UNITED STATES
Commonweal
Thomas Noble October 30, 2014
The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
Hubert Wolf
translated by Ruth Martin
Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 482 pp.
If this astonishing tale were not true, one would think it the work of an accomplished mystery writer. The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio takes us back to Rome in 1859, when the Holy Office received a formal denunciation of suspicious goings-on at the convent of Sant’Ambrogio della Massima. For two years these allegations were investigated, and subsequently several members of the community were tried before the Inquisition. Though bits and pieces of this strange story would leak out over the next century and a half, it was only after 1998, when John Paul II opened the archives of the Holy Office, that Hubert Wolf, professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Münster, was able to examine the full record. The result is a sordid tale of sexual misdeeds, false identities, cult worship, theft, and murder.
Wolf’s book teems with characters, many of them trailing lengthy aristocratic names, beginning with Princess Katherina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who made the denunciation. Born in 1817, Katherina spent her childhood in liberal Catholic circles, but a visit to Rome in 1834 brought her under the influence of Karl August Graf von Reisach, a reactionary and aficionado of women visionaries who was made cardinal by the even more reactionary Gregory XVI. Twice widowed by the age of thirty-six, the princess resolved to become a nun, and in 1858 Reisach placed her in the convent of Sant’Ambrogio. Fifteen months later she smuggled out a desperate and cryptic letter—“Save me,” it pleaded—to her cousin, Bishop Gustav Adolf zu Hohenlohe und Schillingfürst, who marched into Sant’Ambrogio, rescued Katherina, and took her to his country estate in Tivoli. There, under the influence of her Benedictine confessor Maurus Wolter, she recorded her tale of woe in the document that reached the Holy Office.
Katherina’s complaint centered on the convent’s worship of a former abbess, Maria Agnese Firrao, who had presented herself as a living saint, partly via self-inflicted stigmata. Though Firrao was tried and convicted by the Inquisition, and died in banishment, her acolytes at Sant’Ambrogio continued to promote the cult of “Beata Maria,” insisting that the Holy Office had erred in its condemnation of her. Katherina denounced the false sainthood of Maria Agnese as well as the claimed sainthood of the convent’s vicaress and novice mistress, Maria Luisa. She raised questions about the convent’s confessors, and told a disturbing story about Maria Luisa’s relationship with someone Katherina referred to as “the Americano,” a Tyrolean who went to the United States, married and had children, abandoned his family, and went to Rome seeking salvation—and, evidently, nuns to bed. But the most spectacular item in Katherina’s denunciation was her claim that Maria Luisa had made repeated attempts to poison her in retaliation for her complaints.
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