From biker princess to Catholic activist.
When I last wrote about Gloria, Dowager Princess of Thurn und Taxis – aka the Harley Davidson-driving “Punk Princess” – in the summer of 2007, I was summoned to the Festival Thurn und Taxis Schlossfestspiele in Regensburg, to visit her late husband Johannes’s family’s vast 500-room castle about an hour and a half drive from Munich. “We will have a cocktail for some friends at 8pm so it would be good if you could be there on time at the Schloß. Be aware that the opening night is a popular operetta named Das weiße Rössl am Wolfgangsee in which I am performing. It will be sung in German, of course.”
That was my first introduction to her. When a glamorous Gloria emerged, she was dressed in Bavarian hunting costume for her role. She posed flamboyantly for the cameras and then led me to meet the legendary German playboy Gunther Sachs, formerly married to Bridget Bardot. As a silver drinks tray was presented, Sachs told me how his friend Prince Johannes used to enjoy pretending to be sick on his private plane and then eating from the sick bag; he paused … “only the bag actually contained fresh bircher muesli from the Palace Hotel in St Moritz!”
Some 16 years later, as we sit in a dining hall of her Rome mini-palazzo, decorated with crucifixes, images of Jesus and black and white Pop Art prints proclaiming “Repent and Sin No More!”, I encounter a different Gloria, now in her early 60s. She is wearing a long dark burgundy skirt, nun-like white shirt, plain black shoes and what look like a pair of grey mittens. We are served English tea by a butler. I am with Amanda Bowman, chair of the Catholic Herald Institute, not to talk about her colourful past but to discuss her life today as a businesswoman and Catholic activist, and what troubles her these days: the state of the Church, and what can be done to reverse the direction of progressive Vatican traffic that has alienated so many faithful Catholics.
First up on Gloria’s agenda is the Latin Mass. When she first came to live in Rome some 20 years ago, she was asked by some German priests “to do something to influence the mainstream Church” and try to get “the old rite” to return to Rome again. There was only one little chapel in Rome where the Extraordinary Rite was celebrated, and she and her friend Prince Alessandra Borghese began a campaign (including concerts and dinners) to show there was hostility “towards the old rite”. When her friend Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, the old rite was then rehabilitated. This acted as a magnet for many thousands of a new generation of Catholics to discover the liturgical and aesthetic riches of the Latin tradition.
“At Easter or Christmas, at Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini, a special church in Rome, people came from all over the world to worship, and to see the beauty of the old rite,” she says. She is angry that such liturgical beauty is now under threat of extinction thanks to Pope Francis.
“What I realised quickly is that the people who took Catholic life very seriously, and were maybe slightly more strict about Catholic teaching, were basically being persecuted by the mainstream Church. And that’s something I didn’t understand. And that’s why I thought, I have to help. Now we’re right back to that same situation.”
When I bring up how Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Benedict’s former personal secretary, had revealed how the new restrictions on the old rite had “broken the heart of Pope Benedict” before his death, Gloria looks visibly upset.
“You don’t go after the people who take Catholic life more seriously,” she said. “We have so many more urgent matters. People are fleeing the Church because of abuse situations and because of bad publicity. It’s ridiculous to go after the faithful when you have to try and get more people into the Church. It is the wrong battle. Especially as the protagonists are very nice people and not at all extremists.”
After her billionaire husband Johannes, 11th Prince, died in 1990, leaving her heavily cash-strapped, with a 500-room castle to run, the media narrative was that after she dusted herself down to rebuild the family finances, part of her re-invention was to re-embrace her Catholic faith. Were you broken down spiritually? I ask.
“No, I never was broken down and that’s precisely the reason why I became a more practising Catholic because of gratitude. In the crisis situation I was in for maybe 10 years, I got so much spiritual help. I was so lucky to find the right people to help me at the right moment, which must have come from heaven, I thought.”
Today, a young priest comes and serves Mass every day in the private chapel at her Rome house. Of those priests she is close to, several are from the Brompton Oratory, including her close friend, the provost Julian Large. It was Julian who celebrated, in 2009 (wearing the 19th-century “Bumble Bee” set of black and gold vestments), the magnificent Mozart Requiem Mass for her sister Maya von Schönburg-Glauchau with guests including Hilary Clinton, Sir Rocco Forte and hundreds of high society guests from around the world. Her sister was also a fervent Catholic who regularly went on pilgrimages.
Gloria was partly brought up in Africa, whose aristocratic but not wealthy father (family lands in Saxony were confiscated by Communist regimes) was a journalist and author. She has been living in Rome, not far from the Spanish Steps, for around 20 years. Her palazzo-style apartment has a charming courtyard garden, a dodgy lift and a little trattoria at the bottom of the sweeping entrance steps. “I was always a faithful Catholic,” she says, correcting the record that she lost her faith during her jet-set party years (her husband’s 60th birthday cake was decorated with 60 marzipan phalluses). But those days are long behind her. She is now focused on her family, her children (her two daughters attended St Mary’s Ascot, are married and live in England) and her mission to help the Church find its “truth” at a time when it has never been more divided.
“I never lost faith for long periods. Say, three months or so, you know, this leads to the ups and downs, but I basically was raised a faithful Catholic and our parents prayed with us and went to church with us.”
She feels blessed by the grace of God that her situation ended up so well. “By raising the family alone and dealing with financial issues and meeting the right people, not spending time with the wrong people. Everything happened naturally and normally to me.”
Today, instead of hosting bacchanalian parties, she tends to give birthday dinners for priests. The Herald covered one such dinner last year at a symposium in Regensburg. “I like to make a nice event for these battered priests. Because at the end of the day, their life is quite boring, because they have lost relevance in society. My aim is to show the Church’s attraction, when you introduce knowledgeable, clever and witty priests to society. Also it upgrades your party immed-iately.”
At lunch the day before, we had discussed how in both Europe and America, in the post-war era, priests had played a more important and public role in society. Bishop Fulton Sheen, for example, was on the cover of Time magazine. Was that part of her mission today? To encourage more priests to speak out as Catholic leaders in the public square?
“It’s more that society today is not interested or available,” she replies. “It used to be normal that on every Sunday, some parishioners would invite parish priests to come to lunch. Now nobody does and the priests are usually alone. Pastoral life and all that has vanished.”
Gloria blames the media “abuse propaganda” for this as people don’t want to invite priests into their homes. “Why is it that the world is always fighting the Catholic Church? Obviously, because our religion is the true religion. The real sacredness of the Catholic Church is bothering the demons in the world, and therefore, they’re all attacking the Catholic Church. And that’s why, for me, it’s proof.”
Is helping the Catholic Church return back to its tradition-al roots, a form of crusade? “I’ve always said that we learned when we got our Confirmation that we are soldiers of God, and we are a missionary Church, and our duty is to show others and bring others closer to the truth. And to show the beauty of our faith.”
So more of a vocation, I suggest. “My vocation is to use my position and fame to make public relations for the Cath-olic Church because I truly believe that this is the only way we have to be happy in life and to have meaning in life. Because I’ve seen so many people in our society around me, especially my age, who are totally lonely. There is no purpose in their life.”
Gloria keeps busy with her family life (she has houses in Rome, Germany and a beach house in Lamu, Kenya) and charity work which includes often dropping in to the soup kitchen at the family castle, which serves, every day, between 250 and 300 poor people selected by Caritas.
Although Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality will see a Who’s Who of cardinals, media and Church delegates descend on Rome, Gloria is unlikely to be welcoming the Vatican circus. She makes no secret of how she despairs at the direction in which the Catholic Church is heading under Pope Francis.
“I am sad and disappointed to see the general direction the world is going because we are going all in to a world where body and spirit are separated. That’s why abortion is okay. That’s why euthanasia is okay. Unfortunately, the Church today, I feel, is in a position where they don’t have enough self-esteem to be able to say more prominently what is wrong in our society.”
She is a fan of Jordan Peterson (whose wife and daughter are Catholic) and is interested in the rumour that the conservative Canadian philosopher is planning to set up a Davos-style event of conservative thinkers and business leaders, as an alternative to the globalist elitist corporate gathering. “I think he’s a very good wake-up for society as it is. This self-whine of people, always whining and blaming society. I think he has a lot of very good points in those interviews, and I think he’s a great protagonist for Catholic values.”
At the time of our interview, Gloria had recently returned from a trip to America with Cardinal Müller, organised by Vincenzo La Ruffa, founder of the Neumann Forum, for her to see the Regina Academy Schools in Philadelphia, which are a success due to adopting a classical Catholic education (including Latin and Greek) undiluted by woke progressive thinking and secularisation. The real problem, as Gloria sees it, is that so many so-called Catholics and priests today are Catholics only in name. They are “cultural” Catholics rather than true Catholics.
“I would say 80 per cent of the people who are paid by the Church don’t believe in the Holy Trinity and the resurrection, and certainly not in the virginity of Our Lady,” says Gloria. “So we also have a huge believing crisis within our Church, because the Church’s teaching in the last 60 years has been diluted and diluted and most of the young priests today become priests because maybe they think it’s a nice job to have.”
In Germany, she says, the bishops are mostly “heretics”. “They don’t believe. They get the money from the government and they cater for the government. They don’t care about the people in the Church, because they only care about the money.” She is saddened that confessionals are more often “empty” in Germany.
When we first met 16 years ago in Regensberg, we hardly discussed politics. The talk was more of her new Triumph motorbike that had replaced her 1984 Harley Softail. Now there is a political seriousness to her life. She says she is a big fan of right-wing Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni but has little time for the political class in Berlin. In a recent interview with Germany’s Achtung Reichelt! she said: “Berlin is making policies against us citizens. But politicians are there for the people, not the other way around. The transition to green energies has failed, failed. Man-made climate change is a huge swindle.”
Her close friendship with the late Pope Benedict, who used to live in Regensburg and was a regular visitor to St Emmeram, the family palace, has clearly been an important influence on her life’s journey. I can recall a huge photo of Pope Benedict kneeling at his mother’s grave in the town, standing in the side room to the private chapel in the palace.
She admits to finding the “spiritual level” in Rome a lot better than Germany. “Rome is much better because the Italians are much more traditional than others. And even if they don’t believe they will still follow the tradition. Whereas in Germany, they hate tradition just to start with. They have moved the Tabernacle away from the altar and are not interested in a sacredness.”
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.