Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
Sallua was charged with arranging this. He immediately had to summon the four guilty parties before the Holy Office and announce to them the cardinals’ decision, which had been ratified by the pope. He informed them of their sentences, received their abjurations, heard them renounce the crimes of which they had been convicted, and released them from the punishment of excommunication. He then had to inform the rest of the nuns of the verdict. Each of the individual points to be renounced corresponded to one of the main charges listed in the closing summation of each
Ristretto
. The
abjuratio de formali
was an established ritual, and always followed the same pattern.
Joseph Kleutgen’s abjuration took place on February 18, 1862, in the Palace of the Holy Office.
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Present were the two investigating judges, Vincenzo Leone Sallua and Enrico Ferrari, the Holy Office’s scribe, Pacifico Gasparri,
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and Giacomo Vagaggini, acting as notary.
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Kleutgen, whom the court continued to address as Peters, knelt down. A copy of the Gospels lay in front of him. Sallua read out the verdict in a loud, clear voice:
We have resolved to pronounce upon you the final verdict stated below. For this our final verdict we have called upon the holy names of our Lord Jesus Christ and his glorious mother, the Virgin Mary; we who sit in judgment will pronounce from these files of the case and the other cases before us between Monsignore Antonio Bambozzi, as the appointed Fiscal of this Holy Office on the one side, and you, Padre Giuseppe Peters, on the other.
We affirm, render, decide and declare that we condemn you, Padre Giuseppe Peters, for what you have confessed. You have been found guilty by the Holy Office of claiming the false holiness of the late condemned Sister Maria Agnese Firrao in each and every way. You supported and claimed the false holiness of the condemned Sister Maria Luisa Ridolfi in various unlawful and criminal ways, with words, writings and deeds. You are guilty of seduction, through committing acts with her while you were her confessor. You broke the
clausura
in order to care for her. You claimed, wrote and revealed views and principles that were unhealthy and do not correspond to healthy theology. You believed in a supposedly heavenly correspondence and encouraged it, to further the above-mentioned aims. Finally, you are guilty of further offences that fall within the traditional jurisdiction of this highest religious tribunal, and of offences that have been assigned to our jurisdiction. You have therefore brought upon yourself all the censures and punishments that are imposed and decreed for such offences by the Sacred Canons and other special or universal decrees.
But as you have admitted the above-mentioned errors of your own volition, and have asked for forgiveness, we are pleased to release you from excommunication, to which you are subject for these offences, provided that you first abjure, detest and condemn the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and that you abjure any further errors, heresies and sects opposed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, as we command in this our final verdict, and as you must perform in the manner that we will convey to you.
And so that these offences do not go unpunished—so that you will be more cautious in future and serve as an example to others, following your formal abjuration, we sentence you to: eternal disqualification
from hearing Holy Confession, and eternal disqualification from any kind of spiritual guidance; a 20-day suspension from reading Holy Mass; ten days of spiritual exercises. We sentence you to remain two years in a house of your order, to be determined by your order’s General. You are prohibited from entering into any form of communication with the nuns or any persons who visited the former convent of Sant’Ambrogio. The General will provide you with a suitable pastoral guide, to set you right on the honest principles of morality. We also assign the salutary penance that, during the two years of your imprisonment, you will say a
Requiescat
three times a month, and the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary once a week.
We affirm, render, decide, declare and punish in this way, and in every other better way that the law allows and compels.
The transcriber noted that Padre Kleutgen heard and understood the verdict, and spoke no word against it. Kleutgen, still kneeling, then laid his hand on the Gospels and spoke the usual words of abjuration:
“I know that nobody who is not of this Faith will be saved, which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church observes, believes, preaches, confesses and teaches. I recognize that I have committed grave errors against the Church. I greatly regret this.”
Next, the Jesuit had to renounce individually all the offences the investigating court had listed in its closing statement. He had to state that he detested them, and acknowledge that they were condemned by the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Still kneeling, he then read out the abjuration proper:
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Now that, sorrowful and contrite, I am certain of the falsity of the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and of the truth of the Holy Catholic Faith, I abjure them with sincere heart and unfeigned faith. I detest and condemn the above-mentioned errors and heresies and in general all further errors, all further heresies and sects opposed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church. I accept and promise to serve all punishments that have been or will be imposed upon me by the Holy Office. If I should break any of my promises or oaths (God forbid!), I will submit to all punishments imposed and enacted upon me by the Sacred Canons and other universal and specific constitutions against such offences.
May God and His Holy Gospels, upon which I lay my hand, help me. I, Padre Giuseppe Peters, have abjured, sworn, promised and pledged as above. I have signed with my own hand the record of the abjuration, which I have spoken word for word, here in the knowledge of the truth and with a clear conscience, in Rome, on this day, February 18, 1862. Padre Giuseppe Peters.
Giuseppe Leziroli had made his “sorrowful and contrite” abjuration the previous day, February 17, 1862. He, too, had come to the tribunal’s palace, knelt, and placed his hand on the Gospels as instructed.
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Maria Luisa and the abbess abjured on February 14—the latter in the “House of Women,” Santa Maria del Rifugio, and the former in the Buon Pastore jail.
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After just over two and a half years, the Inquisition trial in the case of Sant’Ambrogio was formally at an end. The tribunal could assume that the defendants had realized their crimes, abjured the errors of faith and morality associated with them, and accepted their just punishments. But there was an exceptional feature to this trial that went beyond the Inquisitors’ everyday experience. In the Sant’Ambrogio case, the pope had made the religious authority of the Holy Office into a criminal court for capital crimes, although they didn’t fall within its jurisdiction. The indissoluble connection between the heresy and the murder charges had made this seem imperative. But, unlike heretical views, crimes could not be corrected through abjuration. This balancing act was palpable, at least indirectly, throughout the whole trial. Following its tradition as a religious tribunal, the court intended to guide the perpetrators both to a verbal renunciation and a practical acceptance of the judgment. This would reconcile them with themselves and, more importantly, with the Church.
Anyone searching the Sant’Ambrogio case files for the Holy Tribunal’s public announcement of the judgment will be disappointed. When Agnese Firrao was condemned as a false saint in 1816, the judgment was published on a
bando
. But there is no known
bando
for the judgment in the second Sant’Ambrogio trial in 1862. It was a relatively common practice for the Inquisition to avoid any kind of public notification, particularly for cases in which members of the Church hierarchy were involved. The motive for this is not far to seek.
One of the reasons for publishing the 1816 judgment against Firrao was that the case had already attracted international attention, with
a flurry of articles appearing north of the Alps as well. In this case, it was necessary for the highest religious authority to take a visible stand against the offense of feigned holiness. After the chaos of the Napoleonic period, it was also a sign that the Catholic judicial apparatus was functioning again, having been almost entirely broken down over the previous twenty years. The present case was quite different: only a small number of people in Rome knew anything about it. Publishing the judgment on a
bando
would have made the case public for the first time, and that was something the Holy Office was obviously keen to avoid. This was part of the same strategy that had seen them destroy the graves of Firrao and the women who had succeeded her as abbess.
But perhaps the
type
of offenses that had come to light in the Sant’Ambrogio case also made publication seem inopportune. The pope and the Holy Office could easily have made a public condemnation of Maria Luisa’s pretense of holiness. There was a long tradition of this. But the public should hear as little as possible of the sexual scandal, which ranged from sodomy to
Sollicitatio
. This was a matter of maintaining respect for the Church as an honest institution, and for the sacrament of penance.
In the end, the judges’ decisions were only announced internally, thus protecting the defendants from the sensation-hungry press.
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This applied above all to the perpetrators who were in the public eye, which meant Kleutgen in particular. He held important offices in the hierarchy of the Society of Jesus, and was also a theologian, an author, and a censor for the Index. Of the four defendants, he had the most to gain from the judgment being kept secret. This meant his sexual transgressions, in particular the seduction in the confessional, would never reach the public’s ears. The mere fact that he had made an internal abjuration could mean anything at all. This was a huge gray area that allowed for all kinds of interpretations—something that would be demonstrated a decade and a half after the judgment.
Keeping the case out of the public eye also allowed the Holy Office to draw a veil over the fact that some of the Curia’s most senior members had been caught up in it. An internal resolution of this embarrassing episode avoided the possibility of public gossip about friends of the pope—namely Cardinals Patrizi and Reisach. This was a plausible enough reason for the pope and the Inquisition not to publish the judgment.
Ultimately, the Holy Office only achieved its noble aim with two
of the four defendants. Padre Leziroli spent his year of imprisonment in the retreat house of Saint Eusebius.
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In November 1863, he returned to Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome,
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where the Jesuits had a novitiate. There he was employed in various functions within his order, although the prohibition on preaching and taking confession remained in place for the rest of his life.
The superiors of Leziroli’s order made many failed attempts to persuade Pius IX to lift this ban. The pope didn’t believe Leziroli could be rehabilitated. He is supposed to have said: “He is a holy man, so he may pray for us, but he is much too simple to rule over the conscience of the faithful.”
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After the disaster of Sant’Ambrogio, Pius IX simply couldn’t let Leziroli loose on believers again. But the padre could continue to contribute to the good of the Church with his prayers and silent Masses, without the participation of the community. The padre seems to have resigned himself to his fate with humility, as one would expect of a pious monk. He died, seemingly at peace with himself and the Church, on April 27, 1878, in Castel Gandolfo in the Albanian mountains, where the pope’s summer residence was located.
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Maria Veronica Milza, the former abbess of Sant’Ambrogio, completed her year of monastic imprisonment. The Holy Office then ordered her to be transferred to the convent of the Mantellates on the Via della Lungara in Rome, on January 28, 1863. The nuns there were sisters of the Third Order of the Servites, also known as the Servants of Mary.
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Two years later, Maria Veronica put in a request to the highest religious tribunal to be admitted to this convent as a simple nun. The cardinals granted her request in their meeting on July 14, 1865. They tasked the prior general of the Servites, Girolamo Priori, with arranging for Maria Veronica’s acceptance and profession of vows, following a month of spiritual exercises.
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The former abbess had found her place as a simple nun in a new order, and seems finally to have accepted the judgment against Sant’Ambrogio.
A FOUNDER INSTEAD OF A NUN
But what of the plaintiff? The things Katharina experienced in 1858 and 1859 engraved themselves on her memory, as the detailed report she dictated to Christiane Gmeiner in 1870 shows. After more than a
decade, everything she had gone through was still as real to her as if it had happened yesterday. The awful fear of death she had experienced speaks from every line. Still, she never said anything in public about her time in Sant’Ambrogio.
Even within her family, where of course everyone knew about the affair, Katharina played it down. “This convent episode in my aunt’s life,” her niece Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe remembered, “awakened my great curiosity, but nobody at home liked to talk about it.”
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It was only much later, after her aunt’s death, that she finally learned more about the story. By this point, as oral histories are wont to do, it had changed a great deal—but the beautiful madre vicaria, her holiness and her sham miracles, still lay at its core. The princess, however, now bore the religious name Sister Ludovica, rather than Sister Luisa Maria. And the seducer was no longer an American, but (as in a classic murder mystery) the gardener, whom Katharina had caught in flagrante. Then, of course, there was the poisoning. A “small young nun” managed to get a message to the Vatican. And Hohenlohe rescued his cousin without further ado, storming into the convent that same night armed with a papal brief, hurling “anathemas” at the recalcitrant nuns. The princess wasn’t taken to Tivoli, but straight to Pope Pius IX in the Vatican.
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These embellishments suggest that Katharina did little to correct the development of the legend within her family. She clearly wanted nothing more to do with this aspect of her biography, nor did she want to be reminded of it.