Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
Joseph Wilhelm Carl Kleutgen died on the evening of January 13, 1883, and was buried on January 15 in the graveyard in Kaltern.
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His gravestone proclaimed he was a “man of outstanding gifts, respected scholarship, distinguished by moral integrity and famed in the academy for his many published works.”
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It is questionable whether a priest convicted by the Inquisition of seduction in the confessional can really be lauded for his moral integrity. And a respected scholar perhaps shouldn’t have believed in letters from the Virgin Mary announcing the murder of a nun. But Kleutgen was without doubt a gifted theologian and a prolific author—here the inscription is correct. Leo XIII is said to have dubbed him the “prince of scholasticism,” because his works contributed to making the
Theology of Times Past
the only model recognized by the Church.
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Kleutgen’s gravestone obviously overlooks the really salient aspect of his biography: his life’s great scandal. Just a short time after being convicted of formal heresy by the highest religious authority, this man was helping to formulate Church doctrine—including the new dogma of papal infallibility that remains binding for Catholics to this day.
When the Roman pontiff speaks
ex cathedra
, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.
And the final sentence of the dogma of 1870 reads: “So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.”
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The Secret of Sant’Ambrogio as Judged by History
Pius IX and the Inquisition avoided publishing the judgment in the Sant’Ambrogio case, keeping the convent’s secret hidden behind the walls of the Palazzo del Sant’Ufficio.
However, they failed to keep the case out of the public eye altogether: despite the order of secrecy, the liberal Italian press still got wind of it. In 1861, when the dissolution of Sant’Ambrogio was made public, the newspapers published articles that indulged in all kinds of speculation about the affair. They took great delight in using Sant’Ambrogio to criticize the backwardness of the Curia’s legal practices, and to call into question the legitimacy of a religious court. But these newspapers had been told that the dissolution of the convent was simply due to the continued veneration of Firrao. The names of the principal defendants, and the other offenses, don’t seem to have been made public. Sant’Ambrogio provided the liberal press with the perfect opportunity to attack the Catholic Church, and the pope’s secular rule over the Papal States. What remained of his territory was still standing in the way of Italian unification, even if the Marches and Umbria had already joned the
Risorgimento
.
The
Civiltà Cattolica
reprinted a
Giornale di Roma
report from May 13, 1861, criticizing coverage of the case by “bad” newspapers. It referred to the editors as “people raking through the muck.” By contrast, the Catholic
Civiltà
portrayed the dissolution of the convent as an appropriate
reaction to the pretense of holiness and continued veneration of Agnese Firrao.
1
The international press paid little attention to the case. All that remained of the Sant’Ambrogio scandal was a memory of the cult of Agnese Firrao, as websites about Rome’s tourist attractions confirm.
2
But the fact that the case received very little publicity was also due to the front pages being taken over by other Church-political events. There was the papal condemnation of the Munich conference in 1863,
3
and the
Syllabus errorum
in 1864, in which Pius IX took a sweeping blow at modern thinkers and their values—like the freedom of religion and conscience.
4
Finally, preparations for the First Vatican Council absorbed the public’s interest. When Kleutgen was drafted in to work on preparing the two constitutions, Ignaz von Döllinger’s 1870
Römische Briefe vom Concil
suggested that the Jesuits must be very short-staffed if they had to resort to using a man who had been “convicted some time ago by the Holy Office for an indecent affair in a convent.”
5
Interestingly, Döllinger’s hint was picked up by the German newspaper
Der Spiegel
in 1962, in a lead article on the opening of the Second Vatican Council. At this point, there was talk of Kleutgen having been imprisoned for six years.
6
The Sant’Ambrogio affair only reappeared in the press in the spring of 1879.
7
The Munich-based Church historian Johann Friedrich had been a high-profile opponent of the infallibility dogma, and had therefore been excommunicated in 1871. He subsequently allied himself to the Old Catholic Church. Writing in the
Deutscher Merkur
, he now raised serious allegations against Kleutgen. At the time, controversies were raging between the Old Catholics,
8
and what they called the “New Catholics,” who defended papal infallibility as it was defined in 1870. Friedrich was aiming for a public vilification of the Jesuit, whom he saw as one of the driving forces behind the dogma. He claimed that the Inquisition had sentenced Kleutgen to six years in jail for his part in the poisoning attacks on a Princess von Hohenzollern, but had later been reprieved by the pope.
9
The orthodox
Neue Zeitung
issued a sharp rebuttal to Friedrich, accusing him of the most shameless lies. The Old Catholic retaliated by starting a libel suit against the paper. In the trial that followed, the
Neue Zeitung
’s editors landed a surprising coup. They submitted as evidence a text dated March 7, 1879, from the Holy Office’s chancellery.
It was written by Giovenale Pelami,
10
the Holy Office’s notary, and it confirmed that Kleutgen had “never been charged with poisoning or involvement in an attempted murder by poison, and was certainly never interrogated or convicted for this.”
11
It was certainly true that he hadn’t been convicted of poisoning Katharina von Hohenzollern. But the Holy Office’s statement that he hadn’t been interrogated on this matter was manifestly untrue. And the notary was careful not to mention any other charges, or the sentence that Kleutgen had actually been given by the Inquisition. In its March 15 edition, the
Neue Zeitung
argued that there could be no truth in Friedrich’s accusations, because the pope had entrusted Kleutgen with important work for the Council. “It would be entirely unthinkable for the pope to confer this honor on somebody who had been convicted of mixing poisons.”
12
But Pius IX evidently had no problem drawing on the services of a convicted heretic to formulate dogma. Leo XIII had sworn the Jesuit to silence on the matter, so Kleutgen himself stayed out of the argument.
13
If he had taken up the gauntlet, things might have been rather different.
The Curia’s strategy in the Sant’Ambrogio case was clear, at least during the lifetimes of its protagonists: the whole awkward affair was swept under the carpet for as long as possible. The Church authorities suppressed every memory of the convent and what had happened there as permanently as they could. When there was no other option, they did everything in their power to play the case down. If necessary, the formal truth could be told, but the really interesting facts were deliberately omitted.
There is a similar tendency in the historiographical treatment of the case. Strictly orthodox, Ultramontanist works of history—in particular, those with Jesuit leanings—have consistently attempted to defuse or ignore the incendiary nature of the Sant’Ambrogio affair. They have painted it as just one case of feigned holiness among many. Where there was any doubt, the blame has fallen on the women who pretended to be saints, while the Jesuit confessors have been painted as the victims of slander. This has sometimes even been interpreted as one of those divine tests of faith to which men of religious orders are often subjected.
A classic example of this is the biography of Kleutgen written by Johann Hertkens
14
and the Jesuit Ludwig Lercher
15
in 1911, to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Their book claimed that as extraordinary confessor, the Jesuit had been to Sant’Ambrogio only three or four times a year. Apart from these confessional days, he hadn’t given much thought to the sisters there. The biography’s message was that Kleutgen had nothing to do with the whole affair. It was therefore “easy to understand how he could know and say little of the whole nebulous business.” Kleutgen had let himself be deceived by the nuns over the mother founder’s feigned holiness and the practices associated with this, it was true—but this had only been in the course of the trial, and “not while he was hearing confession.” This phrase is telling; it brings with it the unspoken suggestion of
Sollicitatio
. The biographers state that Kleutgen vigorously defended himself against all charges before the Inquisition, but then, as befitted a man of the cloth, humbly submitted to the judgment of the
Suprema
. There are no further details of the charges and the verdict. A brief summary tells us: “The outcome of the trial otherwise caused only minor damage, if any, to Padre Kleutgen’s reputation and people’s respect for him.” He “remained a man trusted by higher and lower prelates, able to advise them on the thorniest of issues.”
16
Kleutgen’s fellow Jesuits even saw “a marvelous quality of divine providence” in the trial. Providence “tests those it favors, and turns and guides every suffering in a glorious chain of events to the advantage of those it has tested—and, at the same time, to the advantage of many others, and the Church as a whole.” It was only the fact that he was convicted, and the time he had spent away from Rome as a result, that had given the Jesuit sufficient leisure to finally complete his monumental
Theologie der Vorzeid
.
17
In his semi-official account of the First Vatican Council, the Jesuit Theodor Granderath
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only mentioned Sant’Ambrogio in a footnote. It was an explanation of why Kleutgen, “although known as a firstrate theologian, [was] not called in for the preparatory work.” As an extraordinary confessor to the “Benedictine nuns” of the “convent of Saint Ambrose” in Rome, he had been “severely punished” by the Holy Office. The nuns had venerated as a saint “a sister who had died at the start of the century, to whom people had attributed extraordinary, supernatural gifts even during her lifetime,” and the confessors had “missed this … due to the cleverness of the nuns’ superiors.”
19
This was, at least, a reference to Firrao’s feigned holiness and her continued veneration, though the Franciscan nuns had become Benedictine,
and everything else remained unclear. The reader is not told why Kleutgen had to be punished “severely.”
The study by the Jesuit Franz Lakner, published in 1933, also follows this tradition.
20
He kept all details of the case from his readers—even the fact that Kleutgen was in any way involved in the Sant’Ambrogio affair. In an attempt to make the whole matter seem banal, he merely noted that the Holy Office had passed a “remarkable judgment” on Kleutgen, which had forced him to leave Rome for a time in 1862. However, this transpired to be an act of divine “providence,” which provided him with “sufficient peace and leisure” to write his major theological work.
In a biographical entry on Kleutgen for the
Jesuiten-Lexikon
published in 1934, the German Jesuit Ludwig Koch demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge about the case.
21
He stated nebulously that Kleutgen had been extraordinary confessor to the Benedictines of Saint Ambrose. “Shortly before 1870” he had been caught up in a “denunciation for abusive devotions, and suspended.” Readers could interpret “abusive devotions” in whatever way they wanted. The real core of the Sant’Ambrogio affair had thus vanished completely. In the obituaries published in 1883
22
and 1911,
23
in the
Civiltà Cattolica
(a paper belonging to Kleutgen’s Jesuit network), the case wasn’t even mentioned.
It’s easy to understand why Jesuit historians played down or even omitted the affair from their works. It was partly done to protect their own order, and the theology for which Kleutgen stood. This damaging picture—the father of new scholasticism as a criminal and seducer, and the Jesuits and their friends in the Curia as a society of gullible bigots—should on no account be allowed to enter the public imagination. This kind of history writing wasn’t about hard facts, or the ideal of “objective” truth. It was almost entirely apologist, like many other “historical” works.
But historical texts about Katharina von Hohenzollern also displayed a tendency to gloss over the attempts on the princess’s life, and the Inquisition trial that followed. Even the work by her official biographer, Karl Theodor Zingeler, follows this pattern.
24
On her time in Sant’Ambrogio, he says succinctly: “In December the princess became very ill. She was given the last rites, and—because it was thought her time had come—they also conducted the ceremony for the profession
of vows.” Against expectations, Zingeler goes on, Katharina recovered and remained in the convent until July 26. Then she left Sant’Ambrogio with the support of her cousin, Archbishop Hohenlohe.
25
At his country seat in Tivoli, she met the German Benedictine priest Maurus Wolter, who was also recuperating there, and who immediately became her new confessor. Zingeler styles this meeting as the turning point in her life: after many trials and tribulations, the princess found her true calling through Wolter’s Benedictine spirituality, and became the founder of Beuron.
26
There is no word about the poisoning, or her dramatic cry of “Save, save me!” There is no mention of the denunciation she made to the Inquisition on the express instruction of her confessor, Father Wolter—even though Zingeler must have known about this: in the foreword to his book he thanks “Fräulein Christiana Gmeiner, who was the princess’s confidante for so many years,” and who wrote a detailed report in 1870 of the princess’s experiences in Sant’Ambrogio.
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