The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (13 page)

But “Inquisition” can also mean a new kind of legal process that, when the pope introduced it in the thirteenth century, was one of the greatest leaps forward in legal history. Among its innovations was the office of state prosecutor. Investigations were now initiated by this office, and not—as had previously been the case—purely on the grounds of an accusation.
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But the Inquisition’s positive impact is largely unknown. When this
inquisitio
was later linked with the use of torture, the progressive “Inquisition trial” gained the negative image it still has today. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century, defendants weren’t being shown instruments of torture or subjected to horrific interrogations using them. The trial was purely a written process—which at that time was also a customary feature of trials in certain areas of the secular justice system.

It is impossible to reconstruct the case of Sant’Ambrogio without detailed knowledge of an inquisitorial trial’s processes and protagonists. The Inquisition’s tribunal had no official rules of procedure.
⁷⁹
Even the internal document from the nineteenth century, “norms for a procedure in cases for the Holy Office,” which is now held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (as the Holy Office was renamed in 1966), gives hardly any specific instructions
for the organization of a trial, the course it should take, and the parties involved.
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We can therefore assume that the Roman Inquisition had evolved a procedure for criminal trials based largely on customary law and precedent. With nothing set out in writing, the inquisitors would have had a great deal of freedom in how they conducted a trial.
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For criminal trials, the Roman Inquisition was divided into two sections. The deciding authority, the court to which the ultimate judgment fell, was identical with the congregation of cardinals assigned to the Holy Office. And then there was the investigating authority, which preceded and was subordinate to the cardinals.

The real head or prefect of the Inquisition was no lesser person than the pope, the most senior legislator and judge of the Universal Church. Unlike the other congregations (the groups of cardinals who oversaw various administrative areas of the Catholic Church), the
Sanctum Officium
had no cardinal prefect; its leader was merely called the cardinal secretary.
⁸²
A dozen or more other cardinals formed the actual court. They met every Wednesday (the so-called
Feria quarta
) without the pope, and on Thursdays (
Feria quinta
) with the pope at their head.
⁸³
Their decisions and judgments are recorded in the
Decreta
files, which, because of the sheer number of issues covered, mostly contain only summary records of the outcome in each case.
⁸⁴
Preparations for these decisions were made by the consultors, who always met on a Monday (
Feria secunda
). Their meetings included up to three dozen experts, theologians, jurists, and canon lawyers.
⁸⁵
They wrote reports and votums (petitions) on each batch of issues passed on to them by the cardinals, and often formulated suggested decisions for the congregation’s meetings, which the assessor, who led these, set out before Their Eminences.
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If a decision was made during a Wednesday meeting when the pope was absent, the assessor would seek a private audience with the
Pontifex maximus
to obtain his agreement. The pope often modified or clarified exactly what the assessor had to record in each case, according to his own ideas on the matter.
⁸⁷
In general—and this is the crucial difference from a modern, secular criminal trial—the entire process was conducted through written rather than verbal proceedings, with the public fundamentally excluded.

The witnesses and the accused never encountered one another in a courtroom. There was theoretical provision for an unmediated confrontation, but it was never put into practice. Hearings were conducted with one individual at a time, transcribed by a notary, and authenticated with a signature from the person who had been questioned. These hearings were also not unusual in secular courts during the nineteenth century.
⁸⁸
Nor were the defendants or the witnesses
ever confronted with the tribunal itself—they never had sight of the judges. But the accused had only to look at the annually produced handbook of the Papal States to find out which cardinals were current members of the Inquisition, and were therefore sitting in judgment on them.

The Roman Inquisition consisted of an investigating and a deciding authority, with the pope as its ultimate head. (
illustration credit 2.2
)

Their Eminences arrived at their verdict exclusively on the basis of source evidence, presented to them by the investigative section of the Inquisition. The “Inquisition’s perpetually working instructive court”
⁸⁹
was headed by an “official judge,”
⁹⁰
the Holy Office’s commissary,
⁹¹
and two investigating judges, the first and second
socius
.
⁹²
They conducted the trial, received the denunciations, questioned the witnesses, interrogated the defendants, and summarized the results of these hearings and other information for the cardinals in documents known as
Relazioni
. The interrogation transcripts were witnessed by a notary or actuary.
⁹³
The fiscal was another important figure: as the Church’s lawyer, he played the same role a state prosecutor would in a secular court.
⁹⁴
He was responsible for seeing that the trial was properly conducted. In principle, the accused had a defense counsel at their disposal, though in practice he didn’t usually play a significant part in the proceedings. All the same, he was entitled to read the investigating judges’ summaries once the hearings were over, and then submit a written defense.
⁹⁵

The assessor was the main link between the lower, investigating section of the tribunal and its upper, deciding section. He had the right to take part in all hearings—in particular the interrogation of the defendants—and he was always present at the official meetings of the congregation of cardinals. The assessor was the “advisor to the commissary”; he also reported the cardinals’ decisions to the pope, and obtained his seal of approval. Last but not least, he signed off on the
Ristretti
, the files containing summaries of the defendants’ testimonies, upon which the congregation of cardinals based its verdict. The assessor, the commissary, and his senior deputy, the first
socius
(but not the second
socius
), were also official members of the consultors’ conference, thus providing a second link between the investigating and deciding authorities.

Two obvious changes to the composition of the Holy Office’s congregation of cardinals were made after the official opening of the Sant’Ambrogio trial in December 1859. On May 21, 1860, Pius IX
made Cardinal Reisach a member of the Inquisition.
⁹⁶
And on October 5 of the same year, the pope named Patrizi, of all people, as the Holy Office’s cardinal secretary.
⁹⁷
This is the only time in the 470-year history of the Holy Office that a cardinal vicar, responsible for the Tribunal of the Vicariate Court of the City of Rome, has also been made cardinal secretary of the Holy Office. In an internal paper from the early nineteenth century, the cardinals of the Inquisition explicitly advised against a coupling of these two offices: “The election of the cardinal vicar as the secretary of the Holy Office could lead to collisions between the ordinary powers of the Vicariate and the extraordinary powers of the Holy Office.” For this reason, in the history of the Church there was “not a single example of a cardinal vicar, who is qua office a member of the Inquisition, simultaneously being appointed secretary of the Holy Office.”
⁹⁸

Why did Pius IX disregard this unwritten rule? The answer is not far to seek: the pope wanted to be certain that the investigation of the Sant’Ambrogio affair remained in the hands of his trusted servant, the supporting pillar of his pontificate. As Patrizi had been unable to deal with the case within the Vicariate, which had been the pope’s initial intention, he would now deal with it as head of the Inquisition. This way, the pope could offer more protection to people close to him who were embroiled in this affair. At the same time, he was appointing one of the suspects as supreme judge, thus placing him beyond the tribunal’s reach. Similar motives may have played a role in the promotion of Cardinal Reisach to cardinal member of the Inquisition. But wasn’t the pope drawing suspicion on himself with these decisions, which he must have made in the knowledge that both men were caught up in what had happened in Sant’Ambrogio? Was he somehow personally involved?

THE SOURCES FROM THE ARCHIVE OF THE CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH

The
Archivo Segreto Vaticano
, the secret archive in the Vatican palace, is reached via the Porta Sant’Anna on the right of Saint Peter’s Square. It has been open to researchers since 1881. The material relating to all
trials by the Roman Inquisition, meanwhile, remained inaccessible for significantly longer. The files are located in the most secret of all Church archives, the
Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede
(ACDF), the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This archive contains the collections of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index. It is situated not in the Vatican’s secret archive, but in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, the current home of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This building is situated to the left of the colonnades of Saint Peter’s Square, right in front of the Campo Santo Teutonico. Pope John Paul II finally opened the archive in 1998, in the run-up to the Holy Year of Jubilee. It contains the document collection of the Congregation of the Index, which was exclusively concerned with book censorship, and the Roman Inquisition’s much more extensive collection. In addition to monitoring the book market, and having basic responsibility for deciding all religious questions, it also acted as the highest religious tribunal. The main collection is therefore divided in numerous and diverse subcollections, concerned with general religious questions, disputes on sacramental theology, matrimonial law, dispensations, the relationship between Jews and Catholics, and unresolved issues of every kind.
⁹⁹

A little was known about the Sant’Ambrogio case before the archive was opened. It was at least clear that this must have been a matter of feigned holiness. And so one might have expected the files from this case to be housed in one of the relevant archive series on the pretense of holiness.
¹⁰⁰
But the search for them there was fruitless. The case of Sant’Ambrogio was finally discovered in the Stanza Storica, the archive’s “historical hall,” which was principally a collection of material ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
¹⁰¹
The reams of paper that make up the case files, plus the documents and books confiscated from the convent, take up over six feet of shelf space. In terms of content, there are no recognizable connections between the Sant’Ambrogio files and the bundles on either side of them. There seems to be little logic to shelving the files here, and it may have been a mistake. Or were these incendiary papers deliberately hidden?

Due to the structure of the tribunal, with its two levels linked by individuals and institutions, in every Inquisition trial there are three types of court files. First, the investigation files from the lower section, documenting the work of the commissary and his two deputies.
They are handwritten throughout, and comprise the receipt and record of the denunciation, along with transcripts from the witness examinations and the interrogations of defendants. There are also brief notes and remarks from the examining judge, detailing the current position of the trial. These were either made for the judge’s own benefit, or in preparation for presenting the case to the upper level of the cardinals, or even the pope. Sometimes there are also letters to the cardinal secretary.