Now here’s a fascinating story:
In the spring of 1824 in the young capital city of Washington, D.C., Ann Carbery Mattingly, widowed sister of the city’s mayor, was miraculously cured of a ravaging cancer. Just days, or perhaps even hours, from her predicted demise, she arose from her sickbed freed from agonizing pain and able to enjoy an additional thirty-one years of life. The Mattingly miracle purportedly came through the intervention of a charismatic German cleric, Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, who was credited already with hundreds of cures across Europe and Great Britain. Though nearly forgotten today, Mattingly’s astonishing healing became a polarizing event. It heralded a rising tide of anti-Catholicism in the United States that would culminate in violence over the next two decades.
Working from sources in Europe and America, Nancy Lusignan Schultz deftly weaves analysis of this significant episode in American social and religious history together with the astonishing personal stories of both Ann Mattingly and the healer Prince Hohenlohe, around whom a cult was arising in Europe. Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle has the dramatic intensity of a novel and brings to light an early episode in the battle between faith and reason in the United States-a battle that continues to inspire debate in American culture to this day.
The author previously published a really fine study Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834, and has made her name as someone who brings to life the social history of antebellum Catholicism, and anti-Catholicism.
presents a gripping account of the controversy that erupted over Mattingly’s sudden and inexplicable return to health and explores the lasting debate it provoked “between reason and emotion, between science and religion, and between sectarianism and ecumenism.”All of these tensions, she explains, were distilled in the person of Prince Hohenlohe, the mysterious “thaumaturgus,” or miracle worker, whose apparent ability to cure blindness and other infirmities had already made him a sensation in Europe. The 18th son of an Austrian crown prince, Hohenlohe drew crowds wherever he went, combining the “benign accessibility of a parish priest with the awe-striking cachet of a thousand-year-old name.” He also attracted powerful enemies. One official denounced him as a “deeply dissipated man, who seduces girls,” and even his staunchest defenders were forced to admit that he made “an unlikely candidate for Catholic sainthood.” As Hohenlohe’s fame spread, Pope Pius VII himself urged moderation, “so that the holiness will not become a subject of curiosity and mockery.”
Related articles
- Catholicism has always been America’s foreign devil | Sam Haselby (guardian.co.uk)
- How to show that Catholicism is the genuine form of Christianity (Hint: Miracles) (cantuar.blogspot.com)
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Grateful to the dead 
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