This quiet regimen seemed just the ticket for the weary, devout princess, but no sooner had she take the cloth than she began to notice troubling aspects to convent life. Only in emergencies were men, even priests, allowed within the clausura, or convent interior. Sant’Ambrogio was “enclosed,” meaning that the nuns were sequestered from all contact with the outside world apart from rare interviews conducted through metal bars and visits from priestly confessors or doctors. (Her granddaughter was the queen of Portugal.) Twice widowed and sickly, she entered the convent in her late 30s, seeking a “a place of cloistered peace and holy order” in which to live a contemplative life, although she also nurtured the dream of establishing an order of her own. Katharina, a Hohenzollern princess, belonged to one of the great royal Germanic dynasties, which include the Hapsburgs. In fact, the Sant’Ambrogio case was itself a sex-abuse scandal, although that aspect, however sensational, was not necessarily the Church’s primary concern. Hubert Wolf’s “The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio” offers a learned yet fascinating account of this incident - little known because the Vatican kept most of the embarrassing details in-house, a policy it would employ when handling sexual-abuse scandals a century later. Furthermore, the case against the convent of Sant’Ambrogio had tendrils that climbed up to the highest reaches of the Church and entwined around the great Catholic controversies of the day. It was an accusation more lurid than any popular anti-clerical satire, full of sexual transgressions, heretical practices and homicidal schemes. From his estate in Tivoli, the relieved but traumatized Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen began to draft a denunciation of her one-time sisters back in Rome. When her cousin the bishop answered her call and arrived at Sant’Ambrogio, he promised to rescue her and soon delivered on that promise. She pleaded with him to rescue her, claiming that she had been the target of several poisonings and was in mortal danger. In the summer of 1859, a desperate nun in the Roman convent of Sant’Ambrogio sent a letter to her kinsman, a bishop in the Vatican.
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