The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (42 page)

This nun was none other than Maria Luisa. Leziroli had heard from two or three other sisters that they had seen Maria Luisa “with a sullen face” in a particular place, although she was actually elsewhere and “in a good mood.” This led him to believe that the devil had assumed her form. “The sum of all these facts meant that I allowed myself to be deceived. Nothing more.”

This made the father confessor look very gullible, for an educated
Jesuit—his attitude was almost naive. When he was questioned further about when and how he realized he had been deceived, the padre stated that it had only happened two or three weeks after he had been released from his duties in Sant’Ambrogio, in December 1860. This was when his fellow Jesuit, Peters, told him that Maria Luisa had commissioned “certain rings” through the lawyer Franceschetti, “which she caused to appear on her finger as if they were gifts received in heaven.” The rings from the heavenly marriage were thus revealed as being of earthly manufacture. “From this I concluded that everything else must have been a deception, too.” He immediately burned all the papers to do with Maria Luisa’s holiness. He did, however, keep his manuscript on the life of the mother founder, as he remained absolutely convinced of her holiness.

THE APOSTLE OF SAINT AGNESE FIRRAO

Now the interrogation turned to the most important charge against Leziroli: the promotion of the cult of Agnese Firrao, who had been convicted of feigned holiness.
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The judges were particularly keen to know about Leziroli’s work,
Sulle memorie della vita di Suor Maria Agnese di Gesù
, which he had composed over the course of many years. This manuscript, the draft for a saint’s life of Firrao, had been handed over to the Inquisition by the Jesuit general, Petrus Beckx, along with the letter he had received from the Virgin Mary.
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To prepare for Leziroli’s interrogation, the judges tasked the Carmelite monk Girolamo Priori with an evaluation of this manuscript, on April 24, 1861.
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Priori had worked as a consultor for the Holy Office since 1852, and he had also been prior general of his order in Rome since 1856.
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Priori’s judgment was damning: he said this “mendacious biography” of the false saint Maria Agnese Firrao should by all means be burned. In addition to numerous “mercies, privileges and ecstasies,” the Jesuit had presented Firrao’s heroic virtue in a manner that was normally reserved for a
propositio
by the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Either Leziroli was angling for a papal beatification of Maria Agnese (whom he already venerated as blessed), or he was hoping to get her beatified through his
Memorie
alone, without the Church’s blessing, which was a staggering presumption.

In his false saint’s life, Leziroli gave a very detailed description of Agnese Firrao’s mystical wedding to Christ in heaven. This was an attempt to legitimate a new nineteenth-century mystic using a strategy that had worked for the great mystics of the Middle Ages. A mystical union with Christ was supposed to serve as unequivocal proof of sainthood, although this had been hotly debated within the Church even in relation to the “classical” female mystics. The Carmelite’s evaluation of Leziroli’s text pointed out that it “compromised” Giuseppe Pignatelli, Agnese Firrao’s sometime confessor, “many times over.” Leziroli depicted Pignatelli as a committed believer in the true holiness of Agnese Firrao. Priori saw the serious threat that this presented to the process for Pignatelli’s own beatification, which had just been opened in Rome. If the Jesuit Pignatelli had really supported a false saint, then he himself could not be a saint. (In fact, Pignatelli was eventually beatified in 1933, and canonized in 1954.) In Priori’s view, Leziroli’s terrible manuscript had to be taken out of circulation immediately. Of course—as was customary for a Holy Office evaluator—he left the decision on the final
Damnatio
up to the congregation of cardinals.

With this unequivocal votum up his sleeve, Sallua asked Leziroli exactly what his purpose had been in writing his life of Firrao. The padre answered that the mother founder had been a “nun filled with virtue,” possessed of “extraordinary gifts,” and people must not be allowed to forget this. But in the first instance, he said, his work had only been meant for use within the convent. He had wanted to present Maria Agnese to the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio as a shining example. Of course, he and the nuns all knew that Pius VII had condemned her as a false saint—but they thought he had only arrived at this verdict because Firrao’s enemies had slandered her reform of the Third Order of Holy Saint Francis. Even the pope himself, as Sister Maria Caterina had explained to him, had believed the slander. Leziroli also claimed that, as he was basing his text on Firrao’s memoirs and the stories told by her first companions, he was only setting down in writing things that were already familiar to the nuns from oral sources.

Then there was the matter of the mother founder’s continued contact with her daughters in Rome, from exile in Gubbio. The Jesuit justified this by claiming it had been permitted by Leo XII—something that Cardinal Giuseppe Pecci,
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the bishop of Gubbio from 1841 to 1855, had certainly known. Leziroli was probably drawing
on the papal brief of 1829, in which the pope released the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio from all censures and canonical judgments. Even if the brief contained no specific mention of the mother founder, this was obviously how the nuns had interpreted Pope Leo XII’s words. But for contact to have been permitted, Agnese Firrao’s exile would have to have been revoked—which clearly wasn’t the case.

Leziroli was honoring Sant’Ambrogio’s long tradition of defying the 1816 Inquisition decree, without fundamentally questioning its validity. The
cantus firmus
of his testimony was that Agnese Firrao was a true saint. The investigating judges also recorded that Leziroli claimed he himself had been miraculously healed. Maria Luisa had written to tell him that this healing was the result of Saint Maria Agnese’s intercession.

Leziroli stubbornly defended his “saint’s life” before the tribunal. Its real purpose, he said, had been to preserve the most important information on Maria Agnese’s life and work for posterity, “in case the Lord should decide her innocence must be revealed.” He still had faith in all the old sources: Firrao’s personal testimonial, and the statements from her companions. However, he did admit “that everything pertaining to visitations and mercies after her death must be removed from the life of Sister Maria Agnese di Gesù, for this is an illusion.” “All of this” came from what Maria Luisa, the false saint, had told him while he was in his “blinded” state.

In fact, these pages were already missing from the
Memorie
the court showed him, and which he identified as his work. Leziroli said that Padre Peters had cut out the incriminating pages after they learned of Maria Luisa’s deception.

Sallua then turned his attention to the practical ways in which Firrao was venerated in Sant’Ambrogio. The confessor conceded the nuns had called her
Beata, Santa Madre
(Blessed, Holy Mother), especially after her death. He himself had only referred to her as
Beata
in private. In public, and particularly in the liturgy, he merely called her “most pious, virtuous and favored mother,” taking care never to say “blessed, holy or venerable.” But in subsequent interrogations, Leziroli was forced to admit that, after her death, he also called the mother founder
Beata
in public. He explained to the court that when he said this, he meant that Maria Agnese had already achieved heavenly glory. During the benediction for the sick, he therefore incorporated
the phrase “at the intercession of Your servant Agnes” into the liturgical wording for the intercession of the saints. He also advised the nuns: “Trust in your holy mother!”

Leziroli also had to admit to “reworking” the prayers to Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and other saints, at the nuns’ request, to include a prayer for the return of the mother founder from exile. After her death, he inserted the name Maria Agnese into the Litany of the Saints, as “blessed by heaven,” as if she had already achieved divine glory. From the Inquisition’s point of view, this meant he had arrogated responsibilities to himself that belonged solely to the pope and the Roman congregations in charge: the changing of liturgical texts, and raising the dead to the altars.

Leziroli was firmly convinced that Agnese Firrao’s visions had been genuine. She once wrote to him from Gubbio to say she had seen the late abbess, Maria Maddalena, “going up to heaven.” He spoke to Cardinal Pecci about her vision, and Pecci replied:
“She does seem to be an exalted spirit, but only God knows this for certain.”
The Jesuit was sure “that the Lord, who keeps His promises, would one day glorify His servant.” Agnese Firrao was still a saint in Leziroli’s eyes, Inquisition judgment or no. And so he allowed the mother founder’s contact relics to be venerated in Sant’Ambrogio, and petitioned for the return of her body from Gubbio. Firrao’s confessor there wrote and told him her body had shown no signs of decay a full ten days after her death. Leziroli’s aim was to create a saint’s grave as a place of veneration inside the walls of Sant’Ambrogio.
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Sallua wrote: “The defendant was shown many unanimous witness statements, saying he had promoted the veneration and the cult of the mother founder in various ways, acting on his conviction that she was a saint.” Leziroli was unable to refute the overwhelming evidence, and had to confess. “Very well, everything you have read to me is correct.”

He argued that his behavior was purely the result of Maria Luisa’s deception. The tribunal saw this the other way around: when Maria Luisa told the Jesuit about her visions and the other supernatural phenomena connected to the mother founder, she had been preaching to the choir. Everything she said fit with the image he had already formed of the “saint” Maria Agnese. He was only too willing to let Maria Luisa help him set more jewels into the crown of Maria Agnese’s sainthood. Leziroli didn’t feel he had been deceived
by Agnese Firrao, whose spiritual guide he had been for a decade and a half, but only by Maria Luisa. She had a duty of obedience to him, but she had manipulated him using her supposedly divine powers. Leziroli gave a telling picture of the beautiful young vicaress’s strategy of communication and control. Looking back, he expressed his horror and disappointment at having been taken in by this deception. But he may not have been aware, as he did this, that Maria Luisa was consciously serving the expectations or projections he and many other nineteenth-century men of the cloth had of gifted women.
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THE CONFESSOR AND “SAINT” MARIA LUISA

The next charge concerned Maria Luisa’s pretense of holiness.
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The investigating judges asked Leziroli how Maria Luisa had managed to assume such a position in the convent. The defendant said that in 1849, the mother founder had written to tell him she “disapproved” the “extraordinary things” Maria Luisa was claiming. This corroborated the statements the older nuns had given during the informative process. There may have been a kind of competitive envy at work here: skepticism from Sant’Ambrogio’s old saint about the new one, who was threatening to outstrip her.

Leziroli, as he told the tribunal, emphatically rebuffed the mother founder’s criticism. He had put Maria Luisa to the test a number of times, and had seen clear signs that his faith in the authenticity of her supernatural experiences was justified. He viewed her as “a unique treasure” and saw to it that this “privileged soul” was given the appropriate offices in the convent.

Leziroli then took Cardinal Vicar Patrizi into his trust, having informed him of Maria Luisa’s special gifts. Patrizi instructed him to forbid Maria Luisa “all these things,” which, Leziroli claimed, he promptly did. But the investigating judges took a rather different view on the matter, and accused him of not having followed Patrizi’s orders. There was an obvious reason for the court to take this attitude to Leziroli’s statement about Patrizi: the judges had to get the head of the Roman Inquisition, their most senior overseer, out of the firing line.

But if Patrizi had been so critical of Maria Luisa, why was he present when she was elected as vicaress? Had he really believed that if he didn’t go, the devil would possess his servant and poison him with chocolate, as Maria Luisa had prophesied? Patrizi’s visit had perpetuated the “system of visions,” Leziroli explained, because it was taken as recognition of Maria Luisa’s holiness.

Leziroli subsequently admitted that in many cases he had acted on the visions of the supposed saint. He had casually handed out dispensations from fasting and attending Divine Office, and supported Maria Luisa’s recruitment of young nuns. He put pressure on Maria Giuseppa during confession, because she refused to believe in Maria Luisa’s holiness. In general, he had been imprudent with the seal of the confessional, and had actually broken it several times. He had been unstinting in his claims that the heavenly letters were genuine. Last but not least, he had staged the scene in which the nuns venerated the madre vicaria as she lay, seemingly unconscious, on her bed, wearing valuable rings and giving off a lovely fragrance.

The court was particularly interested in what Leziroli knew about the relationship between Padre Peters and Maria Luisa. On June 13, 1861, Leziroli told how Peters’s unusually intensive “pastoral” support had come about.
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