The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Read Online Free Page A
Author: Hubert Wolf
was a divine decree.
The fateful letter was written on December 8, the day of the scene in the choir. Sallua obtained the date from the abbess, who testified that the day before the princess fell ill (meaning December 8) Maria Luisa had come to her looking very worried. She told the abbess: 18 “God wants to punish the princess, and will send her an illness which will take her life.” She repeated this several times. “And in fact,” the abbess said, “the princess did begin to feel unwell the next day, after dinner, with vomiting and pain in her guts, and by the next morning she was in the grip of that serious illness.”
The heavenly announcement of the poisoning was accompanied by prayers. Maria Luisa demanded that the novices pray a novena to the Precious Blood, asking the Lord to strike down a member of the convent with an illness. And the nuns knew very well that this meant none other than the princess. 19 Repeated over nine days, this is a particularly intense form of supplicatory prayer, through which the faithful implore God to fulfill their wish. The fact that the nuns spent nine days wishing the princess dead represented a serious perversion of the Church liturgy, as the inquisitor noted.
THE DRAMATURGY OF A POISONING
Reconstructing the exact sequence of events for the poisonings presented Sallua with some not insignificant problems. Having spent more than a year questioning witnesses, the Dominican found very little agreement on this between the sisters’ testimonies. Many ofthe nuns and novices had only heard rumors and, two years after the fact, were simply padding these out. The information they provided contributed relatively little to the investigation of how the crime had been committed. The inquisitor soon realized there were only a few nuns and novices from whom he could expect a reliable testimony.
At least Maria Francesca’s statements had told Sallua which nuns these were. First, there were Maria Luisa’s direct accomplices, the novices Maria Ignazia and Maria Felice—although Maria Felice had died in suspicious circumstances shortly after the dramatic events of December 1858. Then there was the doctor’s daughter, Agnese Celeste, the nurse, Maria Giuseppa—who was the only one to take a skeptical view of the heavenly letters—and finally Maria Giacinta, who had been ill and confined to bed in December 1858, like Agnese Celeste and Katharina. There was also Giacinta’s brother, the lawyer Luigi Franceschetti, who met with the madre vicaria regularly, and whom she could send on errands outside the convent without attracting too much attention.
Extensive questioning of these witnesses provided the inquisitor with the crucial information he had been looking for on the poisoning plot. Their testimonies allowed him to trace how the whole campaign had been staged and, most importantly, to pinpoint a variety of poisons that had been used, in quantities that would have felled an elephant. 20 However, he still failed to present the congregation of cardinals with a convincing chronology for the attacks.
In part, this was because it was the first time the Dominican had been confronted with a criminal case. An experienced investigator would have reckoned with the inconsistency of the witness statements from the start, particularly with regard to timings, and would have attempted a critical comparison of these with the sequence of events presented in Katharina’s
Denunzia
. Doing this exposes some of their contradictions as failures of memory, and reveals a relatively clear chronology for the murder plot. 21
After the incident in the choir, Maria Luisa didn’t hesitate for a second before setting in motion her plan to murder Katharina. One of her first steps was to isolate the princess from the other sisters. She thus forbade Katharina from taking part in the deathbed prayers for the mortally ill Maria Saveria, for which the sisters gathered in her cell on December 8. As Maria Giuseppa
The fateful letter was written on December 8, the day of the scene in the choir. Sallua obtained the date from the abbess, who testified that the day before the princess fell ill (meaning December 8) Maria Luisa had come to her looking very worried. She told the abbess: 18 “God wants to punish the princess, and will send her an illness which will take her life.” She repeated this several times. “And in fact,” the abbess said, “the princess did begin to feel unwell the next day, after dinner, with vomiting and pain in her guts, and by the next morning she was in the grip of that serious illness.”
The heavenly announcement of the poisoning was accompanied by prayers. Maria Luisa demanded that the novices pray a novena to the Precious Blood, asking the Lord to strike down a member of the convent with an illness. And the nuns knew very well that this meant none other than the princess. 19 Repeated over nine days, this is a particularly intense form of supplicatory prayer, through which the faithful implore God to fulfill their wish. The fact that the nuns spent nine days wishing the princess dead represented a serious perversion of the Church liturgy, as the inquisitor noted.
THE DRAMATURGY OF A POISONING
Reconstructing the exact sequence of events for the poisonings presented Sallua with some not insignificant problems. Having spent more than a year questioning witnesses, the Dominican found very little agreement on this between the sisters’ testimonies. Many ofthe nuns and novices had only heard rumors and, two years after the fact, were simply padding these out. The information they provided contributed relatively little to the investigation of how the crime had been committed. The inquisitor soon realized there were only a few nuns and novices from whom he could expect a reliable testimony.
At least Maria Francesca’s statements had told Sallua which nuns these were. First, there were Maria Luisa’s direct accomplices, the novices Maria Ignazia and Maria Felice—although Maria Felice had died in suspicious circumstances shortly after the dramatic events of December 1858. Then there was the doctor’s daughter, Agnese Celeste, the nurse, Maria Giuseppa—who was the only one to take a skeptical view of the heavenly letters—and finally Maria Giacinta, who had been ill and confined to bed in December 1858, like Agnese Celeste and Katharina. There was also Giacinta’s brother, the lawyer Luigi Franceschetti, who met with the madre vicaria regularly, and whom she could send on errands outside the convent without attracting too much attention.
Extensive questioning of these witnesses provided the inquisitor with the crucial information he had been looking for on the poisoning plot. Their testimonies allowed him to trace how the whole campaign had been staged and, most importantly, to pinpoint a variety of poisons that had been used, in quantities that would have felled an elephant. 20 However, he still failed to present the congregation of cardinals with a convincing chronology for the attacks.
In part, this was because it was the first time the Dominican had been confronted with a criminal case. An experienced investigator would have reckoned with the inconsistency of the witness statements from the start, particularly with regard to timings, and would have attempted a critical comparison of these with the sequence of events presented in Katharina’s
Denunzia
. Doing this exposes some of their contradictions as failures of memory, and reveals a relatively clear chronology for the murder plot. 21
After the incident in the choir, Maria Luisa didn’t hesitate for a second before setting in motion her plan to murder Katharina. One of her first steps was to isolate the princess from the other sisters. She thus forbade Katharina from taking part in the deathbed prayers for the mortally ill Maria Saveria, for which the sisters gathered in her cell on December 8. As Maria Giuseppa
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