Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
At Padre Peters’ wish I returned the letter to him, but sealed, and with the word
Gratia
written on it. Knowing about all this made me worry that, when Padre Peters instilled the spirit of the mother founder into me in the aforementioned way, he might take it further. So the few times it happened—twice to be exact—after I had read the aforementioned letter, I was cautious and fearful. After
that, I wrote a letter (I can’t remember whether in the name of the guardian angel or the Blessed Virgin) saying that God’s mercy had been granted to him through my prayers, and that because of his resistance to extraordinary things, he could cease to dispense his blessing.
For the investigating judge, this was evidence that Padre Peters had committed another offense. In the context of his work as confessor, he had previously conducted a sexual relationship with a woman called Alessandra. In order to construct a specific charge against the Jesuit, Sallua and his colleagues now required further information.
But it was July 28, just over a month later, before Maria Luisa managed to summon up the necessary “composure” to continue testifying on this subject.
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To this end, she submitted handwritten statements detailing her memory of the correspondence between the Jesuit and the Virgin Mary.
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As the defendant explained, Alessandra had used “many extraordinary things” to “deceive” Peters, who had believed in her.
Alessandra had made him great and extraordinary promises, which moved him to overcome his misgivings and not feel ashamed of being seen with her and going about with her, because she had persuaded him to be with her. At this time, great and surprising things occurred, as he said himself. “The acts consisted of long and ardent embraces, kisses, mutual caressing and touching of her clitoris
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with my hand and fingers.” (These are the padre’s words.)
Suddenly she embraced him and fell in a swoon between his naked thighs. Then she took his naked member and put it in her mouth. The “divine marriage” was carried out as follows: “Alessandra lay down on the bed and I” (Padre Peters) “stretched myself out on her, putting my member into the sex
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of the unfortunate Alessandra. During this vehement operation that I had to carry out, she pretended to be in God. But from the expression and pallor of her face, from the odious way she writhed constantly during the act, I could well see that it was a deception and not anything divine. But I cannot explain how a bloodstain could vanish before my eyes, without anybody touching it. It must surely have been the work of the devil, because it cannot have been any natural process.”
Once, the good old woman came into the room and surprised him
in flagrante
during one of these odious acts, causing a great scandal. He held it to be a great miracle that he was able to escape the scandal as he did. From the letter I gathered that this old lady rented a room to him, in which the two of them lived. The old lady must have seen something, because she tried to chase them out of the house—this was written in the letter, though I cannot remember the exact words. The letter explained that Alessandra always returned his kisses and embraces. I don’t remember whether it said the terrible acts with the mouth and the others of the matrimonial bed happened just once, or several times. Nor can I remember whether the letter said the union began with this action, or was completed by it. But I am sure the mutual touching and embracing that was described in such detail happened many times.
Maria Luisa’s testimony suggested that Peters hadn’t just broken his vow of celibacy; he was also guilty of
Sollicitatio
. Interestingly, this affair had taken place in 1848–1849. In the wake of the Roman Revolution, the Jesuits had been driven out of the city once more. Peters probably used his superiors’ absence to disappear amid the bustle of the city, take a room with his lover, and remain undisturbed with her in their love nest. The affair probably only came to an end when the revolution was quelled, restoring order in the Church, and allowing the pope to return to Rome. Now that Peters’s superiors were back on the scene, he had to go back to his order’s house and the oversight of his abbot.
MARIA LUISA AND PADRE PETERS: BLESSING OR BEDDING?
Instead of addressing her relationship with Padre Peters head-on, Maria Luisa had told the Inquisition two very interesting stories: the secret of the special Jesuit blessing, and Peters’s affair with Alessandra. Now the judges pressed her to make a specific statement about her relationship with the Jesuit padre. In her interrogation on July 24, 1860, she finally gave them the information they wanted.
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She had, she claimed, faked her “extraordinary malady” on a regular
basis. She would then call on her confessor for support day and night.
Whenever he came into my cell, I would pretend to be out of my senses; he would fall on his knees, take my hand, press and kiss it. It is understandable why we were alone together. As he did this, I sometimes acted as if I was coming to myself again—or sometimes I did not. And if I did not, he would repeat these acts until I was recovered. Then he would sit on the bed while I told him of some vision or prophecy or about my terrible headaches—he had to use the blessing to release me from these. Or else we spoke of some gift or mercy that the Lord would bestow upon him.
Sometimes I let him find letters about the above-mentioned blessing or other things under my pillow, or in my drawer, or my writing box. Sometimes I had the abbess give him letters before he entered the convent. Our conversations about visions and prophecies went on for hours, and were repeated according to what I had prophesied. During these conversations, he would give me the extraordinary blessing that I spoke of above, and which I had set out for him in the letters from the Madonna.
He dispensed the blessing in the following way: he began by laying his hands on my head, and then he blessed me in the name of the Holy Trinity, the Madonna, and in his own name as my father confessor and protector. Then he fell on his knees and gave me an ardent kiss. Then he stretched out his right hand and at the same time laid his face upon my breast, on the side where the heart is. Then he kissed me on the mouth and on the face, and laid his head on my throat, under my chin. He remained there as our faces touched and he supported my face with his hands.
This all happened every time Padre Peters came in, sometimes several times a day—except for the sign of the cross he made on my throat, as I will now describe. He only did this twice. As the letters instructed, he lifted my
guimpe
[the part of the habit that covers the neck and chest] and made the sign of the cross on my skin with his tongue, from the lowest part of my throat to my chin. Sometimes, acting on the instructions in my letters, he also kissed my feet. On many occasions the letters said he should kiss my heart, and this he also did.
Sometimes, as I was pretending to be overcome by visions and divine conversations, I lifted myself up a little and moved on the bed. He held me in a vehement embrace, and I remained lying on his breast for a while; sometimes he kissed me. For my part, I was quite wary and pretended not to be conscious of these acts, so that he would not doubt my affected purity and holiness.
Sometimes Padre Peters stayed longer, and sometimes not so long. It might be a few hours, half a day or a whole day. Sometimes he also stayed for part of the night and, once, a whole night. Padre Peters came to my cell to care for me … four or five times a month, and this went on for several years. It started shortly after he had begun to stand in as my confessor, and carried on once he became confessor to the convent.
Maria Luisa later corrected her statement about the frequency of the visits:
It is sadly true that I allowed Padre Peters to enter the enclosure. We would withdraw somewhere from lunchtime until the hour of Ave Maria, and sometimes later. There was rarely a day when this did not happen.… Two or three times, when the acts I have described between myself and Padre Peters took place in my cell, as I lay in bed, Padre Peters pulled down the covers and kissed the upper part of my habit, to kiss my heart. He kissed me there over and over, and held his face against my heart for a long time. The whole time we were together was thus a continuous series of kisses and embraces and other acts, as I said above, so I cannot say how long it lasted each time. I can only say that I lay on the bed on my side, opposite him. As the bed was very low, he could repeat the above-mentioned acts in comfort and keep his face against mine.
During these acts he repeated the following phrases: “My daughter, my beloved daughter, firstborn, favored, my delight, my bliss, my treasure.”
When he kissed my heart, he said: “Pure heart, sacred heart, immaculate heart, my treasure,” and similar.
This always happened in the context of pastoral care and in confession. Maria Luisa’s testimony suggested that Padre Peters was guilty
of the serious offense of
Sollicitatio
with her, too. Sallua made a detailed note of the confessor’s misconduct “concerning those acts which, as the expression goes, took place behind closed doors, between confessor and penitent.”
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Maria Luisa, on the other hand, was more concerned with her reception of the extraordinary blessing.
Once, during these intimacies, I made myself seem very inflamed by the love of God. Padre Peters held me in his embrace; I was lying with my head on his breast. Suddenly he put his hand under my scapular and then into the slit in my habit. He pushed my crucifix aside and rubbed my breast, particularly on the side of the heart, for a very long time. Meanwhile, he redoubled his kisses, his caresses, his exclamations. Many other times during these intimacies, he drew the crucifix aside and touched my heart with his hand. Once, he put his tongue into my mouth and I made an effort to trap it with my own. I almost always kept my head on the Jesuit padre’s breast, though almost always while pretending to faint or to speak with the Lord or the Madonna.
Padre Peters kissed and embraced her with tremendous “ardor.” He put his tongue in her mouth “with great vehemence.” “Afterwards he was eager to tell me all about it, and said that during that night he had seen a great beauty in me, like that of the Madonna.”
The terms “ardor” and “vehemence,” which Maria Luisa used several times, were intended to emphasize that—unlike her—the Jesuit padre had been very sexually excited. She tried to convey to him that this extraordinary blessing he was permitted to give her, as the Blessed Virgin’s favorite daughter, was something entirely different from his relationship with Alessandra. There, was filth; here, purity. There, was lust; here, a blessing. There, desire; here, faith.
I never believed these deeds were sinful: I say this with complete certainty. When I invited Padre Peters to carry out those acts, via the letters from the Madonna, I was trying to do him a kindness—and, at the same time, make him consider the evil he had committed with Alessandra. The letters said he was doing these things on God’s orders and as His minister. He was therefore committing
no such sin as he had with Alessandra. Or rather: by behaving so differently, I was able to assure him of the goodness of these acts. Through them, as I said to him many times, he could make amends for many things. He would receive mercy, merits of the highest order, and glory by communication— principally on those occasions when he put his tongue in my mouth. I repeated all these things very often in the letters to Padre Peters from the Madonna, the Lord and the guardian angel. I wanted to convince him of my holiness by this means. I continued to use this system to the very end, and it never troubled my conscience.
The investigating judges didn’t accept Maria Luisa’s distinction between blessing and bedding, and kept coming back to this issue in the hearings. But Maria Luisa stuck to her story: the padre had wanted more, it was true, but she had (among other things) sewn up her scapular so he could no longer touch her chest with his hands. However, he “parted it, so it seemed to me, using his teeth, and put his hand to my breast and touched me there for some time.”
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On July 28, 1860, she begged that Sallua had to believe her when she said that she and the Jesuit had done nothing that resembled what had passed between Peters and Alessandra.
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When his hands wandered “further down” from her chest, she had given up her ecstasies and come to immediately. She repeated this on August 14, 1860, this time in writing.
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The Jesuit had not touched her on the bosom “with his hand or in any other way”; nor had he touched any other “shameful part” of her body. There had been no “act more shameful” than those she had already described.
On September 18, 1860, Maria Luisa finally admitted that she had conducted a passionate relationship with Padre Peters.
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She had
wanted
the Jesuit to commit all these acts with her. She was simply in love with him.
“MY ONLY DEFENSE IS JESUS CHRIST”
Katharina’s poisoning was another subject on which Maria Luisa only made a full confession after the interrogating judge had questioned
her for almost a month, and had confronted her with evidence and incriminating witness statements.
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On July 3, 1860, Maria Luisa related her version of the poisoning attempts to the court.
“In order to give a proper answer to this difficult question, there are a few things I must say first. The late Sister Maria Saveria boasted of many visions and revelations of the mother founder … and claimed that the princess was ill disposed towards me and Padre Peters.… She … ordered me … to do away with … the princess.” Maria Saveria told her to mix “12 grains of opium with a medicine such as cassia or tamarind.” On several occasions after this, Saveria apparently gave her “some little packets of very finely ground glass,” saying she should “put it into the princess’s soup, to make her ill.” Maria Luisa confessed to having kept a few of these little packets. She had “put this glass powder into the princess’s soup two to three times a week.” But she threw away a “packet of white powder” that she had been told to administer to the princess.