Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (2 page)
MARIA FRANCESCA
A novice with heavenly handwriting.
MARIA GIUSEPPA
A nurse with the keys to the convent dispensary.
MARIA IGNAZIA
A novice and Maria Luisa’s accomplice.
MARIA FELICE
A novice and another of Maria Luisa’s accomplices.
PETER KREUZBURG
“The Americano.” Possessed by the devil (and by Maria Luisa).
GIUSEPPE LEZIROLI
A Jesuit priest, the spiritual director and principal father confessor of Sant’Ambrogio; believes in both its saints.
GIUSEPPE PETERS
A Jesuit priest and the second father confessor of Sant’Ambrogio; admirer of Maria Luisa. Is more than he seems.
KARL AUGUST, COUNT REISACH
Cardinal and sometime spiritual guide to Katharina; has a weakness for women with stigmata.
MAURUS WOLTER
A Benedictine priest and Katharina’s new spiritual guide; persuades her to submit a complaint to the Inquisition.
COSTANTINO PATRIZI
Cardinal protector of the convent; cardinal vicar of the Roman Curia; keeper of secrets.
VINCENZO LEONE SALLUA
A Dominican; investigating judge of the Roman Inquisition.
PIUS IX
Pope from 1846 to 1878; believes the Virgin Mary does intervene in the world.
MARY
The mother of Jesus Christ; supernatural manifestation and correspondent.
“Save, Save Me!”
“Shortly after eight o’clock on Monday, July 25, the Archbishop of Edessa—sent by the Lord—finally came to me. There was no time for waiting; this was the one and only time to get saved. To him, I had to reveal everything and had to implore him to help me escape the convent as swiftly as possible. It all went well: my prayers were fulfilled, and I was understood.”
1
These dramatic words were set down by Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in a complaint she submitted to the pope in summer 1859. They were written barely five weeks after her escape from the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome—or rather, after her cousin, Archbishop Gustav Adolf zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, managed to secure her release—and they describe the sensational conclusion to her adventure inside the walls of a Roman Catholic convent. It was an adventure for which she had narrowly avoided paying with her life.
She had been humiliated, isolated from her fellow nuns, cut off from the outside world, and—since she was party to the convent secrets and therefore regarded as a danger—somebody had tried to silence her. They had even made several attempts to poison her. At half past three in the afternoon on July 26, 1859, after almost exactly fifteen months, she finally left Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. Her life as Sister Luisa Maria of Saint Joseph, a nun in the Regulated Third Order of Holy Saint Francis in Rome, had begun so promisingly.
And now here she was, being saved in the nick of time, rescued from imminent danger of death.
In her written complaint, the princess gave her failure as a nun and her thrilling escape from the convent a typically pious interpretation, casting it as salvation by Christ the Lord. This somehow made the experience bearable for her. But the final dramatic episode, and the preceding months she had spent under the constant fear of death, would come to define her whole life. After July 26, 1859, nothing would ever be the same again. Her plight had been genuinely existential: her life really was threatened in Sant’Ambrogio. Even years later, she was still traumatized by the attempts to poison her. This is all brought vividly to life in her
Erlebnisse
(Experiences), a book written by her close collaborator Christiane Gmeiner in 1870, more than a decade after the terrible events in Rome.
2
According to this autobiographical source, Katharina had managed to smuggle a letter out of the convent during the night of July 24, 1859. This was handed to Archbishop Hohenlohe in the Vatican.
The princess waited in a state of great anxiety until she was called into the parlor at half past seven in the morning. Fearful and almost breathless, the princess hurried downstairs to the archbishop, to whom she called out in great agitation: “save, save me!” At first, he did not understand her, and was almost afraid his cousin had run mad, but by and by she managed to convince him that she was mistress of her senses, and that her fear was not unfounded. Now he understood her pleas to leave the convent, and he promised to do everything in his power to arrange this as soon as possible—though the first appointment he was able to make was not until the following day.
The words are Christiane Gmeiner’s, recounting in the third person what the princess had told her in her own words.
3
Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen’s account sounds like a story from the depths of the Middle Ages, and confirms many of the common clichés and prejudices about life in Catholic convents and monasteries. But this story takes place in the modern world of the mid-nineteenth century. And the setting isn’t a secluded mountain convent at the world’s edge, but the center of the capital city of Christianity,
little more than half a mile from the Vatican—home to the representative of Jesus Christ on earth.
What really happened in Sant’Ambrogio? Were these poisonings simply the fantasy of a highly strung aristocrat, or were they genuine attempts on Katharina’s life? She was a princess of the house of Hohenzollern and a close relative of Wilhelm I, the man who would later become king of Prussia and the German emperor. So how did Katharina come to take her vows in such a strict religious order in the first place—and why in Rome?
CHAPTER ONE
“Such Turpitudes”Katharina von Hohenzollern Complains to the Inquisition
ROME AS A HEAVENLY JERUSALEM
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Joachim Winckelmann both longed for Italy, intoxicated by the idea of Rome, the stronghold of classical antiquity. But it wasn’t this idea that drove Katharina there.
1
Nor was she following in the footsteps of the great German royal houses, from the Karolingers to the Staufer Carolingians, who had come to the city on the Tiber to take the emperor’s crown. Katharina’s destination was an order of pious women, so her motivation for coming to the pope’s city must have been largely religious.
But, starting in the mid-eighteenth century, Rome had undergone a dramatic decline as a religious center.
2
Situated in the middle of Italy, the Papal States covered at least a quarter of the Apennine Peninsula, and, as their secular prince, the pope was increasingly drawn into political and military conflicts to protect his rule. This left him less and less able to take care of his duties as spiritual head of the Catholic Church. Toward the end of the century, religious respect for papal authority sank to an all-time low. In 1773, the European powers even managed to force Clement XIV to dissolve the Jesuit order, his most important political supporters within the Church. Napoleon Bonaparte annexed the pope’s lands, and forced Pius VII into French exile. Following the pope’s return, the 1815 Congress
of Vienna restored the Papal States as an independent entity. But although Cardinal Secretary of State Ercole Consalvi promised the Congress that in return, reforms would be implemented in the areas of governance, legislation, education, and the economy, these never materialized.
3
The Papal States remained the most backward political entity in the whole of Europe.
However, following the Wars of Liberation, the Restoration had become a dominant movement in Europe, and the pope was able to regain the people’s respect for him as a moral and religious authority. He had suddenly become the only monarch in Europe to have defied the beast Napoleon, earning a spell in exile for his convictions. All the other rulers had made deals with the French emperor. To the Romantic mind, papal authority was a guarantee of eternal values, in particular of the divine right of kings. It was a protective force against the chaos and uncertainty of the French Revolution, with its liberal understanding of constitutional law and human rights. Leo XII was particularly adept at utilizing this desire for security. The Eternal City would once again become the most sacred place on earth.
German Catholics were increasingly turning toward Rome in the wake of secularization and the destruction of the old Imperial Church with its prince-bishoprics. Most had become the subjects of Protestant princes, and were seeking salvation through a closer connection with the pope. After the July Revolution of 1830, there was a phase of growing Ultramontanism within the Catholic Church. Catholics were starting to look
ultra montes
, beyond the mountains, to Rome. Roman piety, Roman liturgy, and Roman theology were increasingly regarded as the only true realizations of Catholicism, legitimated by the pope in his role as
Vicarius Christi
.
With this movement in full swing, the Catholic press began to style Rome as the bride of Christ, the holy city, a heavenly Jerusalem on earth. This religious elevation of the papacy didn’t stem from the popes and the Roman Curia itself: it was brought to the pope from outside. The pontiff became the surface onto which people could project their need for religious security in an age of upheaval, doubt, and revolution. During this period, people began to rediscover the idea of making a pilgrimage to Rome. Having a personal encounter with the pope, praying over the graves of the apostles Peter and Paul—and the religious self-assurance this brought with it—became markers of a genuine Catholic faith.
The members of the Roman Curia utilized this new orientation toward Rome in very different ways. The College of Cardinals split into
Zelanti
and
Politicanti
. The first group, the zealots, wanted to use the new enthusiasm for Rome to suppress any kind of reform in the Church and the Papal States, increasingly absolutizing the pope as the infallible sacred monarch. The other members, the pragmatists, were rather more skeptical, seeing that this represented a threat to their program of reconciliation between the Church and the world. There were mighty clashes between “hawks” and “doves”—particularly when it came to electing a new pope. Hard-liners and moderates scored alternate victories in the conclaves.
Katharina von Hohenzollern and her mother also headed for Rome, as part of a procession of pilgrims largely drawn from the higher echelons of society. They entered Rome for the first time in 1834, during the pontificate of Gregory XVI, who was a
Zelant
. The pope and his circle harbored a general mistrust of the modern world, with all its progressive political ideas, scientific discoveries, and economic developments.
4
During his reign, he built the holy city into a kind of spiritual fortress against the diabolical powers of liberalism, since the repercussions of the French July Revolution hadn’t spared the theocratic Papal States. Gregory XVI was deeply traumatized by the revolution, and consequently persecuted all innovators within the Catholic Church. For this pope, anything that looked remotely like freedom, reform, or modern education had a whiff of brimstone about it. He believed the Catholic Church should be concentrated on Rome, and furnished as a “house full of glory.” The Church would stand up to modernity and would eventually emerge victorious against it, through the
Triumph of the Holy See
—as the title of a book written by the pope would have it.
5
Following on from this Restoration pontiff, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was elected pope on June 16, 1846. He was a moderate
Politicant
, and consequently took the name of his predecessor’s predecessor, becoming Pius IX.
6
The new pope, a man of great personal charm, began his pontificate by pushing through a series of reforms. He decreed an amnesty for political prisoners, set up a civilian government, and promised his subjects a constitution that would give them a say in the political life of the Papal States. This liberal stance met with broad approval from the Roman population. But sparks from the 1848 March Revolution in the German states landed in the
pope’s city: people became radicalized, and Pius IX was ultimately forced to flee to Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples. It was only after French troops had put down the uprising that the pope was able to return to the Vatican, in 1850.