as a child and young woman, supporting her on a personal and a spiritual level. Now she alone would be punished for all the things that the churchmen’s false faith had allowed to happen, while the eminent gentlemen themselves got off scot-free.

Of course, we must not forget that Maria Luisa had confessed to several murders, and a secular court might well have sentenced her to death.
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In accordance with the regular criminal law of the Papal States in the nineteenth century, “every planned and premeditated killing” carried the death penalty as well. A poisoner couldn’t expect the authorities to be any more lenient—in fact, while executions were
usually carried out by beheading, the law stipulated an even worse fate for those who had poisoned their victims. They were executed by being shot in the back.
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But the blood of priests and members of religious orders was seldom shed. In the Papal States, they held the so-called
privilegium fori
, according to which they couldn’t be tried before a secular court for civil or criminal offenses.
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It was very rare for them to be handed over to the jurisdiction of secular courts and executed. This only really happened to those who stubbornly refused to abjure in cases of heresy, or had committed a capital offense and were dismissed from the priesthood. And the Inquisition tribunal wasn’t looking for capital crimes: its sole focus was heresy, next to which murder and attempted murder were almost classed as secondary offenses, the results of false belief.

Maria Luisa was never allowed to speak publicly about the involvement of clerics in the whole affair. The young nun remained alone, imprisoned in cloistered isolation and cut off from the world.
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During the trial, from December 1859 until May 1860, Maria Luisa was held in the convent of Purificazione, where her “strange behavior” was noted. The abbess then requested that she be transferred elsewhere. The first five years of her monastic imprisonment in Buon Pastore, from 1862 to 1867, seem to have passed without incident. However, she then became “restless,” and started behaving oddly. She roamed the convent day and night, upsetting the nuns with her crazy talk. She started to become violent, and finally could no longer be controlled. She even endangered a nun’s life by trying to “compress her throat.”

In light of this, on July 29, 1868, the Holy Office decided to place Maria Luisa in the Casa della Penitenza alle Terme prison.
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People there soon began to have serious doubts about her mental health. “Here she has been living in quite an animal fashion, and showing clear signs of mental confusion,” as a report to the cardinals of the Inquisition stated.
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The prison physician, Doctor Caetani, described Maria Luisa as “a woman as excited as a wild animal, who suffers excessive outbreaks of the nervous system. However, I do not believe I have been able to discern a true madness.”
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Expert knowledge was necessary to reach a conclusive diagnosis here.

The tribunal followed the doctor’s suggestion on January 20, 1869, and had Maria Luisa committed to the Ospizio dei Dementi,
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Rome’s lunatic asylum. The doctors there diagnosed a mental “disharmony,” in addition to physical weakness. Maria Luisa’s mind had been thrown completely off balance, and she displayed strong kleptomaniac tendencies. She stole everything she could find, and stubbornly denied having done so. She had developed a kind of mantra, denying over and over again that she had ever had a religious vocation. She claimed to have lived an orderly, secular life. She had evidently repressed her convent past, and all the experiences bound up with it. The doctors told her several times that she had entered a convent at the age of thirteen. “But she understood nothing”—or she refused to understand.

Maria Luisa didn’t seem to be responding to any kind of therapy, so the doctors suggested she be allowed to live with her family under house arrest. Pius IX approved this decision on June 30, 1869, with the proviso that her father must guarantee to keep watch over her and prevent her from causing any more damage. She should continue to live as a nun at home. It was impressed upon her that she should give no cause for future complaints.

After little more than a year, in mid-1870, Domenico Ridolfi appealed to the Holy Office, telling them he couldn’t keep his daughter with him any longer. She had plunged his entire household into chaos, and was “unruly.” “She just roamed around all day when she was at home, crashing about and screaming, she treated her sisters like whores, laying hands on them.… She denied God and hell,” he complained. Following a ruling on July 1, 1870, Maria Luisa was taken back to Buon Pastore.

Just a few weeks later, in October 1870, Italian troops occupied Rome and released her. She claimed to have been imprisoned on purely religious grounds. She explained to the Italian authorities that her trial before the Holy Office eight years previously had merely been a “question of religious conflict between Franciscans and Dominicans,” into which she had been drawn quite innocently. The picture she painted of herself as the victim of an arbitrary, inhuman religious court, made use of existing prejudices against the Inquisition. As far as Rome’s new lay administration was concerned, she was preaching to the choir.

Finally, on October 23, 1871, Maria Luisa’s case was brought to trial before the civil court of Rome. Maria Luisa, represented by her
lawyer, Orlando Fiocchi, was pitted against the Holy Office, represented by the lawyer Severino Tirelli.
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The former novice mistress requested the return of her dowry, to the sum of 1,300 scudi, plus an adequate pension and the restitution of her honor, which had been damaged by her wrongful conviction. In a modern state like Italy, a person couldn’t be punished for divergent religious beliefs that opposed the papal system. Maria Luisa and her lawyer made good use of this principle.

Severino Tirelli, the Holy Office’s lawyer, made it clear that the judgment of 1862 had covered not only religious but capital offenses. However, he didn’t go into detail. The Church was desperate to avoid any further aggravation of the already tense situation between state and Church that had developed since 1870. Revelations about Sant’Ambrogio would have been just what the new Italian bureaucracy was waiting for. Tirelli was thus quick to offer a settlement on behalf of the Inquisition—though not without mentioning the immense costs that Maria Luisa had racked up for the Holy See since 1859, and referring pointedly to the asylum doctors’ evaluation of her mental state. Her accommodation in various jails and institutions had cost a total of 4,473.76 scudi. Nevertheless, the Church was prepared to return the dowry of 500 scudi that Maria Luisa had paid on her entry to Sant’Ambrogio. Maria Luisa didn’t accept this offer, insisting she wanted the 1,300 scudi she originally requested. However, on May 2, 1872, the tribunal ruled that she should receive 500 scudi, which corresponded to 2,687 Italian lire.