The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (12 page)

Before conducting the hearings with Agnese Eletta, the Dominican had received important new information about the “possessed Americano.” He was certainly no invention of Katharina’s. Padre Maurus Wolter, the princess’s new confessor, had written Sallua a letter on September 17, 1859.
⁴⁹
It was the first and only time he contacted the Dominican. A Prussian priest named Wegener,
⁵⁰
who lived in the German seminary of the Campo Santo Teutonico
⁵¹
next to Saint Peter’s, had told Wolter that “Pietro Americano” was actually Peter Kreuzburg. Kreuzburg was a doctor by profession, and Tyrolean by birth. He had been a U.S. citizen for seventeen years, and lived in Cincinnati. To that extent, the term “Americano” was correct. In 1857 he had left his wife and children in America, and traveled to the capital of Christianity to seek help for his spiritual tribulations. Wolter also told Sallua that this Kreuzburg had a long-standing special relationship with the Jesuits, and had a “close friendship” with a “certain Padre Kleutgen.”

The priest of San Nicola in Cacere,
⁵²
to whose parish the American belonged, even gave the Dominican Kreuzburg’s exact address on October 11, 1859.
⁵³
Pietro Maria Kreusberg—as the Italians spelled his name—was the son of Giuseppe Kreusberg, and lived at number 65, Via di Monte Tarpeo.
⁵⁴
The priest invited the Americano to visit, and reported that when he saw Kreuzburg, the latter’s clothing was in quite a shabby state, and he was living with very disreputable people. All in all, the forty-four-year-old Kreuzburg had made a “pitiful” impression. If we believe the priest’s analysis, a kind of religious mania seemed to have driven Kreuzburg to leave his family and job, in the hope of finding true salvation in Rome.
⁵⁵

Sallua informed Cardinal Vicar Patrizi of how the investigation stood, in a secret meeting at the start of November 1859. Of course, he couldn’t tell the high-ranking cardinal about the involvement in the affair of people whom Pius IX held in high esteem. This would also have meant talking to Patrizi about his role as cardinal protector
of Sant’Ambrogio. Instead, he focused on the number and nature of the offenses, and managed to demonstrate that Katharina’s
Denunzia
was “an extremely weighty denunciation, backed by many convincing proofs.”
⁵⁶

Patrizi must have been shocked to his core, as he recognized the full incendiary power of the Sant’Ambrogio affair. There was now a danger that the focus of interest could shift to him: in his role as cardinal protector, the ultimate responsibility for what happened in the convent lay with him. As Sallua put it, Patrizi did not want “to bear the responsibility any longer,” and asked the Holy Father to hand the case over to the Holy Office’s tribunal, where it could be dealt with
more solito
,
⁵⁷
in the usual way. Patrizi was probably placing his hopes in the Holy Office’s obligation to maintain absolute secrecy about its cases: breaking this silence resulted in the harshest punishment from the Church.
⁵⁸

We can guess just how disconcerted Patrizi felt from the fact that, out of the blue, he handed Sallua a raft of documents and letters from Sant’Ambrogio dating from 1848 to 1854.
⁵⁹
These proved conclusively that the abbess and the confessor had given the cardinal protector regular updates on what was happening in Sant’Ambrogio, with particular reference to the veneration of Maria Agnese Firrao as a saint, and Maria Luisa’s supernatural experiences. Patrizi had done nothing about either of these, simply allowing matters to take their course—though he hadn’t given any encouragement, either. His behavior could perhaps be explained by the huge support that his mother, the Marquise Kunigunde Patrizi, had given Sant’Ambrogio’s founder. During the Inquisition trial against Maria Agnese Firrao, Patrizi’s mother had proved herself a true follower of this supposed servant of God, and was one of the few people to take the stand in her favor.
⁶⁰

To Sallua’s mind, the letters Patrizi gave him provided “a clear argument and firm evidence” for the validity of Katharina’s denunciation. Anyone with an ounce of sense should have seen that Maria Luisa’s visions and visitations, as reported by Padre Leziroli, had the “character of fictions,” and that they were
“supposte rivelazioni,”
pretended revelations.
⁶¹
Sallua’s words contained a tacit criticism of Patrizi himself, who must surely have seen through the whole conjuring trick. This was the only time the Dominican articulated—in a cautious and very indirect way—his incomprehension over Patrizi’s extremely problematic attitude as protector of the convent. As an experienced investigating judge, Sallua used these texts to set in motion a full Inquisition trial.

As the cardinal vicar of the Roman Church and protector of Sant’Ambrogio, it was Costantino Patrizi’s duty to keep a watchful eye on what went on in the convent. (
illustration credit 2.1
)

AN INQUISITION TRIAL, AFTER ALL

Patrizi’s withdrawal put an end to the low-key solution the pope had initially sought for the case of Sant’Ambrogio. Pius IX must have realized that an Inquisition trial was now unavoidable. However,
after Sallua had told him about the current state of affairs on November 11, 1859, the pope simply said that
pro nunc
, “for now,” he would call a secret meeting in which the cardinals, but not the Inquisition consultors, would be informed of the affair and the “clever and energetic steps” the pope had already taken.
⁶²

Sallua prepared a detailed report for the cardinals’ secret meeting, which took place on November 16, 1859. It left no room for doubt that the case of Sant’Ambrogio fell under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, as the crimes involved were primarily religious.
⁶³
He saw three valid charges arising from his investigations so far.

First, there was the nuns’ continued veneration of Maria Agnese Firrao, whom the Inquisition had convicted of being a false saint. There was also evidence that she had continued to lead the community by means of letters from exile, which was also forbidden. And Leziroli had written a saint’s life of Firrao, which he used regularly in his sermons.

Second was Sister Maria Luisa’s pretense of holiness—an offense that Sallua regarded as clearly proven. The Dominican was also in no doubt that she had used her visions to gain offices in the convent, shown a marked lack of fellow feeling for the other nuns, and had unstintingly supported the false cult through Leziroli.

Third, Sallua told the cardinals of Maria Luisa’s “improper practices,” and made a connection between these and the first false saint, Agnese Firrao. She, too, had been accused of grave sexual transgressions—and continued heresy went hand in hand with continued sodomy. It was no coincidence that Sallua’s report mentioned the “false dogma
in re venerea
” (in matters of sex) and the “disgraceful acts
sub specie boni
” (under the pretense of doing good). This was his way of bringing the third allegation under the Inquisition’s remit as well. It was a matter of false “practical” dogma, and the Holy Office was responsible for Catholic dogma and its protection.

Sallua’s arguments convinced the cardinals to a man, and they decided to open an Inquisition trial against the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio and their confessors, the Jesuits Giuseppe Leziroli and Giuseppe Peters. The convent was to be permanently dissolved, and the nuns divided among various other suitable institutions.
⁶⁴
As the pope wasn’t present for this decision, the assessor, Monaco La Valletta, sought an audience to obtain his agreement.
⁶⁵

But Pius IX substantially moderated the cardinals’ decision.
Ad mentem
,
⁶⁶
in the spirit of the pope’s original decision, there was to be no more talk of the immediate suppression of the convent and a trial against the Jesuit confessors. First, there would be an Apostolic Visitation to Sant’Ambrogio which—and this will come as no surprise—fell under the jurisdiction of Cardinal Vicar Patrizi and his vicegerent, Antonio Ligi-Bussi.
⁶⁷
The latter was tasked with conducting a thorough inspection of the convent, and for this purpose was allowed to enter the
clausura
. In particular, he was instructed to search for writings from the pen of the late mother founder. The pope told the cardinal vicar to contact Petrus Beckx, the Jesuit general, and “very carefully” broach the subject of dismissing Padres Leziroli and Peters. He should then assign other, non-Jesuit spiritual guides to the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio.
⁶⁸

The vicegerent began his search of the convent the following day and, although he found nothing, he did learn that the lawyer Luigi Franceschetti, the convent’s legal representative, knew where Firrao’s writings were hidden. At their meeting on December 6, the cardinals of the Inquisition decided to invite the lawyer in for questioning. The pope himself gave the order to seize Maria Luisa at once, and have her placed in another convent without any public fuss.
⁶⁹

On December 8, Sallua had a private audience with the pope, prostrating himself at the feet of His Holiness, as he reported, in a gesture of humility typical for an inquisitor. He gave a detailed report of the results from the preliminary investigations, setting out a total of eight charges.
⁷⁰

First: the nuns had continued to honor the condemned Agnese Firrao as a saint.

Second: the twenty-seven-year-old Maria Luisa had also pretended to be a saint.

Third: the novices had committed improper acts with the novice mistress, exchanging intimacies and kisses. The night before professing their vows, lesbian initiation rites had taken place. The women had also indulged in physical lovemaking, up to and including intercourse (
usque ad consumationem
). All this had happened under the pretense of heavenly “sanctification.”

Fourth: there had been attempts to poison and murder Princess Hohenzollern.

Fifth: the nuns had hidden cult objects belonging to “saint” Firrao in the convent.

Sixth: Maria Luisa forced the novices to give confession to her.

Seventh: the novices had disregarded important rules and had, for example, eaten meat on fast days and not taken part regularly in the Liturgy of the Hours. Then there was also the forbidden relationship between Maria Luisa and the Americano.

Eighth: the two confessors, Leziroli and Peters, had tolerated, if not actively supported, these offenses.

Only now did Pius IX really seem convinced that the charges were justified, and he finally authorized the Dominican to open an Inquisition trial.
⁷¹
The trial was to cover not only the crimes against the Faith, but all the other felonies relating to the attempted murder, which actually fell within the jurisdiction of other criminal courts in Rome.

In doing this, the pope himself was drawing an overt connection between the two levels of the Sant’Ambrogio affair: the “natural” level of the felonies, and the “supernatural” level of supersensible phenomena. These two planes and their mutual dependence were to become a leitmotif that ran through the whole trial. The judges were confronted with the same conundrum over and over: did incorrect actions lead to incorrect belief? Or was incorrect belief responsible for incorrect actions?

The trial began in December 1859, and ended in February 1862, with the pronouncement of the final judgment. A mighty task lay before the tribunal. Around sixty witnesses had to be questioned—thirty-seven of them the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio
⁷²
—and numerous documents seized, including the saint’s life of Maria Agnese from the pen of Padre Leziroli.
⁷³
The witness examinations alone took more than a year.

THE INQUISITION TRIBUNAL: PROCESSES AND PROTAGONISTS

The elements of the modern criminal trial that we take for granted—the public proceedings, the direct confrontation of defendants and witnesses, heated exchanges between defense counsels, prosecutors,
and judges, cross-examinations, and the detailed reporting of cases in the media—didn’t apply to a trial before the Inquisition, even as late as the nineteenth century. But this didn’t mean an Inquisition trial was ruled by pure capriciousness, as various legends and clichés would have us believe.
⁷⁴
From a historical point of view, there was no such thing as
the
Inquisition. There are three types of Inquisition to be distinguished in the history of the Church.
⁷⁵
First, there was the Medieval Inquisition, which was largely used to prosecute the Cathars. Second, the Spanish Inquisition, which went down in history for its rigid proceedings against suspected crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews in Reconquista Spain, and which mainly served to preserve the unity of Spain’s newly established kingdom. Third, there was the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, founded in 1542 to combat the “Protestant heresy.”
⁷⁶
But the Roman Inquisition was soon given a much more extensive remit, to include control of all Catholics’ religious and social behavior.
⁷⁷
It became an increasingly bureaucratic authority, producing endless reams of paper, like any other modern administrative or juridical apparatus.