The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (9 page)

Extrajudicial Preliminary Investigations

INFORMAL QUESTIONING

Once Katharina had presented her report to the Inquisition, the next move was up to Vincenzo Leone Sallua and his officials. They had to decide how to deal with the princess’s
Denunzia
. Sallua was born in 1815, took holy orders with the Dominicans in Santa Sabina in Rome, and was ordained as a priest in 1838.
¹
The Dominicans had played a major role in the Inquisition and the detection of heretics since the Middle Ages, and people referred to the
Dominicanes
mockingly as
canes Domini
, “God’s dogs.” The Inquisition of the Middle Ages was very different from the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, founded in 1542. The latter had local Inquisitions in many of Italy’s episcopal cities, though its headquarters was in Rome. Somebody who had earned his spurs in one of these local organizations was often invited to Rome as a reward. So it was with Sallua, who had begun his career as vicar to the local inquisitor in Lugo. In 1850 he became an investigating judge of the Roman Inquisition and, in 1870, commissary of the Holy Office. He was aided by the second investigating judge, Enrico Ferrari, who was entrusted with keeping the files in the Sant’Ambrogio case. Ferrari was a fellow Dominican. He was born in 1816, and had been in office since the start of 1851.
²

Giacinto Maria Giuseppe De Ferrari, born in 1804, had been commissary and chief justice of the Inquisition since 1851. He took holy orders in 1821—he was another Dominican—and was ordained as a priest in 1827. In 1839, he became the librarian of the famous Biblioteca Casanatense, the Roman Inquisition’s library. He had worked for the Congregation of the Index since 1843, and there was no more dedicated evaluator in the field of Catholic book censorship in the nineteenth century. He appraised over 150 works during his career.
³
While the remaining offices of the Inquisition were occupied by members of various other orders and secular priests, the office of commissary and his two deputies, the investigating judges, were firmly in the hands of the Dominicans.
⁴

The assessor, who was the real head of the Inquisition’s Tribunal, was the secular priest Raffaele Monaco La Valletta. La Valletta, who was born in 1827, was a canon of Saint Peter’s, and became pro-assessor in January 1859, before being promoted to assessor in December 1860.
⁵

On September 17, 1859, Sallua informed Pope Pius IX privately of Katharina von Hohenzollern’s denunciation.
⁶
The Dominican viewed the denunciation as a very grave business, “not only due to the
delicatezza
of the matter as such,” but because of the wide repercussions that news of the case would have if it spread through Rome. He therefore tried to keep the whole thing as secret as possible.
⁷

The Inquisition’s files state that the padre
socius
believed he “should lay this denunciation most humbly at the feet of His Holiness,” which at first glance seems to suggest that Sallua took this step on his own authority as investigating judge. But it is highly unlikely that a second-ranking inquisitor would have gone straight to the pope without consulting his superiors. Before taking the matter to the pontiff, he would at least have gained the agreement of his immediate superior, Commissary De Ferrari. Tradition suggests that he probably also discussed it at the Inquisition’s
Congregazione Particolare
. This meeting was always held on a Saturday, and its main aim was to distribute the pending cases among individual members. As a rule, the assessor, the commissary, the investigating judges, the “fiscal” (who played a similar role to a modern state prosecutor), and a representative from the chancellery all took part in this. This meeting also decided “to whom each matter should be communicated: the consultors, the cardinals,
or even the pope.”
⁸
In this case, the
Congregazione Particolare
may have made the decision to inform the pope immediately. This task fell to Sallua, since at this point he was the only one familiar with the case. He was received by the pope in a private audience, and handed him a written summary of the allegations.

Pius IX studied the princess’s denunciation and the Dominican’s report thoroughly, but remained skeptical about the truth of Katharine’s claims. For one thing, she had made allegations against people whom he held in such high regard that he couldn’t believe they would be mixed up in this sort of affair: Cardinal August, Count Reisach, Katharina’s spiritual guide, and Cardinal Costantino Patrizi, the cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio. Or was it possible that the two Jesuit confessors, the abbess, or even the beautiful madre vicaria could have enjoyed a similar prestige with the pope? The “nature of the offences” also placed doubts in the pope’s mind. He could scarcely imagine that all these crimes had been committed in a place of pious women, and in such a short space of time.
⁹

For Pius IX, this wasn’t necessarily a case of heresy, for which the Roman Inquisition would have been responsible. Heresy meant denying a Catholic article of faith, or refusing to let go of a notion that went against Catholic dogma. If a Catholic consciously and stubbornly questioned the dogma, this was a “formal heresy.” When this denial happened unconsciously, and the culprit showed a willingness to change, it was classed as a “material heresy.”
¹⁰

The pope thought that if there
was
anything in the princess’s accusations, then the case was a matter of discipline and smaller criminal offenses. These weren’t crimes against the Faith. The pope was also keen to prevent the affair becoming public at all costs, and instructed the Dominican to keep the whole thing under wraps. An Inquisition trial would bring more attention from within the Curia, and create a hotbed of rumor—something the pope was eager to avoid. And so he transferred the case from this larger stage to a smaller one, telling Sallua to hand the matter over to the cardinal vicar.
¹¹

The cardinal vicar represented the pope in his function as bishop of Rome. He looked after the administration of the diocese of Rome, and had full jurisdiction over all disciplinary aspects of religious life in the Eternal City. The Church officials and courts under his auspices included the Tribunal of the Vicariate. He was provided with
administrative support by one vicegerent, who was a titular bishop, and had another for juridical matters. The
Vicarius Urbis
was one of the few officials of the Roman Curia who didn’t lose his position when a pope died; a
sede vacante
led to most other offices being lost.
¹²

In 1859, the office of cardinal vicar happened to be held by Costantino Patrizi, the cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio.
¹³
Patrizi was born in 1798 in Siena, and belonged to one of Rome’s richest families. He studied canon and secular law in Rome, and was ordained in 1819. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Curia, and by 1828 he was titular bishop of Philippi. He was made a cardinal in 1836, and became a member of the Inquisition in 1839. He was cardinal vicar of Rome from 1841 until his death in 1876. A close friend and confidant of Pius IX, he was described as pious and reactionary. His opponents in the Curia held him to be a man of “dull wits,” though more than a few commentators saw him as the most influential of the cardinals, and the supporting pillar of Pius IX’s “authoritarian system of government.” Patrizi had very close links with the Society of Jesus, not least through his brother Saverio, who had gone into the order.
¹⁴

As cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio, Patrizi had to supervise the convent. Elections to offices within the convent were only valid when carried out in his presence, and with his blessing.
¹⁵
If anyone in the Catholic hierarchy was party to the convent’s dark secrets, it would have been Patrizi—particularly with regard to the cult surrounding its founder, Maria Agnese Firrao. If the investigation ordered by the pope had uncovered anything, it would have incriminated the cardinal protector. We should therefore have a degree of skepticism about his objectivity in the case of Sant’Ambrogio. In any event, Pius IX placed the Dominican Sallua at Patrizi’s side to keep an eye on him. This was a very smart move by the pope. He had found a compromise that involved the Holy Office, even if the case was officially under the cardinal vicar’s jurisdiction. Cardinal Patrizi ordered an initial, cautious, extrajudicial investigation.
¹⁶

Sallua’s first task was to question a nun who had been expelled from Sant’Ambrogio a few years previously on disciplinary grounds, and had since been compelled to live in the convent of San Pasquale.
¹⁷
He was told to exercise “extreme discretion.” It was hoped that she could provide information on any irregularities within the convent.

Sallua also had to collect other information, in secret, “especially on
the ominous ‘Americano’ possessed by the devil.” Finally, the Roman authorities tasked the local inquisitor of Gubbio
¹⁸
with questioning some of the sisters at the convent of San Marziale in the town.
¹⁹
The Holy Office had sentenced Maria Agnese Firrao, Sant’Ambrogio’s mother founder, to live in monastic imprisonment there until her death.

This suggests that to start with the investigation was entirely focused on the veneration of Firrao as a saint, and whether she had secretly continued to lead the Catholic community of Sant’Ambrogio from her cell in Gubbio. That was evidently where the authorities in Rome saw the real crime: a woman who had been condemned as a false saint and expelled from Rome by the highest Church tribunal had allowed people to call her
Beata
, and the cult she had inspired among her devotees in Sant’Ambrogio had extended to the driving out of devils and demons.

THE OUTCAST’S TESTIMONY

The nun who had been expelled from Sant’Ambrogio, and whom Sallua was to interrogate, was Sister Agnese Eletta of the Holy Family. The cardinal vicar, acting in his role as cardinal protector of Sant’Ambrogio, had sent her to San Pasquale in August 1857 for disobedience. Here she was to become more spiritual, and practice the virtue of humility. But there had never been a proper investigation of the “difficulties” she had caused in the Franciscan convent; if there had, Patrizi could simply have dug out the old files.
²⁰
This in itself casts the cardinal vicar of Rome in a less than favorable light. Had he neglected his duties as the most senior supervisor of religious life in Sant’Ambrogio? Had he blindly trusted the superiors there, in particular the Jesuit confessors?

In order to gain an initial impression of Agnese Eletta, Sallua first questioned the prioress of the Augustine Sisters of San Pasquale, Sister Maria Luisa of Jesus.
²¹
They had had a difficult time with Agnese Eletta since she arrived in San Pasquale, the prioress told him. The nuns had required a great deal of patience to deal with her constant “insubordination” and her egotism. She wasn’t accustomed to convent practices. Days of abstinence and fasting were clearly unknown
to her; in Sant’Ambrogio, as Agnese Eletta said herself, she had often enjoyed fancy foods, “always with butter.” She had also dressed a little like a woman of the world. Agnese Eletta’s superior—or rather, her convent jailer—painted a picture of a nun who had failed at cloistered life. So how had Agnese Eletta survived for so many years in a strictly enclosed convent?

The following day—October 18, 1859—the Dominican was able to question Agnese Eletta herself.
²²
She was forty years old, and her given name was Agnese Corradini. Once Sallua had made her take the oath, the first question he put to her was the usual one: did she know why she had been summoned to this hearing? She answered, “no, sir.” He then asked her about the important facts of her life to date, and took down her personal details. She said she was the niece of the founder, Agnese Firrao, and had lived in a convent since she was four, when she had moved into the house in Borgo Sant’Agata run by the reformed nuns of the Third Order of Holy Saint Francis. This was in 1823, and she had moved with them to Sant’Ambrogio in 1828, professing her vows there at the age of twenty.

First and foremost, Sallua was interested in the reasons for her expulsion from Sant’Ambrogio. Agnese Eletta gave an extremely evasive answer, saying she had actually always felt very at home in Sant’Ambrogio. It was only just before she went away that her relationship with the abbess had cooled. The abbess had said to her: “You went into my room, picked up several letters from our mother founder Sister Maria Agnese that were on my desk, took them to your room and tore them up. That is the reason I am angry with you.” Agnese Eletta’s assurances that she had done nothing of the sort were met with disbelief. She told the inquisitor that she suspected these letters had been placed in her drawer by another nun, the young novice mistress Maria Luisa.

However, this didn’t stop Agnese Eletta finishing her hearing by singing the praises of the young madre vicaria. “She has the look of a soul privileged by the Lord.” God “gave her the gift of sometimes being able to speak with Him.” After they had prayed together on the night before Maundy Thursday, “she started to talk as though the Lord wanted to speak to me and give me a warning.” Visions and visitations from heavenly beings had been a daily occurrence for her. According to Agnese Eletta, Maria Luisa was “lovable, warm-hearted and graceful,” and showed the novices “great affection and attention.”
“Night-time was when she was most often blessed by God; I say this because I slept in her cell for a while, and heard her … speaking to the Lord.” But Agnese Eletta also stated that she had never truly believed in these supernatural phenomena. It “may have been [Maria Luisa’s] imagination” at work here. Eventually, Maria Luisa had become inexplicably cold toward her, and Eletta didn’t really know why she had been forced to leave.