I have just been on the phone with someone who told me about Hubert Wolf’s Die Nonnen von Sant’Ambrogio: Eine wahre Geschichte. Apparently, this is about an extremely perverted Jesuit priest in nineteenth-century Rome who had the most influence on Pius IX for promoting the definition of papal infallibility. He would have been involved in sexual scandals with the nuns and the affair would have been known about and covered up by Pope Pius IX.

I have just been sent a German newspaper article – and Google translation does a very bad job on translating the text into English. I am told that German Catholics who know about this are absolutely scandalised, and it discredits Pius IX. Click on the image to get full size.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Samstag, den 16. Februar 2013

How reliable is Hubert Wolf, a priest and professor at Münster? His specialising in Vatican scandals involving complicity with evil (including Nazism during World War II) seems to give us the impression of a man with an ideology. He needs to be carefully studied, preferably by one fluent in German, which I am not.

I quote from the Wikipedia article on Kleutgen:

Some years before the Vatican Council Kleutgen was confessor extraordinary to the Benedictine Convent of St. Ambrose in Rome. The nuns of this convent honoured as a saint one of their sisters who had died fifty years before. This was reported to the Holy Office and everyone concerned was severely punished; Kleutgen and the ordinary confessor (both men of exceptionally holy lives) were suspended, because of lack of prudence in directing the nuns, for awhile even from saying Mass.

Kleutgen consequently left Rome and went to the secluded shrine of Our Lady in Galoro, where he wrote the greater part of his Theologie der Vorzeit and Philosophie der Vorzeit. After the opening of the council, at the urgent request of several bishops, especially Archbishop Stein, Apostolic Vicar of Calcutta, his superior general recalled him to Rome to place his talents and learning at the disposal of the council, and Pope Pius IX removed all ecclesiastical censures as soon as he became acquainted with the work which Kleutgen had written. In 1879 some Old Catholics spread the report that Kleutgen had been condemned by the Roman Inquisition to an imprisonment of six years on account of complicity in the poisoning of a Princess von Hohenlohe; but, on 7 March, Juvenal Pelami, Notary of the Inquisition, testified that Kleutgen had never been summoned before the Inquisition upon such a charge, and consequently had not been punished by it.

I am not clear about Pius IX covering things up. Perhaps the problem was that Kleutgen would have been inconveniently guilty of the sordid happenings at Sant’ Ambrogio and too useful as an infallibilist theologian for the Pope’s agenda. Did the Pope cover up a heinous crime by a priest for the sake of his infallibility?

I am open to help in getting to the bottom of this question, which might turn out to have an amazing and shocking collusion with the present-day paedophile priest scandal and episcopal cover-ups.

If any of my readers is able to read German and has read Hubert Wolf’s Die Nonnen von Sant’Ambrogio: Eine wahre Geschichte, I would be very glad of a write-up and resume.