The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (25 page)

On December 8, 1854, Pius IX dogmatized the
Immaculata Conceptio
, by the sole power of his authority, and in the presence of numerous bishops. In so doing, he anticipated the infallibility that the pope was only to be accorded by the Vatican Council in 1870. “Accordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the Holy and undivided Trinity, for the glory and adornment of the Virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic Faith, and for the furtherance of the Catholic religion …‘We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.’ ”
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A contemporary editorial in the Jesuit journal
Civiltà Cattolica
viewed the new Marian dogma in political as well as theological terms. Through the dogma, the “principle of authority in society is created anew,” and “the judgment of damnation is spoken against the so-called sovereignty of the people.”
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The Immaculate Virgin was styled as a combatant against modernity. “Just as the Immaculata, free from every stain, archetype and paragon of the Church, is victorious over temptation and Satan, so the Church and Catholics shall repel seductive Reason and tempting Liberation, and be victorious over the Revolution.”
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The new dogma was announced amid a flurry of apparitions of the Virgin.
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Between 1803 and 1917, there were no fewer than 119 documented sightings. Significantly, 115 took place in Europe. In Italy, apparitions of the Virgin reached an absolute high point in the 1850s. This was seen as a direct consequence of the new dogma, but it also hints at the increasing threat to the Papal States posed by Italian unification. Generally speaking, visions of the Virgin always increase in Catholic countries in times of political or economic crisis. Interestingly, of the 115 European apparitions, only eight were recognized by the Church. Of these, Mary’s appearances at La Salette in 1846 and Lourdes in 1858 achieved worldwide fame.

A shift in religious expression during the nineteenth century created an atmosphere in which visions of the Virgin seemed more plausible than they had previously been, and were treated more sympathetically by the Church. “Pius IX’s papacy provided evidence that the Church was able to channel powerful outpourings of popular piety effectively; that it could take up and institutionalize the fears and longings released by the apparitions of the Virgin.” The pope expertly co-opted these apparitions into his struggle against the modernizers, developing a “remarkable skill in the use of modern methods of communication to further the Cult of the Virgin.”
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The people to whom the Virgin appeared were for the most part women or children from simple stock, whose visions often led to an improvement in their social standing. The fate of an apparition and the person who had seen it, however, still hung on the Church authorities, and was particularly dependent on how the responsible priest dealt with the phenomenon. Seers were often abruptly removed from the limelight and deposited in a convent, when (as at La Salette) their message from the Mother of God turned out to be highly critical of the Church and the clergy.

The corporeality of these appearances was the subject of much controversy and discussion in the theology of the time. While theologians with modern leanings assumed that these visions played out in the heads of the visionaries, many new scholastically oriented theologians were convinced the seers really were able to perceive the Mother of God with their sense organs, and that the heavenly Lady showed herself in tangible form. This idea was part of the more general concept of how the natural and supernatural worlds were related that new scholastic theologians developed during the nineteenth century.

From real corporeal appearances of the Blessed Virgin to the materialization of letters from heaven was—at least in theory—not a huge imaginative leap. And if the supernatural was really manifesting itself in the natural world, then why shouldn’t other heavenly beings besides Mary use the written word to convey instructions from the other side?

But all this looked rather different in practice. While a host of apparitions of the Virgin were reported in the nineteenth century, letters from the Virgin were relatively rare. Two categories of Marian letters should be distinguished here: the so-called apocryphal writings
that Mary was supposed to have set down during her lifetime in Palestine; and the “heavenly letters,” which were apparently written by the Blessed Virgin after her assumption into heaven, and then fell to earth or materialized here. One famous example of the first category is Mary’s letter to the people of Messina. This was written in Greek, dated June 27 of AD 42, and supposedly sent from Jerusalem.
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Its authenticity has been debated by numerous popes.

Heavenly letters from the Virgin have appeared on a number of occasions since the sixth century, often in the context of mystical experiences.
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These have only ever been a single letter in each case, though this has meant each has attracted a great deal of attention. A letter from Mary written in French was widely circulated in eighteenth-century France. Mary described herself as the
“mère de Dieu, dame des Anges, bénigne et pure, espérance et réconfort de toute bonne créature.”
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Apparitions of the Virgin required a human medium, a visionary—somebody to see Mary and hear her pronounce her heavenly message before conveying it to the world. A letter from heaven, by contrast, was itself the medium in which a message from the other side was conveyed in black and white. Visions and auditions were subjective, momentary experiences, but with a piece of heavenly writing there was tangible, lasting proof of the command “from above.”

The appearance of written sources as proof of the authenticity of an event has something historicist about it:
Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo
. If something isn’t there in black and white in the source material, it doesn’t exist. And while the authenticity of apparitions was difficult to prove, with a letter from heaven you had a tangible
Corpus Delicti
in front of you, whose origins could be investigated.

FORGING LETTERS FROM THE VIRGIN

Sallua had come into possession of just one letter. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that Beckx really had followed its “divine” instructions, so he had to focus all his efforts on learning more about the letters from the Virgin. Having spent two months denying she knew anything about them, the abbess finally gave him a clue as to how the letters had been produced.
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Sister Maria Francesca had told her
that “she had written these letters on the instructions of Sister Maria Luisa. She received the drafts from her, and the order never to speak of the matter to anybody.” When the inquisitor rebuked the abbess for her long silence on this central point, she replied: “I believed I would be committing an error if I were to speak of it, since I had written to ask Padre Peters about this at the start of the hearing. He answered in writing that I should reveal everything. But then he sent Franceschetti to tell me in person that
I was under no obligation to say everything I knew, be it as abbess, or through the seal of the confessional, or anything that might cause harm to another person
.”

Now that the abbess had implicated Sister Maria Francesca, Sallua finally had the leverage he needed to unravel the mystery of the letters. Maria Francesca was “subjected to numerous interrogations over four months,” as the Dominican reported to the cardinals. She always “answered with unusual candor” and was able to remember the content of the various heavenly missives very precisely, “down to individual phrases.”

This nun was interrogated in February 1860.
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Maria Francesca a Passione stated that she was twenty-three years old, had been in the convent for three years, and had taken her vows the previous year. The first question she was asked was “whether she knew the reason she had been summoned and why she was being examined, or if she could guess the reason.” She answered: “I believe I have been called here to tell you things about the madre vicaria and novice mistress, Maria Luisa.” At this, the investigating judge asked her to tell him what she knew, one thing at a time. And Maria Francesca testified:

This cleared up the origin of the Virgin Mary’s letter to the Jesuit general, and Sallua was finally able to narrow down the time period in which it had been written. Maria Francesca composed the letter to Beckx in spring 1857—considerably before August 3, the day that Passaglia and Schrader were separated.

But this wasn’t the only letter that Maria Francesca had written at the novice mistress’s behest in the name of the Virgin and other heavenly powers, so Sallua continued his investigations. First of all, the late mother founder had been made to serve as the author of heavenly letters. Maria Francesca continued.

“A few months later, Maria Luisa told me to copy out many things written by the Mother. But as I was writing out fair copies from these drafts, I soon realized that the Mother was really Maria Luisa.” Eventually, the beautiful novice mistress became dissatisfied with the mother founder and the Virgin Mary as correspondents. She decided to go even further up the divine hierarchy:

Now it wasn’t just the Virgin, but Jesus himself who was writing letters. Letters from Jesus do crop up in religious history, but are far rarer than those from the Virgin Mary. There are really only two known cases where He was supposed to have sent a letter from heaven. One was addressed to Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the second half of the second century AD. The other appeared in the sixth century, and spoke in favor of the Sunday observance. There is some debate about whether this text was originally written in Latin or Greek. Later it was even divided into two or three letters.
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The young nun also described the way in which these divine letters materialized on earth. There was a little casket “into which Maria Luisa laid the letters I had written”; these were then discovered there and taken to be letters from the Virgin, fallen from heaven. They were addressed to the abbess, Padre Leziroli, and, more frequently, Padre Peters.

One letter that Maria Francesca wrote to Padre Peters “in the role of the Mother of God,” said: “Poor son! Do you not smell the scent of my first-born daughter? It does one good to smell it.” Maria Francesca added, by way of explanation: “This was at the time when Maria Luisa smelled very strongly of roses.” And the Virgin went on: “I am the
rosa mystica
,
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and my daughter is also a rose, giving off this fragrance that comes from her heart.” In the guise of the Virgin Mary, Maria Luisa was giving Peters a Marian interpretation of the rose scent, and drawing a parallel between herself and Christ. Christ is the firstborn son of God; Maria Luisa is the firstborn daughter of the Mother of God. It was a monstrous claim.
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In her second hearing, Maria Francesca carried on talking about her work forging heavenly letters.
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Her testimony was clearly so fascinating and illuminating that the inquisitor didn’t want to interrupt her by asking any additional questions. When uprisings began in Bologna and other parts of the Papal States, panic had broken out in Rome,
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and the Mother of God wrote to Pope Pius IX. “In two letters to the pope, she recommended that he flee to Austria.” From the style of the drafts Maria Luisa had given her, Maria Francesca believed they had been prepared by Padre Peters. At the very least, Maria Luisa had used information the Jesuit had given her to write them. The letters to the pope addressed an issue that was widely discussed in Rome at that time: the question of how Pius IX should behave in this delicate political situation.

The witness went on: “At Maria Luisa’s request, I wrote Padre Peters a kind of reprimand, in the name of Jesus Christ.” Jesus told Peters he should have more faith in the contents of the heavenly letters, especially what they said about the “extraordinary soul”—meaning Maria Luisa. The letters claimed