The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal

by Hubert Wolf, Ruth Martin (Translator)

Overview

A Washington Post Notable Book

In 1858, 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 feared for her life. A subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered the shocking secrets of a convent ruled by a beautiful young mistress, who coerced her novices into lesbian initiation rites and heresies, and who entered into an illicit relationship with a young theologian. Drawing upon written testimony and original documents discovered in a secret Vatican archive, The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio is the never-before-told true story of how one woman was able to practice deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Catholic Church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804169806
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/12/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	249,062
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Hubert Wolf, born in 1959, is professor of Medieval and Modern Church History at the University of Muenster, Germany. He was honored with the Leibniz-Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Communicator Award, and the Gutenberg Prize, and he was fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich.

Read an Excerpt

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

Editorial Reviews

Astonishing . . . much more than a true-crime thriller about murderous lesbian nuns. It’s also a very serious study of how the church deals with scandal.” —The Washington Post

“In 1998, Pope John Paul II opened the secret archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—better known to you as the Inquisition—to outside researchers. The following year, German historian Hubert Wolf found something that, as they say on the Internet, will blow your mind.” —Lev Grossman, Time

“Deftly balances . . . juicy history with a raft of serious (yet accessible) research into the intricacies of Vatican bureaucracy, the underlying philosophical disputes among various key Roman Catholic figures, and the complex political landscape of mid-nineteenth century Italy.” —The Boston Globe

“A learned yet fascinating account. . . . [Wolf] has an enviable handle on the palace intrigues motivating all the players.” —Salon

“The scandal that Wolf discovered in a secret Vatican archive, in 1999, would have left a true-crime writer salivating. . . . [He] reconstructs what went on inside the convent based on transcripts from the trial and intercepted letters. . . . There is . . . something remarkable about a poor, uneducated nun who brings the Jesuits to their knees while remaking herself as a goddess.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“A huge story of strange times. . . . Exciting reading.” —The Columbus Dispatch
 
“I learned more about the Catholic Church from this book than anything I had read previously. . . . That the author is also an ordained minister and professor of ecclesiastical history only lends support to his claims. . . . Wolf unravels a tale of religious madness and psycho-sexual power trips that is just waiting to be turned into a film by Milos Forman.” —Shyam K. Sriram, PopMatters

“The discovery of the century straight from the Vatican archives. An absorbing story of abuse, murder, and false morals.” —Kurier (Germany)

“This sordid tale of sexual indecency, false saints, and murder within a 19th-century convent in Rome has all the trappings of a good thriller. . . . [Wolf] adds detailed historical context and careful explanations to elevate this tale beyond sensationalism into a more serious study of a fascinating real-life melodrama.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“The gloomy intrigue that [Hubert Wolf] reveals in this extraordinary book, in which murders mingle with forbidden love in all the senses of the word, seems to verify the most overstretched commonplaces of the convent literature, from Diderot’s La Religieuse to de Sade’s Juliette.” —Le Monde (France)

“The true story of an Italian nunnery in the nineteenth century contains all the ingredients of a thriller: the Inquisition, sex, poisoning, conspiracy, and hypocrisy.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag (Switzerland)

“An eye-opening story. . . . Wolf has expertly recovered and retold this scandalous tale in all its gory, as well as bureaucratic, detail.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The way Hubert Wolf deduces insightful conclusions from the doubtlessly spectacular incidents in the nunnery is nothing but masterly.” —Die Zeit (Germany)

“Mysticism, sex, theology, murders . . . . It has all the ingredients of a good whodunit.” —La Vie (France)

From the Publisher

★ 11/24/2014
This sordid tale of sexual indecency, false saints, and murder within a 19th-century convent in Rome has all the trappings of a good thriller. What begins with a 1859 complaint by a German noblewoman against Sant'Ambrogio (specifically, against the corrupt practices of novice mistress Maria Luisa) soon becomes a full-blown scandal: the subsequent investigation implicates prominent clergy in practices that blur the line between mysticism and the carnality. Behind the lurid story, however, are deeper historical conflicts. Both the rise of Romanticism—and its attendant fascination with the supernatural—and struggles over the direction of the modern Church explain the extent of the scandal and the passion with it was investigated. Wolf (Pope and Devil), a professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Münster, adds detailed historical context and careful explanations to elevate this tale beyond sensationalism into a more serious study of a fascinating real-life melodrama. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2015
In 1862, following an accusation of criminal acts and an extensive trial, an enclosed religious community located in Rome was quietly dissolved; its inhabitants dispersed and disgraced, its memory effectively erased from church history. The events leading up to this damnatio memoriae were extreme and included deception, heresy, wayward nuns, tainted priests, theft, and murder. Hidden deep in the Inquisition files of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until found by the author, the scandal of Sant'Ambrogio has all the ingredients of lurid sensationalism. Wolf (church theology, Univ. of Münster; Pope and Devil) thoughtfully does not take the "erotic adventures behind convent walls" route. Instead he draws from primary source documents to present a meticulously researched and documented history that provides an explanation for how and why the myriad abuses occurred. Wolf's background information and discussions of the intricacies of 19th-century religious, political, and judicial Roman Catholicism are, somewhat surprisingly, as intriguing as the scandal itself. The result is an unusual volume that is both scholarly and readable. VERDICT An astonishing piece of forgotten history, told from a research-intensive point of view. Recommended for academic and public library collections. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]—Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

Library Journal

2014-10-22
The long-hidden story of the ultimate convent scandal, masterfully retold.Accessing archival files first opened to the public by Pope John Paul II in 1998, Wolf (Ecclesiastical History/Univ. of Muenster) pieces together a mid-1800s inquisition trial of incendiary proportions. Set in the Roman convent of Sant'Ambrogio, the author lays out a perfect storm of scandal, involving heresy, decades of abuse, webs of sexual misconduct and murder. The story begins with a twice-widowed princess who, fulfilling a lifelong goal, entered the convent in 1858. Within less than a year, she escaped, fearing for her life. Her testimony began an investigation that would uncover the secret world of Sant'Ambrogio. Wolf's narrative centers on Vincenzo Leone Sallua, the investigating judge who systematically uncovered and presented his case. He discovered that the nuns of the convent were venerating their founder as a saint, even though she had been condemned and exiled by Rome. Worse, their young novice mistress, Maria Luisa, was being treated as a living saint, credited with miraculous powers. Further investigations revealed generational repetition of lesbian rituals and sexual abuses, affairs with priests, embezzling of funds and murders to hush up troublesome nuns. In the end, the accused were punished, the nuns dispersed, the building razed, and even the graves of certain nuns removed. Sant'Ambrogio was to be wiped from history, and nearly was so, for well over a century. Wolf has expertly recovered and retold this scandalous tale in all its gory, as well as bureaucratic, detail. He also provides readers with ample background to comprehend the geopolitical and ecclesiastical tapestry against which this drama played out. However, modern readers are left wondering what lessons this story has to teach today. Is the tale of Sant'Ambrogio simply a titillation of history, or does it speak to deeper issues of the church? Wolf is largely silent on that count. An eye-opening story of evil in a holy place.

Kirkus Reviews