In March 1824, Ann Carbery Mattingly, a 40-year-old widow and sister of Washington, D.C., Mayor Thomas Carbery, hovered near death, the curtains in her room drawn, the smell of camphor in the air. Ill with cancer for seven years, she was, said doctors, "out of reach of medicine." In this dire circumstance, the priests of Mattingly's parish turned to a reputed miracle worker, a 30-year-old German cleric with the title Prince Alexander Leopold Hohenlohe-Waldenbourg- Schillingsfurst.

Two years earlier, a priest in Baltimore had written to request the prince's prayers for two parishioners, and Hohenlohe answered with a promise that on the 10th of every month he would remember the sick who wished to join in prayer with him. Ann Mattingly's priests decided to offer nine days of prayer--a novena--and to bring Mrs. Mattingly Communion on the 10th of March.

On that day, as Hohenlohe began morning Mass in Europe, two priests began Masses after midnight in Washington. Soon afterward, one of the priests read a portion of Hohenlohe's letter to Mattingly, placed the host on Mattingly's tongue, and began a short prayer. According to a sworn affidavit by a friend who was there, Miss Anne Maria Fitzgerald, within moments Mattingly asked for her stockings, drew them on, and left her bed. The tumor had disappeared, and ulcers on her back were gone. Her breath became pleasant, and her mouth, she said, tasted like loaf sugar. Her doctors declared "a miracle."

This was not what many leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States wanted to hear. During the early 19th century, as Church authorities strived for respect in the Protestant culture, they engaged in a struggle among themselves to reconcile their Church's traditional acceptance of miracles with Protestant skepticism and with an increasingly secular national climate. Church documents about miracles during this period reflect deep divisions in the American Catholic community. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Mrs. Mattingly, whose social stature ensured the attention of the very stratum of society in which Church leaders most sought acceptance.

On the day of Mattingly's cure, the bells of Georgetown College rang in celebration; and for months afterward the revived patient received dozens of visitors each day, while her cure prompted a slew of published testimonials written by family members and friends.

On one side of the Catholic divide was John England, bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. England believed that there was room for the Catholic tradition of miracles in American culture. In fact, he believed that miracles would draw Protestant converts to the Church and show it to be the one true faith. Some saw the direct hand of God in the very circumstances of Mattingly's cure, one cleric noting: "He who rules the universe seems to have concentrated these miraculous cures in a single archdiocese of the United States for this purpose that these extraordinary events should become known the more rapidly and easily from this central point."

The Mattingly cure did induce a smattering of Protestant conversions, but generally speaking, Americans reacted to published accounts of the event with sneers. A pamphlet war between Catholic believers and nonbelievers of all persuasions was soon under way. In response to a publication by Mattingly's parish priest, Fr. William Matthews, one author--identified as "Friend of Truth"--published The Washington Miracle Refuted: Or, a Review of the Rev. Mr. Matthew's Pamphlet.

There were many skeptics among Catholics. Baltimore Archbishop Ambrose Mar�chal wrote to Fr. Matthews two days after the event that it is the duty of the clergy to "moderate and guide the popular emotion" in order to avoid "irreparable evil and scandal." A Georgetown Jesuit, under the pseudonym "Democritus," published a skeptical letter in the National Intelligencer. Fr. Matthews wryly summed up the dispute: "This miracle has caused a great deal of trouble--happy thing they do not occur often."

In the end, most U.S. Church leaders would downplay the Washington miracle. It grated on Americans that the primary figure in this miracle was a European aristocrat. Protestants were bothered that a foreigner could seemingly extend his reach across the Atlantic, much like the Pope, to influence Catholics. Cautious Catholics worried that the excitement surrounding Hohenlohe's cure would inspire nativist paranoia. By mid-century, when Irish immigration and general social unrest began to increase resentment of Catholics, the cause, advanced by Bishop England, of establishing an American tradition of miracle cures, was doomed.

In Europe, Prince Hohenlohe remained a celebrated figure until his death in 1849. Between 1824 and 1838, he was credited with nearly 20 American cures, half of them of nuns. But in the United States, the attacks on his works by skeptics, combined with the unwillingness of many Catholic leaders to support him, caused his reputation to fade. The 1849 edition of The Works of the Right Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston. . . in Five Volumes, published after the bishop's death, devoted nearly 70 pages to the prince; the 1870 edition barely mentioned him.

Mrs. Mattingly, too, faded into near obscurity. As her strength returned, she attempted to resume the duties of her former life, but celebrity proved an interference. Five years after her cure, she entered the Visitandine Convent in Washington, but she soon left. In 1831 she was miraculously cured of an injured foot when she placed a medal of the Blessed Virgin on it, an event that gave rise to a new round of sworn affidavits. Mrs. Mattingly died on March 9, 1855, at age 71.

Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Ph.D. '84, is professor and coordinator of graduate studies in English at Salem State College and the author of Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (2000). She is working on a book about miracles in the early American Republic.

A princely miracle: Hohenlohe (left), in a 19th-century print.



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