Posted on 01/28/2015 6:18:28 PM PST by Faith Presses On
Perhaps because the author is a sober-minded professor of ecclesiastical history at Germany’s University of Münster, his subtitle is considerably less lurid than it could have been. The scandals at a convent scarcely a kilometre from Pope Pius IX’s palace in Rome included heresy, lashings of sex (gay, straight and all-around religio-erotic kinky), and attempted murder...
...The book turns on the blue-blooded connections of its whistleblower, the 41-year-old wealthy, devout, twice-widowed, passionately romantic (with a capital “R”) Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. She was first cousin both to the Protestant king of Prussia and to Catholic archbishop Gustav Adolf zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, one of Pius’s closest advisers. Katharina’s money and connections brought her into Sant’Ambrogio and to the near-fatal attention of the convent’s charismatic mistress of novices, Maria Luisa. They also got her out of danger on a day’s notice and, after she decided to make a formal denunciation, gave her direct access to the investigating judge of the Roman Inquisition.
The chief inquisitor was thoroughly alarmed by what he heard. The multiple attempts to poison Katharina after she spoke disparagingly about what she saw as the cult of Maria Luisa were the tip of the iceberg. The beautiful Maria Luisa, 27, who, at 13, had been sexually abused by an abbess, was treated as a living saint endowed with miraculous powers; two of her own novices shared her bed. Meanwhile, the nuns still venerated their founding abbess as a saint, 40 years after she had been imprisoned in another convent for the ecclesiastical crime of “false sanctity”...
(Excerpt) Read more at macleans.ca ...
The book being reviewed is “The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal,” by Hubert Wolf.
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen
Gesundheit.
Sounds like a lot of garbage.
Sounds like a bad 70’s sexploitation movie that only played at drive-ins.
Well, it came from Vatican documents directly. There’s been no denial of it that I can see.
This article is not very informative.
It almost seems to show a sympathy toward this wayward nun and her charges.
150 years ago is “Current Events” ??
It isn’t that informative, but there aren’t many articles about this. It’s as though the media is deliberately ignoring it for the most part. And the other articles I’ve read tend to be quite vile in their descriptions of the sexual misconduct.
On the “wayward nun,” who are you talking about?
No, the main events aren’t, but the account itself is since it was locked up in archives all that time and was apparently hushed up too for the last 150 years.
Maria Luisa.
I did not mean I need explicit descriptions. It just kind of went nowhere and left us hanging. I was still unsure what they meant by “founder” - not Maria Luisa, or was it? What order? Seemed she was just mistress of novices, not abbess.
Just lots of things left hanging, such as what the punishment really meant, going to different convents.
Guess they really want one to read the book.
No, thanks.
More depravity and satanic corruption in the Catholic crutch...I mean, church.
Yeah, it happens nowhere else.
But, but but, from reading FR I thought the evil inquisition only existed to put iron thumbs on Protestants.
The foundress’s name was (Maria) Agnese Firrao. She supposedly did miracles and was close to some prominent leaders, I believe including a pope, but then I believe she wanted herself venerated and it was also exposed that she had committed many acts of sexual immorality. So she was removed from her postion, but was said to have kept contact with the convent anyway. Then this later nun similarly abused subordinate nuns, and is reported to also have killed a few as well, and I believe also was sexually involved with several men, including the convent’s “confessor,” I believe it was reported, who was also, IIRC, a theologian or some such that was very influential and close to another pope. The matter only came out because of the middle-aged princess who joined the convent and who the later nun Maria Luisa tried to kill also to protect her secrets. I tried again to find another article going into all this but a new one I found again goes into too much detail for the religion forum, I believe.
Thank you for the insight. Interesting, and sad.
It was only dealt with when a princess who was cousin to an archbishop was rescued from there after almost being murdered by the nun in authority, who had already murdered a few others. Prior to that there were all sorts of people involved, and it just went on. Nuns engaged in sexual acts after being told the head nun was a saint doing miracles and through those acts Jesus was healing them, and how could that be believed by grown women raised as Christians in the first place?
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