A fairly dry but absorbing examination of a scandal the Vatican did an excellent job of covering up for 150 years. In 1858, at the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome, a German princess who is serving as a nun makes a frantic appeal for help, claiming she is about to be murdered. The Church investigates and finds a case so disturbing it is handed over to the Holy Office, the new name for the Inquisition. This not the brutal, torture and the stake Inquisition of the Middle Ages, but an efficient and pedantic prosecution office manned by lawyers rather than witch-hunters. the investigation turns up in the seemingly normal convent the false worship of the Convent's founder, who had been discredited years before, sexual relations between nuns and nuns, and between nuns and priests, and most sinister of all, the murder and attempted murder of those who won't conform to the new order. The bulk of the blame centres on the young and beautiful Sr Maria Luisa, who has an apparent hold over the abbess, has manufactured "letters" purporting to be from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and seduced other nuns into sexual activities under a guise of assumed holiness. While Wolf's slow, dry text could never be called exciting, it is thoroughly intriguing as he tracks the meticulous case-building of the Holy Office, and draws it into the wider context of the struggle within the Church between the so-called Ultramontanists, hard-line conservatives who want absolute power invested in Rome, and the liberal reformers, who want a more decentralized, pastoral church. The victims of this struggle, unfortunately, turn out to be the nuns themselves, poorly-educated girls thrust into an uncomfortable and manipulative environment, and in the end punished more severely than the male participants despite genuinely being victims as much as malefactors. In the end, the scandal proves too much for the Church to deal with, and it is decisively buried in their deepest archives. A fascinating story which has been concealed for too long, and a genuinely disturbing picture of the dangers of excessively regimented religious belief and practice. Great stuff. ( )

The Vatican must be having second thoughts about the wisdom of Pope John Paul II’s decision to open its secret files to scholars if Hubert Wolf’s excellent piece of scholarly sleuthing is any indication of what else may reside there. Wolf uncovered a scandal involving a nun committing almost every form of sexual abuse imaginable, making false claims of holiness and having direct communication with heaven even including feigned miracles and even attempted murder; not to mention priests breaking their vows of celibacy. All of this was duly exposed by a papal inquisition but then buried by the Vatican. Ironically, the principal guilty parties suffered quite different fates. The nun— Sister Maria Luisa—was punished severely and eventually ended up alone, penniless and insane; while an equally complicit priest—Fr. Giuseppe Peters aka Fr. Joseph Kleutgen was given a token punishment and eventually elevated by Pope Pius XI to the position of theological adviser at the first Vatican council. In that capacity, he was primarily responsible for determining central Church doctrines.

Wolf’s meticulous scholarship makes for slow reading, but is redeemed by a perspective on the crimes and their punishments that takes into consideration the religious thinking of the time (mid 19th Century) as well as the power struggles that existed in the Church’s hierarchy. Certainly some of this culture persists to this day when one considers how the Church has mismanaged the modern scandals of sexual abuse by pedophile priests.

Like most nuns of her time, Sr. Maria Luisa came from a humble background and did not have the benefits of education. Notwithstanding these impediments, she was obviously highly intelligent and driven by ambitions to become a leader in the Church. Her goal was to found an order of her own. Thus she viewed her wealthy and powerful new novice—Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen— as a way to achieve her goal. When Katherina became suspicious of the sexual abuses that Sr. Luisa was orchestrating, she needed to be silenced.

Wolf emphasizes that this was a time when religiosity and spiritualism were widely accepted by both lay people and the Church. So, even though much of this story sounds really insane, it would not seem strange to the people of that period. To this mix, one needs to add the large egos that existed at all levels in the Church, not to exclude even its convents. The authority of the male-dominated Church hierarchy was accepted without question and could serve to excuse all sorts of illicit behaviors. Moreover, it was a time of turmoil because the Church was facing a crisis, much like it is today. On one hand, liberal theologians were trying to modernize to accommodate a period of intense secularization; while on the other, conservatives—primarily led by the Jesuits— advocated for stricter interpretations of dogma, like the doctrine of papal infallibility. Wolf suggests that his primary source material, the five year Inquisition lead by the Benedictine, Vincenzo Sallua, despite being exhaustive, was influenced by the times and culture in the Church.

This is an important historical investigation that deserves to be read by scholars. Although it seems to be aimed at lay readers, most may find it to be a slog. ( )

The title and marketing of The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio (at least in this, its English translation) I think set many readers up to expect something much more seamy and titillating than the book actually contains. To be sure, there is a lot of eye-raising information here—beautiful young women poisoning German princesses, bisexual nuns alternately engaging in frottage with other women and French kissing their Jesuit confessors. Surely enough to make any pious matron clutch at her pearls.

But what Wolf is interested in is not so much the sexual shenanigans—which at any rate we know about only from court documents and letters written with the benefit of hindsight—but about the contexts which gave rise to them and the consequences which they had. Pius IX, the then pope who introduced the dogmata of the Immaculate Conception and of papal infallibility, and his circle were heavily involved with the case and its cover-up. For a medieval historian such as myself, Wolf's account of the ways in which female mystics and male theologians played off one another was thoroughly familiar; so too, as someone raised an Irish Catholic, was seeing the ways in which the Catholic Church worked to hide sexual abuse without ever dealing with its causes. Wolf's archival research is meticulous and truly impressive, and has no doubt caused some squirming in the Vatican. Who knows what else lies hidden in the church's archives, waiting to be discovered?

Wolf's writing is dense and the cast of characters huge. I don't think that the general reader who has only a passing interest in religious history will find this easy going, but taken as a whole I found this an engrossing and thought-provoking read. ( )

This book gives a luridly complete account of the implosion of the Convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome a year or so after the corpulent and twice-widowed Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen became bored of the rigours of a cloister into which nobody who knew her thought she should ever have been admitted in the first place: there is nothing in this book to persuade us that she was at all admirable or intelligent or wise. But it is not her story which makes this saga thrilling and shocking in roughly equal measure: it is the disintegration of the beautiful and broken novice mistress, Maria Ridolfi, in the middle of a web of religious hysteria, ecclesiastical duplicity, lesbianism, lies and cover-ups which gives this book its spice.
At the core - appallingly - this is the record of a victim-turned-perpetrator of institutionalized sexual and psychological abuse who is herself made a scapegoat for the moral inadequacy of the whole edifice of Catholicism on the eve of the First Vatican Council. It was Maria's bad luck that, in another version of his schizoid religious self, her Jesuit sugar-daddy-cum-confessor, Giuseppe Peters, was also the theologian Joseph Kleutgen - and that he was one of the chief proponents of the 'ordinary magisterium' and infallibility of the Pope which would soon be made into dogma: he was too big to be allowed to fail. A woman got the blame; the whole matter was hushed up; and only in 1998 was the archive opened (by an assumedly unknowing John Paul II) to the searing light of the Roman sun.
Why should we care? This book is a gripping read (although it could easily have been streamlined into a hundred fewer pages) - and it is an absolutely mesmerizing account of the toxicity of abstract theological brilliance as it collides with histrionic spirituality, with sexual ignorance and inarticulacy, and with the stirrings of the groin (both male and female). Hubert Wolf is unsparing in his elucidation of the details of sexual juices of various kinds about which the records of the Roman Inquisition slip first from Italian into Latin, and then from Latin into ellipsis - and who are we to regret it? (It is curious that interventions from the Blessed Virgin herself, persuasive enough to have guided whole swathes of learned priests, were made in schoolgirl French.) But it is the way in which the cumulative weight of rumour, of credulity and transgressive longing; a culture of abstraction rather than of bodily honesty, and of institutionalized instincts for self-preservation rather than for truth or kindness or care all blend to create a world in which sexual abuse becomes an unmentionable but accepted and habitual norm: amid the lurid glamour, it is this which is chilling.
This book is, in its way, an explanation of the culture on which Roman Catholicism continues to be built today: it is a description of the forces within it which have normalized abuse and made it almost impossible to diagnose and treat; it is also an account of just how hard it really is to distinguish between the merely immature and the genuinely wicked.
Out of this same hot-house world of fantasy mixed with repression emerged Therese of Lisieux barely a generation later. If Therese is a reminder of what this whole religious system can produce when things go right, this sorry book is about the catastrophe for Maria Ridolfi and for far too many others like her when things go wickedly wrong. It is too big a price to pay; and it is as an improbable whistle-blower that the Princess von Hohenzollern deserves some credit. ( )

In the mid 19th Century, a German princess engineers her escape from the Roman convent Sant'Ambrogio. Convinced that she is being poisoned, Princess Katherine manages to escape with the assistance of a cousin, who is a confident of the Pope. The ensuing Papal investigation uncovers a lurid scandal within the walls of the supposedly staid convent. Poisonings, secret lesbian initiation rites, false prophets and even several murders are all uncovered. What was uncovered by the clerical investigators was so shocking that the Catholic Church spent years hushing it up.
The retelling of the events and witness testimony is certainly very interesting. The book spends quite a bit of time relating the history and theology of the Catholic Church in the 19th Century. It is certainly important to have this information to help understand how life in this convent could go so desperately wrong. However that part of the book did become a bit of a slog to get through. Still the overall story is captivating. ( )