The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (58 page)

The money doesn’t seem to have lasted long. Maria Luisa had not only parted ways with the Church; she had fallen out with her family as well. And once she had been “freed,” she couldn’t return to the asylum or a convent jail. She was mentally and physically broken. The judgment of Sant’Ambrogio, and the distance she had fallen as a result, had caused her—if we believe her father—to lose all faith. The woman who had once been the Virgin Mary’s favorite daughter could find no place for herself in this world. The former saint landed first in the madhouse, and then in the gutter.

If we believe Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, then before Maria Luisa vanished from history, there was one final encounter between the former novice mistress and her former novice Luisa Maria, Katharina von Hohenzollern. It must have been during the
princess’s visit to Rome in the spring of 1872 that a “poor woman” visited her apartment.
⁸⁷
“She invited her in—and there stood the madre vicaria. Her heart stood still. But the unhappy, broken, and aged woman, who had retained none of her former beauty, threw herself at her feet and beseeched her for forgiveness. She had recently left prison and was in the depths of misery, literally on the point of starvation.” Katharina, who had inwardly “already forgiven her,” did not refuse her pleas for help, and saved the unhappy woman from “complete despair.”
⁸⁸

From this description, it would seem that forgiveness had at least brought an end to the conflict that had been the catalyst for the Sant’Ambrogio trial. There was no more enmity between the two women: the “saint” Maria Luisa and the “unbeliever” Katharina, the poisoner and her victim. And neither of the two former nuns would have to face the Final Judgment unreconciled. But this may have just been wishful thinking. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe’s story of reconciliation cannot be corroborated by other sources. Even if it were true, it would probably have made little difference to the fact that the Sant’Ambrogio affair left Maria Luisa a broken woman. The story of the former madre vicaria and novice mistress faded away into the darkness of history. In her case, the Inquisition ultimately achieved its aim of
Damnatio memoriae
.

A HERETIC WRITES DOGMA

Unlike Maria Luisa, Kleutgen got away incredibly lightly, despite the serious nature of the charges against him. He himself said later that the Holy Office had sentenced him to “five years of imprisonment in the Inquisition’s cells” for
formalem haeresim
(formal heresy). But the cardinals and the pope had rendered the judgment increasingly lenient, and in the end it was reduced to just two years of incarceration in a Jesuit house outside Rome.
⁸⁹
Kleutgen served his sentence in a sanitorium and house of retreat in Galloro, a picturesque location near the Castle of Ariccia on Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome. At the time, this house was frequently used for rest and recuperation by the editors of the
Civiltà Cattolica
, the Jesuit journal.
⁹⁰
Kleutgen had close connections with this group, and in Galloro he also had the requisite leisure time to press ahead with his
Theology of Times Past
. In short, his stay there didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to incarceration “in the Inquisition’s cells.” Unlike Maria Luisa, who fell into a void, Kleutgen was caught by his order’s community, which had plenty of influence within the Curia of Pope Pius IX.

After just a year and a half, in October 1863, Kleutgen returned to Rome. There he resumed his work as a teacher of rhetoric at the Collegium Germanicum.
⁹¹
Outwardly, the affair seemed to have caused him only minimal damage. He may no longer have been assigned a place in the order’s leadership, but he was allowed to return to his beloved Germanicum, and had enough time to complete his major work on new scholasticism. His influence on Church policy, in particular the development of the Catholic magisterial authority, was undiminished. Even Kleutgen himself marveled at this in retrospect: “Remarkably, those very cardinals who had not long since convicted me
ob formalem haeresim
, afterwards treated me just as if nothing had happened.”

Cardinal Reisach in particular proved very well disposed to Kleutgen, visiting him in Galloro in 1862–1863. When the pope asked Reisach to “procure a theological evaluation on a very important matter,” Reisach asked Kleutgen, who took on the job at once. Reisach handed the text to the pope and another senior member of the Curia, and both were “astonished” at the quality of the votum. In response to their inquiries, Reisach revealed the secret of the censor’s identity. In light of the “aptitude” displayed in this
votum
, Pius IX allowed Kleutgen to return from exile to Rome straightaway. Not long before, the Jesuit general Petrus Beckx had also gone to the pope to beg for mercy on Kleutgen’s behalf.
⁹²
Even as a condemned man and a heretic, Kleutgen had proved faithful to the cause, and the pope was merciful.

But what was this extremely important theological matter that led to the Jesuit’s immediate reprieve? Reisach had a hand in two pieces of Church policy during 1862–1863 to which Kleutgen may have contributed a votum. One was the brief
Gravissimas inter
, of December 11, 1862, and the other was the brief
Tuas libenter
, of December 21, 1863. Both papal documents rested on a concept that Kleutgen had developed as a censor of the Congregation of the Index during the 1850s. His idea made it easier to defame modern, non-new-scholastic theologians as unorthodox, and place them on the
Index of Forbidden Books
.

Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and had himself and his successors declared infallible by the First Vatican Council. He was beatified in the year 2000 by Pope John Paul II. (
illustration credit 9.2
)

Very soon after Kleutgen had been convicted of heresy, Pius IX enshrined this model, which had initially been used only within the Congregation of the Index, as official Church doctrine. It was the concept of the “ordinary magisterium,” which is still of central importance today.
⁹³
Of course, at the same time Joseph Kleutgen was “inventing” this concept, Giuseppe Peters was acting on religious convictions that the Inquisition would later class as heretical.

The ordinary magisterium makes its first doctrinal appearance in 1863, in
Tuas libenter
. This brief was principally directed against the Munich Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, and his speech at the academic conference he had organized in Munich.
⁹⁴
The conference had been intended to bridge the divide within German theology between Roman and German theologians, new scholastics and modern thinkers—though after Döllinger’s caustic opening address, this was clearly doomed to failure. Döllinger called Italian theology
“gloomy and church-yardish.” The “old tenement knocked together by the scholastics” had fallen into disrepair. A new structure could only be built using both “eyes of theology”: history and philosophy.
⁹⁵

Prior to
Tuas libenter
, the concept of an ordinary magisterium had been unknown. There was only the sacred magisterium of the councils and the pope. On the rare occasions when there was no other option, and it was the only way to secure a religious truth, this teaching authority would turn a tenet into a formal dogma. Among other things, this led to the articles of the creed being set down in writing by the Church’s early councils. But theologians were free to discuss all questions of faith that hadn’t been defined by the sacred magisterium. The essential task of this sacred magisterium was to act as a shepherd, observing and protecting tradition, rather than adding to the
Depositum fidei
.
⁹⁶
“The Deposit of Faith was not something presented by the magisterium; rather, the bishops were able to testify to it because it was believed.”
⁹⁷

Going against this tradition, Kleutgen defined the relationship between the papal magisterium and the teaching authority of the theologians in a completely new way. In addition to the sacred magisterium, he proposed an ordinary magisterium for the pope and Curia that would be exercised daily, and would be equally binding. Döllinger’s address, which had made a plea for theology’s freedom from Roman paternalism, was the catalyst that set this in motion. The Munich historian believed that in future only dogmatic errors, offenses “against the clear universal teaching of the Church,” should be denounced and investigated in Rome. Theologians should be given complete freedom in all other fields, which made up the majority of their work—including the freedom to make mistakes. The theological weapons of reason and argument were the only things that should be used against errors that had not been defined solemnly by the Church’s magisterial decision.
⁹⁸

The new scholastic and Ultramontanist camp saw this as an attack on them. They wrote an opposing statement, and denounced Döllinger’s speech and the entire conference to Rome. And Rome, unfortunately for Döllinger, was home to his old archenemy, who had spent years waiting for a chance to have his revenge: Cardinal Reisach. Reisach believed that in 1855 the Munich theologian had used his influence on the Bavarian government to get Reisach “promoted”
away from Munich. The denunciation of Döllinger offered Reisach the opportunity to take revenge on an academic he believed was blinded by his pride in his own intellect. He now had the pope on his side. And, once again, he enlisted Kleutgen in his mission—hence Reisach’s visit to Galloro.

The real incendiary power of Kleutgen’s idea was revealed in the
Tuas libenter
brief, which said that in Germany there was a widespread “false opinion against the old school.” It also referred to the “false” philosophy practiced in connection with this.
⁹⁹
The term “old school” was at least an indirect allusion to the first volume of Kleutgen’s
Theologie der Vorzeid
, which had been published in Münster in 1853. But the reference to “false” philosophy may have been directed at Jakob Frohschammer,
¹⁰⁰
who was teaching in Munich at that time, and had been placed on the
Index
for philosophical errors a few years previously, at Kleutgen’s urging. He was one of new scholasticism’s most steadfast opponents in Germany, and was also an enemy of the Jesuits. It was no coincidence that
Tuas libenter
was addressed to the archbishop of Munich, Gregor von Scherr.
¹⁰¹
He was not only responsible for the area in which the Munich conference had taken place, but also for Frohschammer, who taught there. Kleutgen at least inspired this brief, if he didn’t write it. In any case, the newly accessible sources in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith allow us to identify him as the real “inventor” of the ordinary magisterium of the pope and Curia.

Jakob Frohschammer’s work
Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen
(On the Origin of Human Souls) was denounced to the Congregation of the Index in 1855.
¹⁰²
Thomas Aquinas famously taught that the human embryo was progressively imbued with a soul: it gained first a plant and then an animal soul, and a human soul developed after this. The question discussed among theologians was whether this progression should be thought of in creationist or generationist terms—whether God had to perform an act of creation for each of the three successive souls, or whether the succession proceeded automatically as the fetus developed, from the initial spark it received from its parents in the act of conception. Frohschammer argued in favor of the generationist position.

The secretary of the Congregation of the Index looked over the matter, and initiated a trial. The votum was entrusted to none other
than Joseph Kleutgen. He clearly thought the Munich philosopher’s work on generationism was an open-and-shut case, as his report showed: it was barely eight pages long. But the question of generationism versus creationism was far from the focus of Kleutgen’s interest. For him, this was more about the fundamental question of what counted as binding doctrine, and what didn’t. Creationism had never been defined by the Church as an article of faith, which was why Frohschammer assumed that he was permitted to argue for an alternative model. Kleutgen opposed this view, saying that since the seventh century at the latest, it had been the unanimous doctrine of the pope, bishops, and good theologians that generationism was “close to heresy.” At the very least, it had been viewed “as erroneous and highly audacious.” It was this seemingly uninterrupted consensus within the Church that meant Frohschammer’s work had to be judged heretical.
¹⁰³