In the 19th century, a scandal
involving sex and murder at a Rome convent ensnared practically every
major player in the Catholic Church hierarchy. Nuns
using visions of God to persuade novices to have sex, threesomes with
priests, the poisoning of a fat German princess, a prominent theologian
shacking up with a vicaress, young nuns murdered, fetuses removed from
an abbess, and cardinals, the Jesuit superior general, and the pope all
enthralled by a beautiful and charismatic fraudulent saint—it’s enough
to put The Decameron to shame.
The hard-to-believe story that contains all of these juicy
nuggets—the 1858 scandal at the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome—is the
subject of Hubert Wolf’s rigorous and stunning new book, The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal. Translated by Ruth Martin, it is a hybrid of high and low perfect for the modern reader—racy and yet simultaneously erudite.http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/28/lecherous-nuns-and-priests-murder-plots-and-cover-ups-meet-the-mother-superior-of-catholic-scandals.html