Scandals in the Church Nothing New

By Alex Good
Waterloo Record
May 2, 2015

http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/5591049-scandals-in-the-church-nothing-new/

Long before the current landslide of reports of child sexual abuse became headline news, the Catholic Church was a hotbed of scandal.

Indeed, the link goes back as far as the dawn of the modern mass media, with prints of all the debaucheries going on behind cloistered walls making great propaganda material during the Reformation. Catholic-themed porn was off and running.

More recently, an entire sub-sub-genre of semi-mainstream Eurotrash films in the 1970s, dubbed "nunsploitation," took convents as the setting for tales of sexual perversion. A notorious precursor was Ken Russell's 1971 film "The Devils," which even managed to get banned in many countries.

The fact that Russell's film was based on an actual story of mass hysteria in a French convent in the 17th century tells us that where there's smut, there may be fire. Sometimes even the most shocking and sensational stories of priests and nuns gone bad are true.

Which brings us to the scandal that overtook the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome in the mid-19th century. The story begins with one of the convent's nuns, a minor German princess, begging her cousin (an archbishop close to the pope) to rescue her from Sant'Ambrogio, where she said the nuns were behaving in various wicked ways and even trying to poison her.

The subsequent investigation conducted by the Church's Inquisition confirmed the princess's accusations and then some.

As Hubert Wolf discovered when poking about the newly opened archives of the Inquisition, "what had sounded like an outrageous fantasy turned out to be a true story of a convent in scandal." Heresy, all kinds of sexual delinquencies (at least by 19th-century Catholic standards) and even murder had occurred behind Sant'Ambrogio's walls.

In a paralegal proceeding taking more than two and a half years, the Inquisition slowly dug out the truth. The malefactors were punished (though those with the best connections got off easy), and then ... the Church buried the story. It sat in the archives for 150 years, waiting for someone to discover it.

A lot of modern true crime reporting has a tendency to get bogged down in the mountain of evidence thrown up by a trial. It's the problem of having too much information.

Wolf was faced with the same difficulty here, as he had to wade through all of the extensive interviews and reports made by the Inquisition and somehow turn them into a coherent narrative. He mostly succeeds, helped along by just how sensational the revelations were, but there are times when he might have condensed and streamlined his account a bit, especially as the witnesses kept changing their stories.

As a Church historian, however, Wolf is very good at both describing the process of the investigation and then explaining its fallout. He also provides helpful insights into the nature of convent life and Church politics in 19th-century Italy, which was in many ways more medieval than modern.

But despite that sense of temporal dislocation, it's still a story with an obvious contemporary relevance and message.

Scandal and secrecy go hand in hand. A more open Church would have fewer fires to put out.

Alex Good is a Guelph writer and editor of the literary journal Canadian Notes & Queries.