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The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
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The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
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Overview
In 1858, Katherina von Hohenzollern, a German princess recently inducted into the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church's Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant'Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent's beautiful young mistress, Maria Luissa. What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical proportions, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing upon written testimony and original documents, Professor Wolf tells the incredible story of how one woman was able to perform deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Catholic Church.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780385351904 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 01/13/2015 |
Pages: | 496 |
Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.90(d) |
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Prologue
“Save, Save Me!”
“Shortly after eight o’clock on Monday, July 25, the Archbishop of Edessa—sent by the Lord—finally came to me. There was no time for waiting; this was the one and only time to get saved. To him, I had to reveal everything and had to implore him to help me escape the convent as swiftly as possible. It all went well: my prayers were fulfilled, and I was understood.” These dramatic words were set down by Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in a com- plaint she submitted to the pope in summer 1859. They were written barely five weeks after her escape from the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome—or rather, after her cousin, Archbishop Gustav Adolf zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, managed to secure her release—and they describe the sensational conclusion to her adventure inside the walls of a Roman Catholic convent. It was an adventure for which she had narrowly avoided paying with her life.
She had been humiliated, isolated from her fellow nuns, cut off from the outside world, and—since she was party to the convent secrets and therefore regarded as a danger—somebody had tried to silence her. They had even made several attempts to poison her. At half past three in the afternoon on July 26, 1859, after almost exactly fifteen months, she finally left Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. Her life as Sister Luisa Maria of Saint Joseph, a nun in the Regulated Third Order of Holy Saint Francis in Rome, had begun so promisingly. And now here she was, being saved in the nick of time, rescued from imminent danger of death.
In her written complaint, the princess gave her failure as a nun and her thrilling escape from the convent a typically pious interpretation, casting it as salvation by Christ the Lord. This somehow made the experience bearable for her. But the final dramatic episode, and the preceding months she had spent under the constant fear of death, would come to define her whole life. After July 26, 1859, nothing would ever be the same again. Her plight had been genuinely existential: her life really was threatened in Sant’Ambrogio. Even years later, she was still traumatized by the attempts to poison her. This is all brought vividly to life in her Erlebnisse (Experiences), a book written by her close collaborator Christiane Gmeiner in 1870, more than a decade after the terrible events in Rome. According to this auto-biographical source, Katharina had managed to smuggle a letter out of the convent during the night of July 24, 1859. This was handed to Archbishop Hohenlohe in the Vatican.
The princess waited in a state of great anxiety until she was called into the parlor at half past seven in the morning. Fearful and almost breathless, the princess hurried downstairs to the archbishop, to whom she called out in great agitation: “save, save me!” At first, he did not understand her, and was almost afraid his cousin had run mad, but by and by she managed to convince him that she was mistress of her senses, and that her fear was not unfounded. Now he understood her pleas to leave the convent, and he promised to do everything in his power to arrange this as soon as possible— though the first appointment he was able to make was not until the following day.
The words are Christiane Gmeiner’s, recounting in the third person what the princess had told her in her own words.
Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen’s account sounds like a story from the depths of the Middle Ages, and confirms many of the common clichés and prejudices about life in Catholic convents and monasteries. But this story takes place in the modern world of the mid-nineteenth century. And the setting isn’t a secluded mountain convent at the world’s edge, but the center of the capital city of Christianity, little more than half a mile from the Vatican—home to the representative of Jesus Christ on earth.
What really happened in Sant’Ambrogio? Were these poisonings simply the fantasy of a highly strung aristocrat, or were they genuine attempts on Katharina’s life? She was a princess of the house of Hohenzollern and a close relative of Wilhelm I, the man who would later become king of Prussia and the German emperor. So how did Katharina come to take her vows in such a strict religious order in the first place—and why in Rome?
Excerpted from The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio by Hubert Wolf. Copyright © 2015 by Hubert Wolf. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Dramatis Personae xi
Prologue: "Save, Save Me!" 3
Chapter 1 "Such Turpitudes": Katharina von Hohenzollern Complains to the Inquisition 7
Rome as a Heavenly Jerusalem 7
A Road-to-Damascus Experience and Its Consequences 11
A Roman Cloistered Idyll 17
Salvation from a Cloistered Hell 21
Denunciation as a Moral Duty 23
The Secret of Sant'Ambrogio 25
A Possessed Seducer of Nuns 27
A False Saint 29
Poisoning 33
The Savior's Perspective 40
Chapter 2 "The 'Delicatezza' of the Matter as Such": Extrajudicial Preliminary Investigations 46
Irformal Questioning 46
The Outcast's Testimony 50
Two Nuns in a Bed 55
Unchastity and Sodomy 58
A Dominican Wants the Details 61
Many Convincing Proofs 64
An Inquisition Trial After All 67
The Inquisition Tribunal: Processes and Protagonists 70
The Sources from the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 75
Chapter 3 "I Am the Little Lion of My Reformed Sisters": The Informative Process and the Devotees of the Mother Founder 81
The Convent of Sant'Ambrogio della Massima 82
Franciscans of the Third Order 83
Agnese Firrao is Venerated as a Saint 88
Agnese Firrao Is Accused of False Holiness 92
The Inquisition's 1816 Verdict 94
The Miraculous Conversion of Leo XII 98
True and False Holiness 102
Proof of the Continuing Cult of Firrao 107
The Secret Abbess 110
Relics 112
Inspired Texts 115
A "Mother Confessor" 117
The Confessors Proclaim the False Cult 118
Chapter 4 "Wash Me Well, for the Padre Is Coming": The Madre Vicaria's Pretense of Holiness 121
Visions on the Road to Power 121
Mysticism 126
The Earthly Origins of Heavenly Rings and the Scent of Roses 130
Letters from the Mother of God 136
The Marian Century 142
Forging Letters from the Virgin 146
Pastoral Care in Bed 153
Lesbian Intimacies in a Convent Cell 158
The Sant'Ambrogio System 162
Chapter 5 "An Act of Divine Splendor": Murder on the Orders of the Virgin 166
The Americano and His Obscene Letter 166
The Cord Around Katharina's Neck 170
Heavenly Letters Foretell Katharina's Murder 173
The Dramaturgy of a Poisoning 176
"It Was Most Certainly the Devil' 193
More Murders 198
Pennies from Heaven 203
The Confessors as Confidants and Accomplices 205
The Results of the Informative Process 207
Chapter 6 "It Is a Heavenly Liquor": The Offensive Process and the Interrogation of the Madre Vicaria 210
"I Always Wanted to Become a Nun" 210
The Story of an Innocent Lamb 213
Evidence and First Confessions 222
Maria Luisa and Her Novices 224
Sexual Abuse 226
Jesuit Confessors and Their Very Special Blessing 233
The Confessors Affair with Alessandra N. 237
Maria Luisa and Padre Peters: Blessing or Bedding? 240
"My Only Defense Is Jesus Christ" 244
Chapter 7 "That Good Padre Has Spoiled the Work of God": The Interrogations of the "Father Confessor and the Abbess 250
Giuseppe Leziroli: A Confessor Before the Court 250
The Apostle of Saint Agnese Firrao 252
The Confessor and "Saint" Maria Luisa 256
Leziroli and the Poisonings 260
Maria Veronica Milza: An Abbess Before the Court 262
Confessions 267
Chapter 8 "During These Acts I Never Ceased My Inner Prayer": The Interrogation of Giuseppe Peters 271
Padre Peters's True identity 271
The Defendants Spontaneous Admissions 278
A Cardinal Breaks the Secret of the Holy Office 288
And After All, the Cult of Firrao Was Permitted 291
Theology and French Kissing 297
New Scholastic Convolutions 305
The Court's Final Proposition 309
A Proxy War? 312
Chapter 9 "Sorrowful and Contrite": The Verdict and Its Consequences 320
Consultors, Cardinals, Pope: The Verdict 320
Internal Abjurations and External Secrecy 326
A Founder Instead of a Nun 331
A Cardinal's Poison Paranoia 337
Friends in High Places 342
A Saint in the Madhouse 345
A Heretic Writes Dogma 351
Epilogue: The Secret of Sant'Ambrogio as Judged by History 363
Acknowledgments 373
Notes 377
Sources and Literature 449
Illustration Credits 467
Index 469