ASV

Archivio Segreto Vaticano

Ep. ad Princ.

Epistolae ad Principes

NdB

Nunziatura di Bruxelles

SCVR, Pos. Arch. Segr.

Sacra Congregazione dei Vescovi e Regolari, Positiones, Archivio Segreto

SdS

Segreteria di Stato

Early on the morning of Easter Monday 1855, under the cover of darkness, three women slipped out of the convent of St-André in the heart of the old city of Tournai. A coach was waiting to carry them along the narrow cobble-stoned streets to the new railway station just beyond the medieval city gates, where they boarded the train for Paris. Though dressed in secular attire, the three women were sisters of the convent of St-André, who were leaving Tournai for the first time since they had taken their vows. From Paris, they were bound for Marseille, and thence, across the Mediterranean, for Rome. Armed with a mandate from the entire community of St-André, they were personally going to implore the protection of Pope Pius ix against their bishop.Footnote ¹

This spectacular initiative marked the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would only be concluded in 1858. Its roots went back to the 1820s, however, and the echoes of the affair would continue to reverberate until 1886. As the archives of St-André and of the diocese of Tournai were destroyed in the Second World War, almost all of the surviving source material on this fascinating episode is concentrated in the Vatican. I stumbled on the main Roman file about the affair by chance, because it is well hidden in the archive of the Congregation for Bishops and Regulars.Footnote ² Material in the archives of the Brussels nunciature, of the secretary of state and of Pius ix filled out the gaps.Footnote ³ All in all, there is abundant and very detailed documentation, which allows a reconstruction of the viewpoints of all sides in the conflict.Footnote ⁴ Despite its unusual and even extraordinary character, the case may be considered symptomatic of the problems the hierarchy was facing with a new generation of religious women in a novel political and social context; the case thus allows a precious glimpse into the otherwise often unspoken assumptions underlying Roman policy in the balance between women religious and bishops.

The community of St-André was in many ways a typical example of the Catholic revival in Belgium. This broad movement of religious renewal started when the country was under Napoleon and (after 1815) under the Dutch, but it took off after Belgium gained independence in 1830 and more freedom was introduced for the Catholic Church. St-André was originally a congregation of hospital sisters going back to the Middle Ages, but by the eighteenth century it had become a convent with a school for upper-class girls. The convent and the school were suppressed at the time of the French Revolution in 1795, but the prioress, Séraphine Hauvarlet, bought back part of the old buildings and lived there with a couple of her former sisters. By the early 1820s a small, very informal religious community had again come into existence. Instead of attempting to resuscitate the conventual life, it followed the age-old model of the beguines, still very popular and widespread in nineteenth-century Belgium. The sisters took only vows of chastity and obedience for one year at a time, and retained their property. They wore no religious dress. They were essentially self-governing and democratic. They ran a modest boarding school for well-to-do girls and a separate free class for poor children.Footnote ⁵ The existence of the community and of the school was consolidated when, in her will, Hauvarlet turned the buildings into an estate in the care of the diocese of Tournai.Footnote ⁶

Like many congregations, St-André experienced a dazzling expansion in the decades after 1830. By the mid-1850s the community had grown six-fold, counting about 60 religious women in all. Its boarding school housed almost 200 girls, and its poor school had 300 pupils.Footnote ⁷ The expansion was part of a general process, by which consecrated women came to outnumber consecrated men (priests and religious). From being about four-tenths of the total in the Austrian Netherlands of 1780, they moved to nearly 60 per cent in the mid-nineteenth century. In an even more striking reversal of the situation under the ancien régime, less than one-tenth of this revivalist legion of 10,000 nuns was contemplative. The number of female religious communities rose from 280 in 1829 to 642 in 1846. Meeting a variety of local needs in a rapidly industrialising country, they attempted to fill the void created by the French Revolution's religious policy and exacerbated by the partial withdrawal of the state from public services after Belgium's liberal revolution. It was they who bore the brunt of the Catholic effort in education, health care and charity. Education, in particular, was in strong demand. Whereas, in 1829, communities of hospital sisters and teaching congregations had been roughly in balance, by 1846 the latter were more than twice as numerous as the former.Footnote ⁸

The centrality of women to the Catholic revival was widely acknowledged by leading clerics and laymen, and it was reflected in the special place given to – and taken by – women in the sacrificial spirituality of the movement. But St-André was also fortunate in that its long-time spiritual director, Gaspar-Joseph Labis, became bishop of Tournai in 1836. Labis was the driving force behind successive building campaigns to enlarge the schools, in which he invested part of his private fortune, and he buttressed the pensionnat with his moral weight as a bishop. He made the sisters take classes with the professors of his seminary during the summer, so that they could meet the rising expectations of parents. What is more, he turned the community into a proper congregation, with the three (simple) vows, a more conventual type of life and a more stringent hierarchy.Footnote ⁹ Through the ultramontane Labis, St-André established a close link with the Jesuits; the rector of the Society's house in Tournai, Fr Louis Boeteman, became one of their confessors. At the end of the 1840s, as happened in numerous other female congregations, the sisters asked the Jesuits to draft a more advanced and complete rule for them. The work was left unfinished, but some of the dispositions of the new Ignatian rule were nevertheless introduced.Footnote ¹⁰ Observers were struck by the sincere religious fervour of the community, which compared favourably with that of many other educational congregations.Footnote ¹¹

The members of this highly reputed congregation came mainly from the patrician or bourgeois families of the diocese, and were not seldom interrelated.Footnote ¹² Their pupils, likewise, were the daughters of burghers from the proud old towns of Hainaut and Flanders. The professed sisters bore the genteel title of Dames, and the community relied on soeurs converses, lay sisters from the common people, for manual labour. The Dames de Saint-André were part of a highly self-conscious class. Their ancestors had built the finest medieval cathedral in Belgium and had championed the liberties of the cities against successive rulers of the Low Countries. Their fathers and uncles had brought this tradition up to date by borrowing some of the ideas of Félicité de Lamennais. The liberal-Catholic banc de Tournai was an exceptionally cohesive and long-lived regional bloc in the young Belgian parliament. In the same year that St-André became an institute of perfection, 1836, the banc de Tournai defended communal liberties tooth and nail against King Leopold i, in the name of God and liberty. Over the next decades, it would continue to be in the forefront of the struggle of Belgian political Catholicism against the encroachments of the modern state upon society. The combination of a fierce attachment to liberty with a ferocious devotion to the pope, typical of Belgian liberal Catholicism, was perhaps most pronounced in Tournai and the Tournaisis.Footnote ¹³

Since 1850 the exemplary community of St-André and its elite school had been attracting the attention of the Brussels nuncio Eustachio Gonella. That in itself was highly unusual. Most (traditional) male orders were subject to apostolic visitation by the nuncio in the course of their reintroduction in independent Belgium, ‘ce pays où le Pape est Pape comme il l'est dans aucune autre contrée de l'Europe', in the words of Barthélemy Dumortier (one of the leaders, appropriately, of the banc de Tournai).Footnote ¹⁴ The apostolic visitation served as a kind of shock-breaker between the elite of the regular clergy and the secular clergy, who had misgivings about the reappearance of ‘monks’. However, it was not supposed to extend to female congregations: women religious were understood to be the bishop's affair. In contrast, not only did the nuncio intervene in St-André, in October 1854 he involved Rome directly through a long, apologetic report. He had long wished to spare the Holy Father such bitterness, he wrote, but the imminent threat of an immense scandal left him no choice.Footnote ¹⁵ Soon, the case at hand would be known in the Vatican as ‘il disgustissimo affare di S. Andrea’.Footnote ¹⁶ What was going on?

At the heart of the affair there was a protracted abuse of power on the part of Bishop Labis. Ideally, episcopal authority over diocesan female congregations was exerted indirectly in Belgium, through a delegate; it was limited to essentials such as a preliminary fiat for the rule, the approval of the election of the mother superior, the appointment of the confessor, approval of the taking of perpetual vows by sisters, and the right to visit every few years. Like the power of the sovereign in Belgium's new constitutional monarchy, it was supposed to be ‘un pouvoir modérateur s'exerçant au besoin, s'effaçant le plus possible’ (to quote Gonella's right hand as apostolic visitator, Mgr Jean-Ignace Scherpereel).Footnote ¹⁷ In reality, the case of St-André illustrates how religious women could chafe quite as much under episcopal despotism as the many secular priests without an appointment to a parish, the so-called desservants.Footnote ¹⁸ Bishop Labis believed that, as long as the rule of a congregation was not canonically approved, he had full authority over it, as if he were the superior.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, because of his pivotal role in the development of St-André, he considered himself the founder of the community. When the community became a congregation in 1836, Labis had taken care to inscribe his name as founder on the new preliminary rule, and to have the sisters take their vows in his hands. They realised only later what they had done, when Labis, in his capacity as founder, ignored their rule and the tradition of their community by appointing the superior and other dignitaries of the convent motu proprio.Footnote ²⁰

The overbearing behaviour of the prelate did not stop there. Labis craved female attention, and although he was from a humble background, he showed himself bent on his prerogatives as a bishop. This knee-jerk ancien régime reflex was also apparent, incidentally, in his decade-long, ultimately unsuccessful efforts to groom his nephew, who was also his confidant and his right-hand man, as his successor, and in his insistence on having his six nieces educated free of charge at St-André.Footnote ²¹ Labis abused St-André as his ‘country-house’, to borrow the expression of one observer.Footnote ²² The bishop spent the better part of his day there, every day – priests visiting on business knew that they could find him in St-André rather than in his palace. Considering himself the master of the house, Labis turned up in the most unexpected places, surprising the pupils when they came out of classes or when they were at play. He took his walks in the convent garden, addressing the sisters. He interfered with minute details, not only of prayer and catechism, but also of kitchen, pantry and wardrobe, often in a whimsical, arbitrary fashion. In the afternoon Monsignor was wont to retire to his private salon, where the sisters were forced to entertain him. In the evening the bishop invited one or more of his favourites to the honour of a candlelit dinner. Monsignor was so fond of his sisters in Christ that he seriously considered early retirement at St-André's.Footnote ²³ Unfortunately for him, the sisters did not return these sentiments. In their protests over the years, religion, class and gender were interwoven.Footnote ²⁴

Insofar as religion was concerned the bishop was an obstacle on the community's road to religious perfection, a road it was more than ever bent on pursuing since the introduction of an Ignatian rule in 1850. He undermined authority in the congregation by his constant and arbitrary interventions, he made sisters break their vow of poverty by having them dine at his rich table, he led them into temptation by his favouritism. He was nothing less than a threat to their salvation. In class terms these self-conscious ladies were not about to reduce themselves to the ‘servile instruments’ (as they put it) of an arriviste, upstart bishop. Like their male relatives, they reclaimed their rights, their liberty – ‘nous sommes libres’ – and wanted to govern themselves. As for gender, Labis was a double trespasser on female territory. He trespassed on the spiritual ground of the convent as a space of female purity; he trespassed on the material terrain of the female household when he busied himself with pots and pans, shopping lists and women's underwear. Above all he was a humiliating tyrant to them and a threat to their honour. As they asked rhetorically: ‘oserait-on confier à Mgr. Labis un gouvernement des femmes?’ Naturally, the scene was increasingly charged with sexual electricity, the more so as most sisters were relatively young.

The situation first led to conflict in 1850, when Labis replaced the superior and the mistress of novices because they forbade the sisters to go to Monsignor's salon.Footnote ²⁵ The community appealed to the nuncio. Gonella, who had just arrived in Belgium, was encouraged to intervene by one of his predecessors, Raffaele Fornari, ‘because this would increase the authority of the nuncio, both before the eyes of the bishops and before the eyes of the country’.Footnote ²⁶ This first intervention was largely favourable to Labis, however. The Visitator, Théodore de Montpellier, soon to become bishop of Liège thanks to Gonella, was close to Labis. In exchange for some vague promises on the part of the bishop, he made the community accept its new leaders.Footnote ²⁷

The crisis that started in 1854 was much more acute. Monsignor had not mended his ways, and the community had continued to grow. By that time, above all, the gossip mill was turning full speed – and what a powerful machine it was in a provincial town of respectable burghers like Tournai. It was fed by the outpourings of the sisters to their kin, and especially by the chatter of the girls from the pensionnat during school holidays. St-André came to be known as ‘the seraglio of Monsignor’. Hushed voices, unfriendly stares and painful allusions to the ‘delicious banquets of St-André’ or ‘the joyous convent life’ made social events in the gabled townhouses of Tournai quite unpleasant for the families of the sisters during that winter of 1854.Footnote ²⁸ And the rumours spread, down the railway track and from café to café. In Brussels it was a spicy subject of conversation at the royal ball.Footnote ²⁹ In Ghent students passed a pornographic caricature under the bench during a boring lecture.Footnote ³⁰ Here was a scandal, simmering under the surface, waiting to erupt. The cup was full when, one morning, the sisters found obscene graffiti scrawled on the convent gate. In a letter to the nuncio, signed by two-thirds of the Dames, they now boldly threatened to shut down St-André, leave the diocese of Tournai and start elsewhere, with or without the blessing of the Belgian episcopate: ‘nous ne voulons plus être une pierre de scandale pour le public’.Footnote ³¹ Their honour, and the honour of their name were at stake. They were also under heavy pressure from their families to do something.Footnote ³² Could the nuncio not become their protector, and make Rome curtail Labis's authority by recognising Séraphine Hauvarlet as the true foundress?Footnote ³³

Gonella was besieged from other quarters as well. The clergy of the diocese were complaining: how on earth could Monsignor keep slippery curés out of the arms of their housekeepers if he mistook sisters for courtesans? A nobleman from the Tournai area noted with concern that Monsignor's pastoral letter would no longer carry authority among the peasants, who cracked coarse jokes behind his back.Footnote ³⁴

What really set the alarm bells ringing in the Brussels nunciature was that scandal took concrete shape in the bishop's darling nun, Dame Joséphine. As the other sisters tried to ensure that Joséphine was duly chaperoned when Monsignor was on a visit (even peeping through the windows of the chapel when she made her confession to him), the two had set up a secret correspondence with the help of one of the soeurs converses, Sr Marie-Jo. In between her errands, Marie-Jo carried letters and small presents to and fro between the bishop's palace and the Dame's cell. In the correspondence Joséphine whispered about her sisters, and the bishop roared against his many enemies.Footnote ³⁵ But there also seems to have been a definite romantic edge. In his reports to Rome, the nuncio hastened to emphasise that the relationship of Labis with Joséphine was within the bounds of the ‘strictly licit’,Footnote ³⁶ but, apparently, only just so. It was clear to everyone that the attraction was fatal, and the end of the affair predictable if no action were taken.Footnote ³⁷ This dangerous liaison became known because, as the winter of 1854 turned into spring, Joséphine felt remorse and broke down. Her family was furious with the bishop. Dame Joséphine, in fact, was not a nobody. She was Countess Ida de Robiano, a scion of one of the most distinguished Catholic families in Belgium, with a high political profile; her father had been governor of the province of Antwerp and her brother Ludovic was a senator. The other sisters were convinced that her vocation was not genuine, and put her under relentless pressure to leave the convent, in the hope that this would remove the main reason for Labis's visits. The nuncio and his advisors in the affair felt that this was cruel and also ungrateful, because Ida's dowry had been a boon to St-André, but they shared the doubts about her suitability for the religious life.Footnote ³⁸ It is possible that Ida's vocation had been encouraged as part of a family strategy to prevent the fragmentation of property (something that still happened much more often than might be thought among the nineteenth-century aristocracy). On the other hand, Ludovic and his wife, Louisa de Beauffort, were very devout Catholics, who would place her spiritual welfare above any other consideration. As Louisa put it, Ida suffered from nothing less than ‘un dépit amoureux’; her soul was in danger, and it was therefore better that she broke with St-André, even if this would bring the scandal into the open.Footnote ³⁹ Joséphine herself wanted to leave, feeling that she did not have to ‘sacrifice [her] reputation in order to preserve that of Monsignor and remain unhappy’.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Labis wanted to make Marie-Jo the scapegoat so as to keep Joséphine in the community, the lay sister too was ready to walk out and speak up to defend herself, furious about the ‘duplicity’ of the bishop: ‘quoique je ne sois qu'une pauvre soeur converse je tiens à ma réputation plus qu'à ma vie surtout sur ce point déliqu'a de la pudeure’.Footnote ⁴¹

If the liaison between Labis and Joséphine came into the open, it would be political dynamite. The polemics of Belgian liberals were all about political Catholicism being a masquerade of bishops and nobles pining for the ancien régime. What could better illustrate their thesis than this story about a bishop and a sister-countess generously sprinkled with eighteenth-century perfume? Only the last-minute intervention of the nuncio stopped the cat from coming out of the bag. Marie-Jo was spirited away to a cloistered convent in Flanders, escorted by a priest who would prevent her from speaking to anybody along the way;Footnote ⁴² soon she would leave the religious life altogether, her silence bought with a pension.Footnote ⁴³ Joséphine's qualms were temporarily assuaged, though she would eventually exchange St-André for another religious community.Footnote ⁴⁴ Labis, in spite of the embarrassing new revelations provoked by the crisis, clung to his power over the community. Pride was to the bishop what honour was to the sisters (including Joséphine and Marie-Jo). His episcopal dignity and paternal authority were at stake: the women of St-André were ‘ungrateful children’ who had to be taught a lesson.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the face of Labis's stubborn insistence on his prerogatives, the nuncio swung over to the side of the sisters, informed Rome about the affair and asked that the Curia intervene to ensure completion of the rule and to force the bishop to relinquish direct authority over the convent.Footnote ⁴⁶

With their threat to move out and go public, the sisters had stumbled upon the powerful invisible weapon of public opinion. They could wield it all the more effectively in a country where the Church was no longer a part of the State. The breakdown of privilege in the modern age had removed many barriers against a bishop's authority over religious communities but, through freedom, it also created new means to ensure their rights and enlarge their sphere of activity. Labis said that, precisely because he could no longer invoke the strong arm of the law against rebellious nuns, Rome must stand squarely behind him and force St-André to submit.Footnote ⁴⁷ The nuncio knew better. In 1850 he had intervened mainly because he saw an opportunity to extend his authority. Now, more was at stake. Not so much the rights of the community in Tournai, or of religious women in general, for Gonella considered St-André expendable in itself. But the scandal caused by a dissolution of the community under these circumstances would hurt the Belgian Church and deal a devastating blow to the very episcopal authority that Labis was invoking. In order to protect the authority of all Belgian bishops, including his own, Labis had to swallow his pride and take a step back.Footnote ⁴⁸

Unfortunately, Rome did not fully follow the nuncio's advice. Sure enough, Labis was sermonised by Pius ix in person at the end of 1854, when he went to Rome for the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.Footnote ⁴⁹ He was now forbidden to enter St-André, yet he retained full authority over the convent, and the nuncio was instructed to abstain from further intervention.Footnote ⁵⁰ This left the bishop plenty of room for delaying completion of the rule and for displays of power, such as the deposition of the community's spiritual director, Canon Joseph Vanderwarden, whom he considered too sympathetic to the women under his care.Footnote ⁵¹ The new coup de crosse triggered the open revolt of the community and the sending of the delegation of the three sisters to Rome in April 1855, accompanied by Vanderwarden.

The three Dames were Maria Deroo, a somewhat older visionary and ‘specialist in sacrifice’, who would return to Tournai after a year; Chantal François, the headmistress of the pensionnat, who was the daughter of a Louvain professor of medicine, and Sophie Devoldre, the undisputed leader. (Everyone agreed that Vanderwarden was a tool in the sisters' hands.) Sophie, a physically attractive, determined and passionate petite of thirty-three,Footnote ⁵² had exercised her charisma on the community since 1850, when she had been made mistress of novices by Labis. Her ‘immense influence’Footnote ⁵³ was reflected in the warrant by which all the Dames delegated their civil and religious rights to her for the completion of the mission to Rome.Footnote ⁵⁴ To understand the ascendancy of Sophie, one has to keep in mind that the crisis of St-André was also a genuine crisis of identity. The community had a homogeneous social profile and set itself a clear task in education, but it found itself in a spiritual limbo. The pre-Revolution convent had been secure in its patron saint, in its relics (above all that of St-André himself of course) and in its rule (Augustinian, with some Ignatian touches). Since then, the connection with the patron saint had become a token affair. The venerable relics were gone. New ones had come in their place from the Roman catacombs in 1849, those of the (presumed) martyr Lucia, which had been enclosed in a life-size wax statue before being shipped to Tournai.Footnote ⁵⁵ Lucia, in her pathetic reclining pose and richly embroidered ‘ancient’ dress, conjured up images of the Eternal City, of the struggle against pagan despotism, of a heroic sacrifice for religious freedom. Her relics contained a promise, and so did the fragments of the Ignatian rule introduced a year later in 1850. But neither could really compensate for the deficit in spiritual identity. Sophie, with her charismatic authority, stepped into this relative void. She completed the rule during the first months of 1855. A decisive spur was the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.Footnote ⁵⁶ Its proclamation was an event in Tournai, as in all of Belgium. It was celebrated with a solemn procession, love-songs to Our Lady, musical chapels, fireworks, an ‘electric sun’ and a ‘balloon with Bengal fire and star’.Footnote ⁵⁷ To the sisters, the dogma was a compass pointing to new spiritual territory, uncovered in the visions of Mary or of Sophie herself. The spiritual revolution at St-André was the background to the radicalisation of the sisters' strategy in their conflict with the bishop. They now claimed that the vows that they had taken in the hands of Labis were invalid, because the old rule had been abolished and the new one had remained incomplete. In consequence, they were free to found another community, the Société des Dames de Jésus et de Marie, for which Sophie was to obtain papal approval. She could then open a generalate in Rome, and by the same token the congregation would be relieved from the authority of the local ordinary in Tournai.Footnote ⁵⁸

As the diligence with the visitors from Tournai passed under the Porta del Popolo, the city of the pope-king was on its last legs, even though its rulers did not yet realise it. After the Roman revolution of 1848–9, Pius ix had been restored by France, Austria, Spain and Naples. A false sense of Catholic strength was reinforced by the apogée of the empire of Napoleon iii during the Crimean War. The Papal States seemed to receive a new lease of life. Giacomo Antonelli, as secretary of state, imagined himself to have equalled the achievement of Consalvi in 1815. Although a clever diplomat, however, he lacked Consalvi's stature as a reformer, and changes were too piecemeal to make much of an impression at home or abroad. Papal administration was a brontosaurus crushed under the accumulated weight of its own traditions. The dismal reputation of the Papal States as one of the last old regimes of Europe was well-deserved. And yet, it was also in these years that the papacy actively started to look abroad, across the Alps, for an ‘input’ that ultramontanes were more than ready to offer. A process of relative internationalisation was set in motion, often at Pius ix's personal initiative.

All of this was far from the minds of Sophie and her companions as they marvelled at ‘la cité sainte par excellence’ and started networking.Footnote ⁵⁹ They were received frostily at first. Nuns who broke their vows and spoke ill of their bishop belonged in the convent prison, not in the antechambers of cardinals. What stopped their Roman adventure from being cut short was that they received the support of an influential countryman, Mgr Xavier de Merode. Together with a German and an English nobleman, he had been appointed as secret chamberlain a few years earlier, in a conscious effort by Pius ix to internationalise his entourage. The tireless, ascetic and witty Merode above all held both keys to the heart of the pope at this time: the delegation from Tournai was allowed to submit its plea to the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars. The Belgian prelate, whose family maintained close ties with the Robianos, was well-informed about the St-André affair.Footnote ⁶⁰ But the community also fitted into his master plan to reform religion and society in the Papal States by introducing revivalist congregations from across the Alps. French or Belgian sisters and brothers took over papal prisons, youth penitentiaries, mental wards, safe-houses and schools for upper-class girls. One can hear an echo of Merode in Sophie's words that ‘Rome indique partout la grandeur, la majesté, la force en ruine. C'est un peuple à refaire.’Footnote ⁶¹ The pairing of the exaltation of Rome with the denigration of the Romans was typical. Ultramontanism was not capitulation to, but conquest of Rome. Sophie had come to show that ‘a star has risen in the West’.Footnote ⁶²

Merode's wholehearted support remains remarkable, in the light of the philosophy Sophie outlined in her introduction to the completed rule, a key document in the whole affair.Footnote ⁶³ It was Ignatius with mennaisian seasoning. She envisaged an exempt and strictly hierarchical congregation along Jesuit lines, with a privileged link to the pope through a special vow of obedience and a cardinal protector. If the model was traditional, the underlying understanding of a dialectic between authority and liberty was modern. Authority was vital, but it had to be ‘freely accepted’: the ‘principle’ of the sisters' vocation was precisely ‘that of [their] liberty of conscience’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sophie was even more original in applying Ignatian inspiration to the feminine condition. The new congregation was destined to be nothing less than ‘le berceau de la femme régenérée en Jésus Christ et en Marie Immaculée’.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘Is it given to woman’, she asked, ‘to take her inspiration from the same principles as man, to march by the same way and to advance towards the same goal? Why not?' As the companion of man and even more as his mother, woman was powerful: ‘in this way she reigns over society, of which she is the soul and the foundation’. No less than man, she was ‘a free, intelligent and reasonable creature’. Sophie acknowledged that her nature was more depraved than man's, but she put a spin on this traditional teaching by claiming that it implied a special role for woman in the salvation of man, and of mankind. Through the power of her heart, the regenerated woman who followed the model of the Virgin Mary would save the modern male from his ‘depravity and independence’, and bring him back under the yoke of the Church. This was the mission of ‘Marie Rédemptrice’ before the end of time, for which the transformed institute was to raise the banner world-wide, as visions revealed to SophieFootnote ⁶⁶: ‘voici l’âge de la femme, ère nouvelle pour laquelle il faut des instruments nouveaux et des institutions nouvelles'. The goal of the congregation should therefore be ‘to make woman understand her mission and to give her the means to accomplish it’ – not just the spiritual and moral means, but also the intellectual means. The power of woman for good presupposed a rigorous education for girls, which could only be provided by properly trained religious women who had liberated themselves from the enslaving ‘commerce de l'homme’:

In consequence, the training of the Dames was to acquire the character of higher education, comprising dead and living languages, philosophy, mathematics and sciences, followed by a written and oral examination. In her correspondence, and in conversations, Sophie spelled out the uses to which the sisters would put their knowledge. No longer limiting themselves to a pensionnat and a poor school, they were to train primary school teachers for the (Italian) countryside, lead retreats for women and organise the self-help of destitute women in cotton manufactures.Footnote ⁶⁷ The introduction of a strong social dimension was probably influenced by Merode, who pointed out to the sisters that other revivalist congregations were already taking over elite education in Rome. But it was also the result of Sophie's confrontation with (south-) Italian society, where she felt women to be ‘more oppressed and degraded’ than in Belgium. The ultimate aim was ‘the reform of marriage’ through ‘the uplifting of woman’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The revival's sacrificial spirituality, of which consecrated women were the specialists, took a decidedly active turn here. Imbibing the spiritual milk of Mary Immaculate, they had to unite virginity with fecundity after her example. Her school was that of Jesus Christ, of whom she was the ‘essential associate’; it was a school of combat for the reconquest of the world. The union of Mary with Christ was to be mirrored in the new institute's special connection with the pope. In accordance with his teachings, they would bring men back into line, ‘giving good Christians to the Church [and] good citizens to the State’.

Sophie's constitutions are a remarkable document although but a particular example of a more general trend towards what might be called ultramontane feminism.Footnote ⁶⁹ As active congregations blossomed, religious women became less secluded. They easily picked up ambient romantic ideas about liberty or the exaltation of woman, reading them back more or less openly into the prevalent ultramontanism. But if the revolt of St-André underscores the potential for the feminisation of religion in the Catholic revival of western Europe, the way in which Rome handled the challenge illustrates its limits.

When the sisters from Tournai knocked at his door, the pope had three options. The first was simply to send them home, back under the bishop's crozier. Naturally, this was what Labis asked, with the support of other Belgian bishops.Footnote ⁷⁰ It was also the initial reaction of Pius ix, who was upset at the sisters' ‘act of insubordination’.Footnote ⁷¹ Their thesis about the nullity of their vows seemed specious. As one adviser to the pope put it: ‘I would answer to these religious women that if they want to be, I do not say good and perfect religious, but good Christians, the first step they have to take is to be obedient and respectful towards their Shepherd.’Footnote ⁷²

The first option was discarded thanks to Merode, with his first-hand knowledge of the details of the case. He was assisted in this by the other camerieri segreti and by some members of influential religious orders such as the Dominicans and the Trappists (both were essentially French), and even Jesuits.Footnote ⁷³ Labis's vengeful behaviour in Tournai played into the hands of the sisters' sympathisers. The bishop could only narrowly be prevented from placing St-André under interdict, and he intimidated the sisters through the confessional.Footnote ⁷⁴ He snubbed the nuncio and the Jesuits, whom he blamed for the affair. He treated poor Vanderwarden, who had returned, as ‘a dead man’.Footnote ⁷⁵ What was especially important in alienating Pius ix from Labis was the knowledge that, in spite of papal injunctions, he had continued to interfere at St-André after his visit to Rome at the end of 1854.Footnote ⁷⁶

The pendulum thus swung in favour of the sisters, as the pope took the affair to heart.Footnote ⁷⁷ Merode encouraged Sophie to look for a house, so as to force the pace of events a little: ‘la cause spirituelle ira au pas de la cause matérielle’.Footnote ⁷⁸ What enhanced Sophie's credit as a potential foundress was that she had large sums of cash at her disposal. To cut short embarrassing questions from bankers and sellers, she pretended it was her money, but in reality it came from more wealthy sisters who had recently inherited.Footnote ⁷⁹ Gonella, who was informed about what was happening in Rome through private channels,Footnote ⁸⁰ now came out on the side of St-André. In a long report he advised that the sisters be allowed to establish their generalate and noviciate in Rome, albeit without exemption. The house in Rome would be subject to the cardinal-vicar, that in Tournai would remain subject to the local ordinary. This would spare Labis loss of face, and uphold the principle of episcopal authority. But it would effectively deprive Labis of the right to revise the rule, because the principal house of the congregation would now fall under the cardinal-vicar. Gonella also felt that the bishop could be stopped from further meddling in the Tournai house through a secret papal order, given in writing. A decisive factor in the nuncio's advice was that St-André stood as one woman behind Sophie, and that the threat of a major scandal was therefore undiminished. The community would rather dissolve itself than submit to Labis. Gonella reminded his Roman superiors of the power of ‘a public avid for such arguments’ in Belgium. What was now whispered would then be said openly and in the press. The harm to religion would be ‘incalculable’.Footnote ⁸¹

This second option foundered on the resistance of the curial apparatus, in casu the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars. Its prefect was the old Cardinal Gabriele della Genga, the erstwhile president of the notorious giunta that had carried out repression after the fall of the Roman Republic of 1849. The real work was mostly done by the Congregation's able secretary Mgr Andrea Bizzarri, hand-picked by Pius ix to realise the monastic reform that the pope had been pursuing since 1846. Bizzarri had made his reputation on a mission to Sicily, ‘a region further removed from Naples than from Africa’. The problem there was the lax discipline of monks and nuns, ensconced behind the age-old privileges of the Legazia Sicula. They loved the archbishop of Palermo, who annulled vows easily: according to the bishop of Syracuse, Sicily was full of the children of secularised religious.Footnote ⁸² Religious women who clashed with their bishop because they wanted more discipline, were a new experience. Bizzarri was relatively open to revivalist impulses, notably where a more active role for congregations in society and a closer involvement in pastoral work were concerned. This was reflected in the encyclical Ubi primum of 1847, the clarion call for reform drafted by the secretary.Footnote ⁸³ Nevertheless, active female congregations of the type multiplying north of the Appenines were still uncommon in Rome around 1850, apart from the poor schools of the indigenous Maestre Pie.Footnote ⁸⁴ The model was essentially imported from abroad, from France, northern Italy and Belgium, in the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote ⁸⁵ This means that the friction between curial bureaucrats reared in counter-Reformatory traditions and sisters stepping outside the convent wall, was doubled by a culture clash between Romans and ‘foreigners’ (it did not help, of course, that the latter often looked down upon the former).Footnote ⁸⁶ Sophie's ideas were risqué in revivalist Belgium, but not so much so as to deny her the support of figures within the male religious establishment. They were definitely over the top in the more patriarchal context of southern Italy: socially and culturally Rome was a south Italian city, much closer to Naples than to Florence.

This is the background to the votum of Carlo Capelli, the consultor of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars charged with studying Sophie's constitutions.Footnote ⁸⁷ Capelli belonged to the arch-Italian order of the Barnabites; its most eminent nineteenth-century member was Cardinal Luigi Bilio, the author of the Syllabus errorum. Some of Capelli's objections to the constitutions reflected bureaucratic conservatism, and occasionally common sense. A superior-general at this stage would constitute a break with precedent and ‘put the cart before the horse’: St-André should first prove its merit by expanding across diocesan and national borders. The authority claimed for the superior was too absolute, particularly where the sisters' property and inheritance were concerned: this would provoke anticlerical resentment. In a more general way the Barnabite felt that the spirit informing the constitutions was too exalted, smelling of ‘quietism’.Footnote ⁸⁸ But what plainly bothered him most was less an old heresy than the new, as yet unnamed one of feminism. Full exemption from diocesan authority was exceptional, even for men, and unimaginable for women. Was it to be believed that a woman could govern a congregation all by herself, without a man at her side? Sophie's leitmotif, that women were called upon to reform mankind on a par with men, was simply absurd in Capelli's eyes. In this respect, the consultor noted with grave concern that the constitutions undermined the monopoly of consecrated men on doctrinal authority and on the sacraments. The sisters of St-André proposed to lead retreats and teach the catechism; they were ready to grant their superior the virtual authority to hear confessions. Capelli was even more worried by their aspirations to higher education:

Bizzarri (and della Genga) fully endorsed Capelli's votum. Sophie's constitutions could not be approved. St-André should preferably return to diocesan authority, ‘normalized’ after the example of other Belgian dioceses. If that proved impossible, the pope could temporarily appoint a delegate to replace the bishop.Footnote ⁸⁹ What Bizzarri resisted with determination was Gonella's advice. The ‘dottoresse fiamminghe’ were impossible in Rome – it was an altogether unfavourable soil for such ‘exotic seedlings’.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, the pasticcio with Labis that Bizzarri would have liked to see was unrealistic. The bishop insisted on his ‘right’ to appoint the leaders of the congregation. He also proved incorrigible, establishing a new ‘special relationship’ with a more pliant congregation in the countryside outside Tournai. For St-André, on the other hand, any submission to Labis was clearly out of the question; the sisters had to be given some kind of satisfaction, moreover, if dissolution and scandal were to be avoided. The third option that emerged in the end, therefore, was the expedient of an apostolic delegation. The delegate was none other than Gonella, who was also charged with (re)writing the rule in consultation with the sisters.Footnote ⁹¹

The decision was a humiliation for Labis, and a shock to the Belgian episcopate. As Montpellier wrote in an interesting admission, the blow was too hard for the bishops vis-à-vis the new religious communities:

Meanwhile, in Rome, Sophie and the inseparable Chantal were not pleased either: they exploded when the pope blocked the purchase of a house at the eleventh hour.Footnote ⁹³ He granted them a private audience, but his soothing words were (mis)understood as a new permission to stay.Footnote ⁹⁴ In spite of later papal encouragements to return to Tournai,Footnote ⁹⁵ Sophie surreptitiously bought a villa on the Aventine in February 1856, and had three novices come over from St-André.Footnote ⁹⁶ Pius ix ended by formally ordering the two sisters to leave in April.Footnote ⁹⁷ They demurred, invoking a higher inspiration;Footnote ⁹⁸ in private, they also made the mennaisian distinction between the pope as head of the Church and the pope as head of the Papal States.Footnote ⁹⁹ From a juridical point of view, they claimed to be private civilians rather than religious as long as their rule was not approved and they had not taken new vows.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For this position, they won the support of the Belgian plenipotentiary Emile de Meester, who was encouraged by Barthélémy Dumortier, on a visit to Rome.Footnote ¹⁰¹ De Meester was no doubt certain not to be disavowed by Belgium's predominantly liberal-Catholic government.Footnote ¹⁰² At this point, the second option came briefly back into play. Some people in the Curia felt that the pope could be compromised because of the sympathy Sophie had enjoyed from his entourage, and because of the permission he had first given her to stay. She had therefore to be removed at all costs, even if this meant approving her (amended) constitutions and her purchase of the villa on the Aventine.Footnote ¹⁰³ Pius ix, in contrast, was offended and was inclined to expulsion pure and simple.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Confusion in Rome was matched by deadlock in Tournai. The position of the nuncio was awkward. He could not go marching into St-André's right away, as this would be a further affront to Labis. He had to draft the rule, but the sisters pretended that Sophie had taken everything with her.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Besides, why would Monsignor want to write a rule if Sophie, ‘notre Mère et Fondatrice’, had already done so? Were her constitutions not being examined by the Congregation for Bishops and Regulars?Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Left uninformed by Rome for months, the nuncio was so uncertain that he did not dare to ask the Congregation for a copy of the constitutions directly, but rather through the intervention of the powerful Cardinal Costantino Patrizi.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The copy finally arrived in September 1856, preceded by the confirmation that Sophie was no longer persona grata at the Vatican.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Gonella could now go to work. His strategy, he explained, was to separate (the cause of) St-André from (the cause of) Sophie Devoldre. If he were to be successful time must be allowed to do its work in Tournai, and Sophie should not therefore be expelled from Rome. That could always follow later, once St-André had been brought back into line. Antonelli reassured him that nothing would be done in Rome ‘without calculating what needs to be calculated’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

While Sophie was left in limbo (she busied herself writing a feminist commentary on the Gospel of St John),Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gonella revised her constitutions with the help of two Jesuits. They basically excised its underlying spirit and originality. As apostolic delegate, the nuncio would appoint the superior and the confessors; in the future, the sisters would be able to elect their own superior, but remain dependent on local ordinaries for spiritual directors and confessors.Footnote ¹¹¹ In the meantime, little by little, the Jesuits and Passionists of Tournai undermined the sisters' trust in Sophie. She was hiding the truth, they said. In Rome, she was ‘nothing anymore … less than nothing’. Genuine founders and foundresses never opposed the Holy See, ‘ils suivaient la filière’. From the moment Sophie had disobeyed the pope, she could no longer be inspired.Footnote ¹¹² Sophie herself facilitated the task of her detractors. She alienated her protectors in Rome by her tempestuous behaviour.Footnote ¹¹³ She had a penchant for secrecy, increasingly limiting her correspondence with St-André to a few confidants. She insisted on ‘blind obedience’ (especially when she needed more money). In the end, she did not leave the sisters much choice other than to join her.Footnote ¹¹⁴ They were bound to wonder if exchanging the bishop's despotism for that of the foundress was worth their while; and what use it was to leave kith and kin in order to become unwelcome guests in Rome. Above all, had their original demand not been met, now that the nuncio had replaced Labis and completed the rule?Footnote ¹¹⁵

In April 1857 the time was ripe. The nuncio still needed all the weight of papal pomp and power, including the threat of excommunication, fully to destroy Sophie's charismatic hold over the community in a carefully staged ceremony at St-André's. After a pontifical mass, every sister was called upon to appear before the apostolic delegate as before a judge. Gonella's speech was an interesting lesson in undiluted ultramontanism. As the Holy See was ‘the source and centre of all spiritual power on earth, … nobody can do anything from the moment the pope reabsorbs, so to speak, the power that originally comes from him’. The pope had the absolute right to grant constitutions to a congregation, depriving any other person of her or his right. ‘Refusing to subject oneself to the right of the Head of the Church, in order to but recognise this other right annulled by his preponderant action, would be an act of spiritual revolt punishable by ecclesiastical sanctions, even by anathema or excommunication.’ By virtue of the power vested in him, Gonella annulled the mandate given to Sophie two years earlier and exhorted his ‘very dear sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ’ to observe ‘a blind obedience to your true superiors, a profound humility, a perfect abandon in the hands of God through the ever certain path of legitimate authority’. Only then would they truly resemble the wise virgins of the Bible. The ceremony was concluded with the installation of the former superior, Henriette De Sauw, and a homage by every sister in the hands of the apostolic delegate.Footnote ¹¹⁶

One of De Sauw's first acts was to order Sophie and Chantal to return to Tournai with their novices. She also claimed the villa on the Aventine for the community, and demanded the reimbursement of the remaining funds: in all, Sophie had received more than 264,000 francs from the sisters of St-André.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Sophie, for her part, denounced the intellectual piracy and disfigurement of her rule. She refused to hand over either villa or funds, asserting that the money she had received was hers by virtue of her mandate.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the autumn of 1857 she even acquired a second house in the Papal States, in the provincial town of Terni, a small-scale cotton factory for marginal women.Footnote ¹¹⁹ St-André argued that, precisely because Sophie had acted in virtue of a mandate, everything eventually belonged to the community.Footnote ¹²⁰ The congregation filed a lawsuit with the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, which was a fully competent tribunal in temporal matters when one of the claimants was religious. The civil courts of the Papal States were also an option, and even a more watertight one in the event that Sophie would eventually have recourse to the Belgian courts. The Congregation, however, would proceed far more rapidly, and, most important, its hearings were in secret so that there was no risk of a scandal that would surely harm a bishop and possibly the pope himself.Footnote ¹²¹ Within the space of a few months, in fact, the Congregation ruled in favour of St-André.Footnote ¹²² A new delay threatened when the Giudice delle Cause Ecclesiastiche, Mgr Francesco Latoni, who had to give his permission for the execution of the sentence, discovered a serious procedural mistake. However, the difficulty was removed ‘con fatica e denaro’.Footnote ¹²³ So it was that, after one arm of the papal administration had bribed another, possession could be taken of the Aventine villa on behalf of St-André in April 1858. The two remaining novices were forcibly removed and confined in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, before being sent back to Belgium. Although adults under Belgian law, under that of the Papal States they were minors until they either married or took religious vows. Sophie and Chantal were expelled from the villa and from Rome.Footnote ¹²⁴ They learned that the threat of scandal was not nearly so potent a weapon in a police state, however inefficient, as in Belgium. They were prevented from publishing a defence in the press; they were spied upon wherever they went; their correspondence was intercepted.Footnote ¹²⁵De guerre lasse, they returned home in June 1858, vesting their hopes in the Belgian courts and in the new liberal government led by Charles Rogier, a cousin of Chantal's mother. Both proved a disappointment. Their lawyer, Auguste Beernaert, dissuaded them from starting an action, for lack of evidence to substantiate their claims.Footnote ¹²⁶ For the liberals, the affair had lost much of its potential interest, now that the two sisters represented no one but themselves. Rogier felt that this was a religious affair now, in which civil authorities could not meddle.Footnote ¹²⁷ There were also political considerations, and a dose of paternalism. Concerned to improve his government's credit among Catholics, Rogier prided himself on not having made a scandal. He rather wished ‘that the affair was suppressed by the entry of Sophie and Chantal in a religious house’, and added ‘that he was ready to pay their pension if necessary’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Mainstream liberalism was in fact not very liberal as far as women were concerned until the end of the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, Sophie and Chantal stayed in Louvain with the François family. They were spied upon by the Jesuits, whose confessors received instructions to promise the two eternal hellfire if they persisted (they went to a Redemptorist instead).Footnote ¹²⁹Après-coup, Sophie said that she had given up all idea of scandal out of solidarity with the pope when the Papal States were invaded in 1859–60.Footnote ¹³⁰ In reality, she was making a virtue out of necessity. Exile was the only option left. Sophie and Chantal moved to the small town of Douai in northern France, where they opened a modest pensionnat. Sophie never got over her disgrace. She attempted to reclaim her rule and/or financial compensation in 1868, 1873, 1880–1 and 1886.Footnote ¹³¹ Her goal was still the Institut des Dames de la Société de Jésus et de Marie, distinguished by a special vow to the pope, ‘objet de mon culte, de mes joies et de mes douleurs’. Her plans took an interesting turn after 1880, when she attempted to jump on the bandwagon of papal devotion through the good work of ‘une heure de Garde, de Vigilance et de Prière en l'honneur du Souverain Pontife’. The faithful, above all laymen and laywomen from the people, were called upon to offer an hour of prayer, labour or suffering for the intention of the pope. The aim was to make ‘[all] hearts draw together around the chair of St-Peter's’, and to return to the papacy the spiritual treasures it imparted to the faithful. In a short span, the oeuvre gathered 7,000 hours for the pope.Footnote ¹³² Sophie was no doubt inspired by an audience with Leo xiii in 1880. Her case was again examined by the pope in 1881, and a last time, more cursorily, by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars in 1886. The retroacts of the affair were considered a decisive stumbling block.Footnote ¹³³ Sophie spent the last years of her life in Rome, ever under the shadow of the Vatican.

And St-André?Footnote ¹³⁴ On the express demand of Gonella, the apostolic delegation was transferred to his successors as nuncio after he left Belgium in 1861.Footnote ¹³⁵ It was maintained until the death of Labis in 1872. Subsequently, St-André returned to diocesan authority, but it was exercised more moderately. Moreover, in 1878, the congregation obtained an insurance against episcopal despotism in the person of a cardinal-protector (the former nuncio Luigi Oreglia di Santo Stefano). After having overcome the financial difficulties Sophie left in her wake, the institute prospered. The crisis of identity had been resolved. St-André's spirituality continued to revolve around the axis Mary–Jesus; the cult of the Sacred Hearts naturally came to occupy an important place in it. The vitality of the congregation was reflected in its expansion. By 1905, half a century after the crisis, it counted five pensionnats in Belgium and England. Perhaps more important, and certainly more revealing, were the new initiatives it took. In 1859 St-André opened a teacher-training school (école normale) in Bruges for sisters from congregations involved in primary education. The first superior was Dame Lucie, who had been one of Sophie's pupils when she was mistress of novices.Footnote ¹³⁶ She was assisted by Dame Loyola and Dame Laurence, Sophie's two confidants at St-André until almost the end.Footnote ¹³⁷ Dame Loyola went on to become mistress of novices and the ‘spiritual mistress’ of the community until her death in 1867. In 1870, when the congregation was free to choose its own leader for the first time since 1855, Dame Lucie became mother superior. She stayed at the helm until 1891 when she died in an odour of sanctity. The development of a form of higher education for women remained one of her principal concerns. She ensured the success of the school in Bruges through its ‘adoption’ by the government, and she created a cours normal for both sisters and laywomen at St-André. As she said, times had changed since the days of Molière, and it was no more than fitting ‘qu'une femme ait des clartés de tout’. Religious women who had enjoyed a higher education would be better armed against temptation; laywomen would be better able to keep their husbands and sons on the right path.Footnote ¹³⁸ The ‘model’ of St-André exerted a direct influence on Mother Marie du Sacré Coeur in France, whose efforts to create an ambitious école normale on a national scale would eventually be condemned by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars in 1899.Footnote ¹³⁹ It was also under the government of Dame Lucie that St-André strengthened its social vocation, first through the détour of missionary work among the common Catholic folk of Jersey, from 1884 onwards more directly through a new house in the mining city of Charleroi. In 1892 it was the first Belgian congregation to introduce retreats for working-class women, led by sisters. In sum, much like liberal Catholics after Lamennais, the sisters of St-André carried out Sophie's programme without Sophie. The sacrifice, however unconscious, had been fertile.

Beyond the particulars of the case, the ‘affair of St-André’ deserves attention for three reasons. First, it is a measure of the structural tensions caused by the emergence of ‘the sister’, itself part of broader tectonic movements pushing a Catholic ‘modernity’ to the surface. Second, it offers an x-ray picture of Roman policy at the formative stage. And third, it was one of the first times that Rome was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism.

The clash between St-André and the bishop of Tournai was symptomatic of a field of tension between religious women and the local higher clergy in the nineteenth century. It is perhaps no coincidence that the sisters of St-André were influenced by the Jesuits. Since the days of Mary Ward, in the seventeenth century, aspiring ‘Jesuitesses’ had been considered problematic by the hierarchy. But the romantic spirit of the age and the lived experience of breathing air beyond convent walls were even more accountable for a pronounced self-consciousness among a new generation of religious women. In many places, sooner or later, religious feminisation came up against episcopal despotism. That Belgium was the scene of a spectacular outburst should not come as a surprise. ‘La liberté comme en Belgique’ made the country a laboratory for modern Catholicism. The law could not stop bishops from being despots; but neither could it stop religious women from wielding the club of public opinion or simply from quitting. Freedom opened other fault lines in the Church – between vicars and bishops, or between ‘lay apostles’ and bishops – stimulating the rise of a Catholic opinion (laymen published newspapers, vicars and religious congregations constituted the hard core of their subscribers). The Roman buffer was welcome, perhaps even necessary. In Belgium, as elsewhere, nuncios strengthened their authority as mediators in the 1850s. Assuming direct control over a community of women was an unprecedented step in this process.

Gonella did not actively seek this role in the matter of St-André: the affair was forced upon him by the very dynamics and conditions modernising religious life. There was no Roman master plan, even if the Holy See was quick to seize the opportunities offered by new conflicts and new claimants. Pius ix had had the reform of convents on his agenda since 1846, but he was mostly concerned with male orders and inspired by conditions in Italy. Here, bishops were seen as allies against lax monks. The irruption of the new female congregations from the north after 1850 led to a recalibration of the Roman factor in the balance between bishops and regulars. The case of St-André defines the margins within which, through trial and error, the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and ‘standardisation’ of religious women. On the one hand there was territory upon which a bishop could not trespass. Even if the congregation was diocesan, he had to leave religious women a substantial measure of internal autonomy, quite as much for the sake of his authority as for that of their liberty. On the other hand, there were limits beyond which religious women could not hope to go. Transnational congregations with a good record might well largely escape episcopal jurisdiction through Roman approval of their rule and the recognition of a superior-general. However, religious women could never be fully exempt. In part, Rome was protecting female congregations against their own enthusiasm, as it did for some male congregations. It saved them from the despotism of the foundress, for instance, or from the evil reputation of ‘testament-hunters’.

Less sensible appears, with the benefit of hindsight, the rejection of ultramontane feminism and, consequently, the lid placed upon the feminisation of the Church. Women were not called upon to save the world on a par with men. Sisters could not be admitted to full higher education because they would shake up the established hierarchy and take power from priests. At bottom, it was no more complicated than that, as Capelli's votum reveals. In this respect, the case of St-André laid down the Vatican line for the rest of the century. It was rooted in theological doctrine, historical precedent, an authoritarian ecclesiology and – last but not least – the south-Italian biotope of the Holy See. Even if religious women quietly made their way in higher education through teacher-training schools, the denial of a university type of curriculum would increasingly become a handicap with the growing stringency of educational norms. The case of Mother Marie du Sacré Coeur illustrates that this did not substantially affect papal policy. And yet, within the perimeters drawn by the hierarchy, religious women could achieve a great deal. St-André is there to prove it, together with countless other congregations. By ‘following the beaten track’ to Rome, the second sex could escape the grip of the first estate sufficiently to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century.