The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (61 page)

In 1912, when Zingeler’s biography was published, it was obviously hard for the Catholic milieu and the royal house of Sigmaringen to bear the involvement of a Catholic noblewoman in this sort of affair. With the fierce disputes that the crisis of modernism had brought with it still raging,
²⁸
it was easiest to remain silent about the whole thing. In any case, the image of Katharina as a poisoning victim and plaintiff in an Inquisition trial didn’t fit with the idea of her as the immaculate founder of a monastery. She was a heroine, whose efforts had given life to the first Benedictine monastery in the southwest of Germany since secularization.

After the Old Catholics had made their attack on Kleutgen and the Jesuits, nobody wrote openly about the Sant’Ambrogio affair until the Second Vatican Council, when Benedictine historians referred to it in connection with the opening of the Catholic Church. Prior to this, even they had glossed over it. Anselm Schott made no mention at all of the Sant’Ambrogio case in his biography of Maurus Wolter.
²⁹
He claimed it was the pope himself, not Hohenlohe, who made the Benedictine Katharina’s confessor, and opened up “the new and higher path” that he then followed toward the founding of Beuron. It was only Virgil Fiala, in a 1963 book marking the hundredth anniversary of Beuron Abbey, who addressed Katharina’s experiences in Sant’Ambrogio directly. He wrote that the princess had suffered a
life-threatening illness in December 1858—and he named its cause. She had discovered “serious errors made by the young and beautiful madre vicaria,” who had then made an unsuccessful attempt to win Katharina over with her “flatteries.” After that, “every attempt to report this to the outside world was prevented. Indeed, there was even an attempt to ‘help along’ her poor health”—that is, to poison her.

In his contribution, Fiala also quoted a letter from the princess to Abbot Maurus Wolter, written on December 11, 1878. He had discovered this in the Beuron archive.
³⁰
Here, Katharina addressed the poisoning attacks directly: “It is now the anniversary—20 years! of when I drank the lethal draught in Sant’Ambrogio.” Having been rescued, she had met Maurus Wolter, who had blessed the princess with holy fragments from the True Cross, “after which I was returned almost immediately, miraculously, to health.” The path to the founding of Beuron began with a miracle from God. In the Beuron jubilee publication, Katharina’s traumatic experiences in the Regulated Third Order of Holy Saint Francis, with its exalted, sick forms of piety, was painted as the negative foil to the healthy spirituality of the Benedictines. And the miraculous healing performed by Padre Maurus wasn’t an unusual mystic practice in the Sant’Ambrogio mold, but a Church-approved, long-established blessing. Splinters from the cross of Jesus contained in a small monstrance (so-called Fragments of the True Cross) were frequently used for blessings: for example, the blessing of the fields on the Feast of the Ascension.
³¹
God had turned the evil intentions of Sant’Ambrogio’s superiors to good, through Katharina’s meeting with Maurus Wolter. Without the poisonings, there would have been no cry for help; without the cry for help, no salvation; without salvation, no chance to meet Wolter; without this meeting, no founding of Beuron. One hundred years after the Inquisition trial, the Benedictine Virgil Fiala was making the same argument that Katharina had once put forward. And this meant he had to tell the story of the poisoning.

But this was the exception. The tendency to keep the affair from the public gaze ultimately won out, as the three editions of the German Catholic lexicon,
Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche
, from the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s show. There is no mention of Sant’Ambrogio in the articles on Joseph Kleutgen
³²
or Katharina von Hohenzollern.
³³
According to these, Katharina’s stay in Rome was simply the occasion
of her meeting with Maurus Wolter, and Kleutgen was an important new scholastic theologian. This is the picture German Catholics wished to present in the three editions of their most important reference work. The darker aspects of both lives were retouched or painted out. Sant’Ambrogio simply didn’t fit into the picture.
³⁴

Still, the secret that surrounded the whole affair was revealed, at least in part, in a theological dissertation in 1976. Konrad Deufel was the first writer to have reliable sources on the case at his disposal, having discovered Christiane Gmeiner’s report from 1870 in the Hohenzollern royal house and seigniory archive in Sigmaringen.
³⁵
Here were seventy-eight pages written by somebody immediately connected with the affair—even if the report had been composed long after the events it described, and may be of limited value as a source. Over just three pages, Deufel gave a short summary of Katharina’s
Erlebnisse
disclosing key facts about the denunciation and the Inquisition trial. Deufel was also able to access letters written by Kleutgen and Andreas Steinhuber (who later became a Jesuit cardinal), in the archive of the Low German Jesuit province. These revealed that Kleutgen had told his order he had been convicted
ob formalem haeresim
. But the Jesuit deliberately left his brothers in the dark about exactly what his misdemeanors had been. Steinhuber therefore speculated that Kleutgen had “uttered some sentence during the interrogation that the judges took to be heretical.”
³⁶

Deufel’s study has received some harsh criticism for its technical deficiencies.
³⁷
In his review of the book, Herman H. Schwedt calls the Inquisition trial, as sketched by Deufel, a “modern-day witch trial” in which witnesses (meaning Kleutgen) were “convicted alongside the defendants.”
³⁸
He also unjustly condemns Deufel for regarding “the much-discussed attempt by the novice mistress to poison Katharina von Hohenzollern as a fact,” although there was no public announcement of a conviction for attempted murder, and such cases lay entirely outside the Holy Office’s jurisdiction.
³⁹
Still, Deufel’s initial, brief reconstruction of the Sant’Ambrogio affair, supported by a certain amount of source material, did achieve some recognition, and has been cited in many subsequent books. Giacomo Martina draws on Deufel in his lengthy monograph on Pius IX,
⁴⁰
as does Elke Pahud de Mortanges in her study on Jakob Frohschammer,
⁴¹
and Aidan Nichols in his
Conversation of Faith and Reason
, which mentions “The Kleutgen Fiasco.”
⁴²

Deufel claimed that the mystery surrounding the case up to that point, and in particular the reason for Kleutgen’s fall from grace, had been “largely illuminated” by the report from the Sigmaringen state archive. Information from Rome, he said, could “only provide something new in the formal sense.”
⁴³
This has proved inaccurate. The opening of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s archives by John Paul II in 1998 made the Holy Roman Inquisition’s files accessible to researchers for the first time. The files from the Sant’Ambrogio trial, which had been hidden for a century and a half in the most secret of all Church archives, finally saw the light of day. At last, the secret could be revealed—and what had sounded like an outrageous fantasy turned out to be a true story of a convent in scandal.

The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio
would not have been written without the support I received from many sides. Thanks are therefore due to:

The Historisches Kolleg in Munich: this unique establishment for historians afforded me working conditions that made a year’s residency go by in a flash. I would like to thank the board of trustees for the faith they placed in me; the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for financing my year at the college; the managing director, Dr. Karl-Ulrich Gelberg, for the smooth organization of everything; Dr. Elisabeth Müller-Luckner for all the stimulating conversations; Gabriele Roser and Elvira Jakovina for making life in the college so pleasant; and my two student assistants, Edith Ploethner and Franz Quirin Meyer, for a great many books, photocopies, and intelligent questions. I would also like to thank my fellow stipend recipients for the interesting insights into their subjects and research aims. Dr. Elisabeth Hüls made the workshop “Wahre und falsche Heiligkeit” (True and False Holiness) in January 2012 into a wonderful forum. It is also thanks to her that the conference volume,
“Wahre” und “falsche” Heiligkeit. Mystik, Macht und Geschlechterrollen im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts
was published so quickly, appearing as volume 90 in the series
Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien
in spring 2013. Many things that
The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio
touches upon are given in-depth consideration there, from a variety of perspectives. I would like to thank all the conference participants and moderators for contributing their ideas to the workshop and reworking their chapters for the conference volume.

The foundations: I discovered the files on the Sant’Ambrogio case in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF) in 1999. At that time, researchers were seldom permitted to
make copies, so it was necessary first to gain a proper understanding of the files, and then to write parts of them out. The Gerda Henkel Foundation kindly financed this effort. And without years of support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for my studies in this archive, I would never have been able to bring this case to light, let alone work on it.

The archives: even after twenty years as a professor of Church history, my fascination for archive work remains undiminished. This is partly thanks to the archivists. I would like to thank Monsignore Dr. Alejandro Cifres, the director of the ACDF, and his colleagues Daniel Ponziani, Fabrizio De Sibi, and Fabrizio Faccenda for making the central collections available and providing helpful answers to all my questions. Dr. Johan Ickx, who spent many years at the ACDF and is now the head of the Secretariat of State’s historical archive, was always an important contact, particularly as his wife, Elizabeth Ickx-Lemens, took on the task of copying out parts of the collections relevant to Sant’Ambrogio. This book also makes use of material from a number of other archives. Along with many other people, I would like to thank Dr. Clemens Brodkorb from the Archiv der Deutschen Provinz der Jesuiten in Munich, and Birgit Meyenberg from the Sigmaringen state archive, for making files available and responding conscientiously to all inquiries. Prof. Dr. Peter Walter used his profound knowledge of the theological history of the nineteenth century to help me date the Passaglia affair, among other things. I spent a fascinating afternoon with Prof. Dr. Christa Habrich, who gave me an exemplary introduction to the world of poisons. If I should ever find myself needing to commit the perfect murder, I will certainly consult her again. I thank her, and with her everyone who, whether as archivist, librarian, colleague, or private individual, has provided me with pieces of the great puzzle of Sant’Ambrogio.

The Seminar for Middle and Modern Church History: my year in Munich would not have been possible without my team in Münster. Everyone there, but particularly my managing director, PD Dr. Thomas Bauer, and my substitute for the year, Prof. Dr. Klaus Unterburger, kept me free of any obligations. In working on the manuscript, I was able to rely on translations provided by Alex Piccin und Elisabeth-Marie Richter, among others. During the editing process and while conducting difficult research, I was as always grateful to
have recourse to the expertise and vast experience of my collaborators in scientific communication. The conversations I had with them were hugely beneficial—and not just to the manuscript. I would therefore like to thank Dr. Holger Arning, Sarah Brands, and Katharina Hörsting. I am also grateful to Dr. Judith Schepers und Birgit Reiß from my seminar, and to Sabine Höllmann, for their thorough proofreading. And these thanks would not be complete without mentioning two collaborators in particular: Dr. Maria Pia Lorenz-Filograno, my “Signora di Sant’Ambrogio,” for her translations, research, checks, and motivation, and Dr. Barbara Schüler, for her criticism, copyediting, polishing, and general organization of everything.

The first readers: curious to know how the “true story” would come across, and how different people would react to it, we gave the manuscript to people with an interest in history but who were not experts in the field. I would like to thank Michael Pfister, Christiane Richter, Christa Schütte, und Heribert Woestmann, among others, for their nuanced opinions and suggestions.

C. H. Beck: as an author, I feel I am in the best of hands with my long-standing editor, Dr. Ulrich Nolte. I am greatly honored that my book has been published by C. H. Beck in its 250th anniversary year.

Munich, September 2012
Hubert Wolf

The material from the Roman archives is largely written in Italian and Latin. Translations into German have been commissioned by the author, placing an emphasis on faithfulness and readability. The English translations of all quotes have been made from the German. In the notes, the Italian titles of these sources have been retained (where these exist), as they appear in the archives. It has not always been possible to provide page numbers. All emphases within the quotations are taken from the originals and set in italics, whether they were originally underlined or picked out in some other way. All names mentioned in the text, with the exception of the popes and famous figures from world history, are given a biographical note; if no details for a person could be found, no special mention is made. The full versions of all abbreviated archive collections and book titles used in the notes can be found in the “Sources and Literature” section.

PROLOGUE
“Save, Save Me!”

1.
Fogli manoscritti consegnati in atti dalla Principessa Caterina de Hohenzollern il 15. Settembre 1859. Sommario della Relazione informativa no. XXII; ACDF SO St. St. B 7 c.