A clickbait title but an interesting article - Nuns Gone Bad: A Lurid Tale of a Lesbian Nun Sex Gang

[Schwadevivre]

via Alternet

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. She pleaded with him to rescue her, claiming that she had been the target of several poisonings and was in mortal danger. When her cousin the bishop answered her call and arrived at Sant’Ambrogio, he promised to rescue her and soon delivered on that promise. 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. It was an accusation more lurid than any popular anti-clerical satire, full of sexual transgressions, heretical practices and homicidal schemes. 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.

Although there were some practices that might, loosely, be called lesbian the real scandals were normal (heterosexual) interactions and the extreme veneration of the founder of the Order of Sant’Ambrogio

What the Dominican (investigator) would discover was a secret, cultlike veneration of Maria Agnese Firrao, featuring stories that she “trapped her tongue under a heavy stone for five to six minutes” to prevent blasphemy and wore “an iron mask containing 54 pointed nails,” and other tales of self-mortification. Maria Agnese was also reputed to have performed miraculous healings, and the sisters kept such relics as the scourges she used on her body, as well as other less grisly possessions, in the belief that they retained sacred powers. In short, they treated the founder of their order as a saint, even though decades earlier the Inquisition had invalidated Maria Agnese’s claims to that status, sent her into confinement in another convent and ordered her to have no further contact with her “daughters.”

 

[ramonmercado]

There was an article about this in FT some years back.