The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (44 page)

With the juridical illegitimacy of the correspondence thus clarified, the abbess was called upon to explain what constituted Sant’Ambrogio’s “famed spirit of perfection,” and what relation this bore to the mother founder’s supernatural gifts. Maria Veronica replied that it was only because Firrao had been a soul chosen by God that she was able to found an institute of such great holiness. She cited the wound in the founder’s side as conclusive proof of her holiness, and the spirit of Sant’Ambrogio that stemmed from it.

The investigating judge was particularly struck by the abbess’s “dishonesty” when it came to the biography of Firrao written by Abbot Marconi. In her first hearings, Maria Veronica had denied the existence of this work many times over. Sallua now produced several witness statements that revealed just how familiar she was with the biography. Her reply is typical of her behavior before the Holy Office’s tribunal: “What I said only appears to be a contradiction: by a life of Maria Agnese, I meant a printed book. When I said there was
none, I thought you were asking me about a published work. Now I understand that this also included manuscripts, and in truth I must say that these did indeed exist, although I do not believe they were the work of Abbot Marconi.”

Nor did the court believe her when she said she had always acted in “good faith and conscience.” Her excuse was far more reticent than Padre Leziroli’s: she claimed she had simply been following the convent’s tradition, and the example of others. The abbess thus denied any personal responsibility for perpetuating the cult of Firrao, blaming everything on the structures and system of Sant’Ambrogio.

When she was questioned about Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness, Maria Veronica praised this sister’s “innocence, virtue and simplicity,” and “celebrated her holiness and her supposedly supernatural gifts.”
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Her unequivocal belief in “saint” Maria Luisa’s authenticity was based on the heavenly letters and, not least, on the authority of the confessor. She quoted Padre Leziroli as saying that “even if an angel were to come down from heaven and tell him the opposite, he would not believe it.” And the learned theologian Padre Peters, “a man in whom even cardinals confide, and rightly so,” had spent days at a time with Maria Luisa during her ecstasies. He had sacrificed many hours from his theological studies to attend to her—which confirmed to the abbess that Maria Luisa was something “out of the ordinary.”

There had been a clear reversal of roles in Sant’Ambrogio. The Rule said that the vicaress should be nothing more than a dependent helpmeet to the abbess, but Maria Veronica had been elected abbess by the grace of Maria Luisa. And it wasn’t just that she had been chosen on the strength of Maria Luisa’s vision; in the course of her time in office, she proved to be a puppet in Maria Luisa’s hands. One symptom of this role reversal was the way in which blessings were dispensed. Normally, an abbess would bless her nuns. In Sant’Ambrogio, however, the vicaress blessed the abbess on a daily basis. “Every evening I received the blessing from Maria Luisa, in the following way: I knelt down, kissed the ring on her hand, and she made the sign of the cross three times on my forehead and heart, pressing her hand to my breast. Maria Luisa told the father confessors of this practice, and because of the comfort it brought me, they said I might continue with it.”

With the support of a few of the older sisters, the abbess made at least one attempt to revolt against Maria Luisa’s regime. Significantly,
this was when Agnese Eletta was expelled from Sant’Ambrogio. The abbess and Maria Costanza appealed against this decision to Cardinal Vicar Patrizi—but he just informed the spiritual director, Leziroli, of what they had told him. Leziroli gave the abbess and the older nuns a telling off, and threatened certain punishment from God if these accusations against Maria Luisa went any further. After this they gave in, and bowed to the Sant’Ambrogio system.

Maria Veronica also knew about Maria Luisa’s highly problematic recruitment of young nuns, as she admitted to the court. She gave the example of Angelica Volpiani from Ferrara, who was taken into the convent following pressure from the novice mistress and Leziroli, even though the girl’s mother was against it. She was hurriedly clothed and given the name Maria Agostina. The abbess had relented and given her assent to the acceptance of this attractive and powerful young woman, although from the outset Angelica Volpiani had made an unfavorable impression on her. In the abbess’s view, this young woman had no vocation. The order’s rules stated that as the mother superior, Maria Veronica should have rejected her on these grounds. And Maria Agostina’s tragic fate showed just how disastrous it had been to ignore the rules: in the truest sense of the words, Maria Luisa drove her to her death.

Even before the convent had won Katharina von Hohenzollern as a novice, Maria Luisa told the abbess of “various revelations, particularly coming from the Madonna.” The Virgin was adamant they should take Katharina, writing in one letter:
“The princess must be mine, whether sick or well.”
Unfortunately, the abbess could say nothing of the exact circumstances in which the princess had been recruited—the role of Cardinal Reisach, for example.

The letter from the Virgin was part of Maria Luisa’s plan to found an offshoot of Sant’Ambrogio, where she could become an abbess herself. Agnese Eletta, the vicaress’s former bedfellow, told the prioress of San Pasquale that in 1857, Maria Luisa had foretold that she would “go to France with a Signora for a new founding.”
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When Katharina von Hohenzollern came to Rome in the summer of that year, Maria Luisa must have heard about her search for a suitable convent, her poor state of health, and, most important, the substantial convent fund Katharina had established after the death of her second husband. But there was only one person in Rome who could have
given her this information: Katharina’s spiritual guide and confessor, Cardinal Reisach. And after the princess entered Sant’Ambrogio, Reisach seems to have convinced her to add a clause to her will stipulating that “a convent of the same institute is to be founded, the first founder of which must be the madre vicaria, Maria Luisa.” Hohenlohe provided this information during his hearing on April 19, 1860, adding that the sealed testament was in Reisach’s hands.
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“The princess must be mine, whether sick or well,” wrote the Virgin. In reality, this was a monstrous demand: it wasn’t Mary in heaven but Maria Luisa in Sant’Ambrogio who wanted to possess Katharina. And the princess did seem like a gift from heaven, to help her fulfill her lust for power.

CONFESSIONS

The abbess was not to be swayed from her firm belief in Maria Luisa’s holiness and the authenticity of the supernatural phenomena that surrounded her, despite the judge pointing out the “disconnections and contradictions” in her statements. It was only after he had given her a “severe and at the same time paternal warning” that she confessed to having acted unjustly, and begged the court for forgiveness. “I realize that I have done wrong. I was truly blind in allowing Maria Luisa to err in so many ways. I realize that I am guilty of knowing about her errors and illusions. I therefore beg forgiveness.… I ask God, the Holy Tribunal, and in particular His Eminence the cardinal vicar for forgiveness: I deceived him for a long time, by keeping all these things from him. I now thank the Lord for opening my eyes and showing me the abyss in which I and the entire community found ourselves. He removed the blindfold from my eyes, and I feel like a completely new person.”

She now answered the charges in detail, saying she had not only been informed of the intimate acts between Maria Luisa and Padre Peters; she had actively encouraged these.
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From the outset, she had noted the “delight” with which Padre Peters had looked upon the beautiful vicaress. Once, the cardinal vicar came to the convent unannounced while Peters was in Maria Luisa’s cell. She herself had
quickly hidden him, so that Patrizi wouldn’t suspect any wrongdoing. And she was the one who had allowed the padre to enter the enclosure.

Then the abbess came to the poisoning of Katharina von Hohenzollern.
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At first, the novice mistress had been able to “quell the princess’s mistrust with her flattery and sweet words.” But at that moment when the princess “told the father confessor about the Americano’s letter, which contained vile words,” Maria Luisa’s hatred for her had grown immeasurably. “She was further enraged by the princess’s act of humility, when she came to her on the morning of the feast of the Immaculate Conception and begged her to tell the truth.” The abbess admitted she had acted wrongly, increasing her own guilt in the whole affair by believing Maria Luisa’s version of events instead of Katharina’s. She had been blinded by the vicaress’s apparent holiness.

Maria Ignazia’s statements on the poisoning were read out to the abbess, and she corroborated them before the court. “They are indeed correct … and represent the precise facts,” she said—though admittedly with the caveat that she could only judge this so far as she herself had been informed about the affair. “A few facts concerning how the poisons were administered were unknown to me, or I could not believe them when other people told me.”
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Maria Ignazia had in fact exonerated the abbess on some fundamental points, saying that she had no active involvement in the attacks, and knew nothing about various important details of the poisonings. The tribunal accepted this. There were some facts that couldn’t be denied, because the body of evidence was so overwhelming—but Maria Veronica claimed she had followed the confessors’ instructions, and had simply written these off as “illusions created by the devil.”

In spite of this partial exoneration, the abbess accepted ultimate responsibility for the attempts on Katharina von Hohenzollern’s life. As the mother superior of Sant’Ambrogio, she was to blame for everything that happened there. She saw Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness as the key to all her crimes and immoral acts. If she had spoken out against the false cult of Maria Luisa in time, none of these other terrible things would have happened. However, there is no way of knowing whether the abbess came to this conclusion on her own, or if she was just agreeing with Sallua and the Inquisition, who believed that false faith almost automatically led to false actions.

In any case, the abbess placed a great deal of blame on Padre Peters.
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In her eyes, he was the principal promoter of Maria Luisa’s holiness. He was also the person most deeply involved in everything that had gone wrong, through the heavenly letters and his “improper” intimacies with the madre vicaria. And he had the most to lose if the case became public knowledge. Maria Veronica said he had been deeply perturbed, and had told her anxiously: “The cardinal vicar knows something.” In an attempt to stop anything coming to light, Padre Peters had sworn the nuns, including herself, to secrecy. She and the nuns had obediently lied or refused to speak to the visitators, and had even kept their promise when they were first called to appear before the Inquisition. Peters had officially informed her in writing that she must tell all; face-to-face, however, he had told her she should reveal nothing.

At the end of the abbess’s interrogation, Sallua summarized her confession into five points. One: she had admitted to actively encouraging the cult of Firrao. Two: she had also lent her enthusiastic support to Maria Luisa’s feigned holiness. Three: she had abused her office with regards to the enclosure. Four: she had blindly and falsely believed in the supposed apparitions of the devil. This “deception” had been repeatedly used to commit numerous offenses and slander innocent parties. Five: she was to blame for various false precepts and scandalous practices in Sant’Ambrogio. This covered a whole gamut of deviant religious and social behavior, from lesbian initiation rites to amorous relationships with men, and the continual breaking of the rules on fasting, confession, and Divine Office.

Maria Veronica gave a “sincere” confession (as the court noted with satisfaction), acknowledging her guilt on all points. “I confess that I have done wrong, although I must say, there were some things I would not have done had I known that they were evil. I beg forgiveness, and to be assigned a punishment, so that I might atone for my mistakes.” She raised no objection to the possible punishments the judge mentioned to her, “because I wish to make reparations to God and the Holy Tribunal.”

The abbess declared the trial against her to be legitimate, and declined a reexamination of the witnesses and a defensive process, as well as a period in which to retract her confession. Nor did she take advantage of the right to instruct her own defense counsel. The
Holy Office called in its lawyer once again, just as it had done for Maria Luisa and Padre Leziroli. Giuseppe Cipriani read over the files and signed them off on September 16, 1861. The fiscal, Antonio Bambozzi, had already done this on September 12. The
Ristretto
for the abbess’s interrogation could now be printed for the cardinals and consultors. They were given their copies in October 1861, and used them to reach their verdict on Maria Veronica Milza.

CHAPTER EIGHT