The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (46 page)

How did all this fit with his role as Padre Peters in Sant’Ambrogio, the man who believed in miracles? Had he managed to reconcile the different norms and expectations of his two lives? If he had, then Peters’s behavior in Sant’Ambrogio—his belief in holy women, letters from the Virgin, and heavenly rings—would be simply the practical application of Kleutgen’s theological and philosophical concepts. Or, in reverse, Kleutgen’s theology would be a justification of Peters’s behavior. Miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and the tangible materialization of the supernatural in the natural world, were concomitant with the new scholastics’ approach and their understanding of the natural and the supernatural.
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In this respect, Peters’s piety and religious practice followed what made perfect theological sense to Kleutgen.

But there is one crucial dimension of the Sant’Ambrogio affair that cannot simply be integrated into this theory: Peters’s moral, sexual, and criminal misdeeds, in particular his lax attitude to the seal of the confessional, and the offense of
Sollicitatio
. These clearly weren’t covered by the rigid moral theology of new scholasticism that he stood for. They were much more than “venial sins,” or mere human weakness—failings that didn’t compromise a theological principle, and could therefore be charitably overlooked.

So there was a degree of conflict between the roles of Peters and Kleutgen. Did he perhaps have two separate identities? Was Peters-Kleutgen
a dissociative personality who, as Padre Peters, could allow himself to do all the “bad” things the prominent theologian Kleutgen could not—things Kleutgen would have condemned? This scenario has shades of Jekyll and Hyde about it. But Peters gives us no reliable symptoms for this kind of retrospective psychiatric diagnosis, which medical historians could reach in cases of “possession” like the Americano, for example.
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Kleutgen knew exactly what Peters was doing, and vice versa. Admittedly—at least, according to the anti-Jesuit polemic of the time—the Society of Jesus’s military structure, and the rigorous ethic of achievement within the pope’s mobile response troop, sometimes led to a kind of double morality. The Jesuits were often accused of using extreme sophistry to justify completely contradictory actions, or pervert a norm into its exact opposite.
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Did this flexible morality also sanction the adoption of two completely different roles by a member of the Society of Jesus?

THE DEFENDANT’S SPONTANEOUS ADMISSIONS

Like other defendants in inquisition trials, when Kleutgen was first brought before the Inquisition, he was given the opportunity to make a spontaneous statement before being confronted with the specific charges against him. The investigating judge asked the standard question: “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” The Jesuit replied that he thought it probably had something to do with his work as a confessor in Sant’Ambrogio.
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But he didn’t follow this up with any off-the-cuff admissions, as the tribunal had hoped. Instead, he gave them an elaborate prepared statement. It was no surprise that as a successful theological author he had approached this task with a pen in his hand. He presented the court with a lengthy memorandum, which he read out in the sessions on March 18 and 26, and signed to approve its inclusion in the files. His dossier outlined seven instances in which he acknowledged that he had displayed “a lack of caution and tact.”
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The first point concerned Maria Luisa’s visions, and his belief in their authenticity. He said the young nun told him that the three late abbesses—Maria Agnese, Maria Maddalena, and Maria Agnese Celeste della Croce—had appeared to her. They wanted to provide
her, “or rather, the whole community, with support in respect of spiritual and worldly needs.” These visions had occurred very frequently up to the year 1857, when Maria Luisa told him that God had agreed they should cease. However, she later spoke of many other apparitions: sometimes of the Lord, sometimes of the Virgin Mary, or other saints, who always told her of the present glory of Maria Agnese Firrao in heaven, and her future glorification on earth. “I remember two points very well: 1. That Maria Agnese was esteemed particularly highly in heaven because of the greater than average suffering she had endured on earth; 2. that, displaying her stigmata, she said that these stigmata would one day speak.” The Inquisition’s decree of 1816 had played no role in this context. Later, however, he heard it said in Sant’Ambrogio that false witnesses had been called in the mother founder’s trial, and those who had persecuted and accused Maria Agnese, God had immediately punished with death. “But I know that no word of disrespect for the authority was spoken in my presence.”

He had viewed the veneration of Maria Agnese as “private invocation,” which was “normally permitted” for “deceased persons who died with a good reputation.” He took Maria Luisa’s “apparitions or revelations” to be supernatural, and, because there must be no contradiction between theory and moral conduct, he decided to give his “tacit consent” to the cult.

Kleutgen’s dossier skillfully shifted the blame onto Maria Luisa and her divinely ordered secrecy. He believed her visions were real. However—and this was the voice of the academically trained theologian—he should have spoken to experts on mysticism, who could have provided him with the criteria for distinguishing between true and false mystics. But he failed to address the central question of why he, an ordained cleric, allowed himself to be sworn to secrecy by a woman. This turned the hierarchical system of the Catholic Church on its head. There was supposed to be a clear distinction between shepherds and sheep, clerics and laity, the Church that taught and the Church that listened. Only priests could impose silence as a penance—and, according to Paul, women had had to stay quiet in church in any case.

In the second paragraph of his summary, Kleutgen turned to the splendid reputation that Maria Luisa enjoyed throughout the convent. It was only when a few sisters who had “noticed something extraordinary” came to him with their observations, “that I must have shown I believed in it.” Of course, two “events that were held to be very extraordinary” had become general knowledge. First, Maria Luisa owned rings that she claimed were gifts from heaven, and second, her body started to give off a heavenly fragrance. Kleutgen denied actively encouraging the nuns to venerate the divine ring. But he couldn’t explain how, in that case, all the nuns ended up kissing the ring. “If I remember rightly, I said nothing about the ring, though I knew she was wearing it on this day. I thus tolerated this extraordinary fact, at least implicitly, through my conduct. I did not want to humiliate Maria Luisa, and did not give sufficient consideration to the rest.”

The third point of Kleutgen’s written statement related to the heavenly letters. In the last months of 1856, when he had only just begun serving as second confessor, Maria Luisa started to bring him pieces of writing, “which had been dictated to her, as she claimed, during visitations.” To begin with, these were just a few lines long, and gave answers to some of the questions that he had asked beforehand. But gradually they became “proper letters,” several pages in length. Maria Luisa told him that during the inspired writing of these letters, she had understood nothing of their content. At first, Maria Luisa wrote these letters during her visions: she was the inspired scribe, a mere
tool with no will of her own, whose pen was guided by a divine being. Later, the divine beings supposedly began to write their own letters, giving them to Maria Luisa when she was transported to heaven. She brought the letters, “which were no longer in her handwriting, but in another, very beautiful hand,” back to earth with her, to the convent of Sant’Ambrogio.

The Jesuit’s belief in the authenticity and heavenly origin of the letters had been unshakable. As he wrote in his dossier: “I blame myself for my recklessness in taking these letters to be the writings of heavenly persons, and, in my replies, accepting what they demanded of me.”

So Kleutgen’s belief in the letters was not just theoretical. He put the Virgin Mary’s instructions into practice—even when she made unreasonable demands on him. His obedience to these supernatural instructions even made him reveal one of his life’s greatest secrets: the affair with Alessandra N. This was an open acknowledgment that he had broken his vow of celibacy, making him a fallen priest, and therefore extremely vulnerable. But he thought his secret was safe in heaven, with the Mother of God.

Kleutgen believed Maria Luisa to be a pure soul, fundamentally incapable of lies and deceit. Of course, he said, he had been mistrustful at the start, but his doubts had evaporated in light of “certain things that happened in regard to the heavenly letters.” He had always sealed his replies in such a way “that I thought it impossible they could be opened without damaging the paper and the seal. But they were returned to me intact, just as I had left them.” As the letters gave precise answers to questions he had asked in his sealed replies, somebody must have assimilated the contents without opening them. This could only have happened by supernatural means. There had thus been no doubt in his mind that the letters genuinely came from heaven.

Kleutgen had experienced a second phenomenon for which he could find no natural explanation. Once, he received a heavenly letter in which some of the text was struck through, which upset his aesthetic sensibilities a great deal. The beautiful letter had been defaced. He carried this letter around with him all day, and so had no idea how, when he looked at it again that evening, the line through the text could have disappeared. There was no correction of any kind to
be seen. He had spoken to Maria Luisa about the ugly line, and she had simply advised him to take another look that evening. He could only comprehend the improvement as a supernatural phenomenon. He had also believed the “beautiful handwriting, which was new to me” to be divine. Naturally, he had inquired whether any of the nuns in Sant’Ambrogio was capable of creating an artwork of such heavenly beauty, and had been told that the novice Maria Francesca was a gifted calligrapher. Twice he had asked her whether she had anything to do with the letters, “but she denied everything. I thought her a good and simple soul, so I did not suspect she could be deceiving me.” For Kleutgen, this proved the heavenly origins of the letters. Once again, the supernatural was manifesting itself in the natural world.

The Jesuit gave a detailed statement on the content of the letters. Many were religious texts and meditations on Church feasts, with texts for blessings and prayers to be used, or commands from above regarding the regulation of the convent’s business and financial affairs. Other heavenly letters provided responses to his “doubts in respect of the sister’s spirit,” and “gradually explained the mercies that had been bestowed upon her in the course of her life.” But far more important for Kleutgen was the fact that the letters reflected his hope of a radical turning point in the course of history, which he saw as having been on a trajectory of decline since the start of the nineteenth century. His longings and the will of God were seemingly of one accord.

Kleutgen said he had burned the majority of the heavenly missives as soon as he had read them; the remainder he had kept in a little chest
in the convent, to which he had the only key. Following the Apostolic Visitation, when the novice mistress’s “deceptions” became clear to him, he entreated Franceschetti to bring him this casket, and then destroyed all the letters. He had obviously never considered there might be another key.

Kleutgen’s fourth point was a detailed response to the accusation that he had been inside Sant’Ambrogio’s enclosure too often, and had spent time there alone with Maria Luisa. A man’s unauthorized entry into the enclosure of a women’s convent was a serious offense, and tended to arouse suspicions of sexual misconduct. Kleutgen therefore made attempt after attempt to explain that he had always had a good reason for entering the enclosure of Sant’Ambrogio. “I never went into the convent unless asked by the mother abbess, or at least by somebody acting on her behalf. I believe I never took it upon myself to ask if I might enter, but always waited to be sent for.” Whenever he had stayed overnight, or spent several hours there during the day, it had always been for the pastoral care of nuns who were mortally ill or dying.

In the three years from November 1856 to October 1859, seven of Sant’Ambrogio’s nuns had been seriously ill. Five of them had come close to death. Two who survived had been described as “dying” rather than sick by the doctors. “So it can come as no surprise that during this whole period I spent ten or 12 nights in the convent. Particularly as I encouraged the sisters to call upon me rather than Padre Leziroli at these times, out of consideration for his age and his frail state of health. I would like to point out that several times, the doctor told me I should stay, but I declined.”