Some people’s lives need no justification to be recounted. The life of the extraordinary Maria Adeodata of Jesus (1806-55), a mystic Benedictine nun of Mdina, is one such life – at least as retold by the late Peter Serracino Inglott in a posthumous book published last Saturday.
I am as aware as anyone of the groans that common sense demands at the very idea of the biography of a cloistered 19th-century nun. I let out an inward groan myself when Fr Peter, almost 20 years ago, told me he was working on it.
But then he handed me his manuscript (it was the first of three versions). I saw that he had managed to make a really intriguing figure of Adeodata – intriguing for our understanding of national and cultural history as well as for its study of a spiritual adventurer.
By the third version (the latest found among his papers), he painted the portrait of a woman of substance born a wealthy aristocratic heiress; with a libertine father and puritan mother (and a marked soft spot for her father); having a disfigured shoulder she didn’t bother to hide from her suitors; a monastic reformer and believer in personalised religion; and the author of what Fr Peter persuasively argues is an underestimated, minor spiritual masterpiece.
Fr Peter was asked to write the book by the late Arthur Barbaro-Sant and his wife Emily, then immersed in promoting the cause of the beatification of Adeodata. They had been entrusted with the task in 1988 by the then Abbess of St Peter’s Monastery in Mdina.
Parishes were methodically visited, money raised, devotional holy pictures and booklets printed, radio programmes transmitted, Masses held, Rome visited, cardinals embraced, a TV drama produced, and two streets named for the nun (in Mosta and Qala). Then, in circumstances described in Emily Barbaro-Sant’s moving memoirs, their work was unceremoniously stopped.
Some people didn’t want Adeodata to become Malta’s first saint. Perhaps they were unable to see more in her than a remarkable survivor of her parents’ broken marriage.
In any case, thus ended the first return of Adeodata. Following her beatification in 2001, her name once more slipped back into obscurity. She had been widely known as a saint during her lifetime. By the beginning of the 20th century, three miracles had been attributed to her, including the healing of a Mother Abbess at death’s door in Subiaco, Italy – a reminder of the wider Italianate cultural universe of which Malta was part at the time.
The case for her beatification had begun then, basing itself on the testimony of people who knew her, such as her cousin, Lady Luisa Strickland, and her most consistent adversary in the monastery, Sister (later Abbess) Scolastica Caruana. The case was halted in 1913, when St Peter’s Monastery ran out of the money needed to continue to finance the process.
The end of Adeodata’s first return may have been providential in one sense. It enabled Fr Peter to continue writing, on and off, for several years, without having the manuscript torn out of his hands. As a result, the book grew as his understanding of his subject deepened.
Some people didn’t want Adeodata to become Malta’s first saint. Perhaps they were unable to see more in her than a remarkable survivor of her parents’ broken marriage
With this book, Adeodata makes her second return. It’s financed by St Peter’s Monastery and beautifully edited by Petra Caruana Dingli (with whom Fr Peter had discussed details of the book’s production as early as 2001). It has Daniel Cilia’s photographs of the monastery and Hector Scerri’s theological overview. (There’s also an essay by me but don’t let that put you off.)
Fr Peter’s range of reference covers six languages and draws on the disciplines of history, literature, psychology, cultural anthropology and theology.
First, the book is a social history. Adeodata was born the Baronessina Teresa Pisani of Frigenuini, sole heir to a great family fortune. Her mother was Italian, her father Maltese, a political liberal. Her grandfather, Gaetano Pisani, predated Mikiel Anton Vassalli in his insistence on the existence of a Maltese nation.
Fr Peter helps us understand how natural it was for Adeodata to be raised in Naples and how unnatural it was for this descendent of Maltese nationalists to insist on speaking Maltese (including to Luisa Strickland, mother of Gerald, still surprised when remembering this in 1892). She was in some ways the product of the Napoleonic wars as much as of her parents’ unhappy marriage.
Second, the book is a cultural portrait – especially of a community of cloistered nuns given to coquetry and class war as well as mystic intensity. This aspect of the book greatly benefits from the illustrations and mapping of the monastery because Fr Peter does a detailed job of imaginative reconstruction, mainly by combing through the testimonies given by people who knew Adeodata.
Third, the book is a psychodrama as compelling as any written up by Freud, even though Fr Peter is at pains to show that Adeodata’s key decisions cannot be reduced to sexual frustration or neuroses.
He chases every little detail he can find. She ate little but was quite different from anorexics. She dressed shabbily but was self-confident. She was intent on reforming life in the monastery in the spirit of a communal rule but that included developing a religion tailored to one’s individual needs.
Fr Peter pays a great deal of attention to her spiritual diary, which he says has been unfairly underestimated. He shows how she developed a set of techniques, helped by the mental imagery of a garden, to cultivate the sharp mental focus and skills she needed to reinvent herself.
Modern bestselling authors popularising the neuropsychology of attention, or the diary-keeping techniques of tracking personal change, put it differently, and in a culturally more accessible way. But they don’t take you further.
Finally, the book is a theological interpretation of a short passage of history. “By scrutinising the lifeworks of the finest human beings produced by our community,” Fr Peter writes, “we can discover what God has been doing in our midst.”
He’s not talking about any complacent moralising. He provides a vivid portrait of one woman who discovered the cosmos in a small world and tried to live in it as a kind of spiritual artist.
She developed a form of prayer that was like a game, drawing on every tradition of spirituality she knew of. In the process, her insights anticipated some aspects of 20th-century Catholicism.
Let’s be thankful for the Church hierarchy’s underestimation of her. Unfettered by narrow definitions, this remarkable woman can return to a secular Malta and its millennials. They’re not looking for a saint but may well be interested in someone who teaches techniques of radical mindfulness and an ecological art of living.
ranierfsadni@europe.com