Book Review: Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle

I purchased this book because of Thomas Babington Macaulay's mention of "the miracles of Prince Hohenlohe" in his review of Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes, cited here. According to the publisher, Yale University Press:

In 1824 in Washington, D.C., Ann 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 free 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.

Nancy L. Schultz deftly weaves analysis of this 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. Schultz's riveting book brings to light an early episode in the ongoing battle between faith and reason in the United States.

The author, Nancy Lusignan Schultz, also wrote Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (Free Press, 2000), which certainly describes the violence to come, just ten years after the Mattingly cure.

This book was fascinating to me because of the many ways Catholics in early 19th century America and England shared parallel concerns: How to participate as citizens (after 1829 in England); how to integrate--or not--into their respective cultures; even the controversies between the laity and the clergy and between the "native" and Continental clergy and between the orders (especially the Sulpicians and the Jesuits) seem parallel. Of slightly lesser interest was the situation in Germany, where Prince Hohenlohe lived and practiced his healing ministry, facing the concerns of both religious and secular authorities. 

Like the old Catholic families in England, the laity in the United States of America, via lay trusteeism, were used to be in charge of their parishes. In England, the Catholic laity, especially the landowners and wealthy, controlled the chapels on their estates, and sponsored the clergy to serve Catholics on their estates and nearby. As the hierarchy in both England and America developed, the laity had to adapt to new sources of authority. 

I thought also of the differences between Manning and Newman in England, with Manning like Faber much more willing to embrace Italianate devotion language than Newman and other Oratorians and converts. The same kind of devotional divide occurred in the early nineteenth century in Maryland, Virginia, and the Capital. The Sulpician Archbishop of Baltimore, Ambrose Maréchal, ordered the Jesuit Dubuisson not to be so scrupulous in applying Prince Hohenlohe's precise timeline, accounting for different time zones, but he was ignored (disobeyed).

Schultz points out the differences between not only the Sulpicians and the Jesuits, but between the English-trained Jesuits like Archbishop John Carroll, who'd been educated for a time at the College at St. Omers, preparing to work in the missions in England, and the Jesuits like Father Etienne/Stephen Dubuisson, who'd been prepared for a much more secure ministry (he was in charge of discipline for a time at Georgetown). The former were much more concerned about the possible deleterious effects of a triumphalistic proclamation of this miracle on the status of Catholics in the country, while the latter thought it best to spread the good news and combat any attacks against the miracle.

The family story of Ann Carbery Mattingly, her suffering, the two miraculous cures she received, and the mysteries of her husband's and her son's disappearances from her life is also compelling. I was certainly not as interested in the gender specific analysis Schultz conducted in the later chapters, but the book is vividly written and well documented. 

I've prayed for miracles of healing before and reading this book made me wonder what I would have done if one of those prayers were answered. I would feel great thankfulness and given God great praise, but how would I or the recipient of the healing I'd prayed for feel about telling people about the miracle, encountering skepticism, curiosity, even manipulation or fascination?

As Schultz demonstrates, being a wonder worker like Prince Hohenlohe or being recipient of a wondrous healing like Ann Mattingly did not make life any easier for either of them in many ways. He was distrusted, suspected, and certainly mocked--he does not seem to have the most stable character, as he often had to change schools, had some trouble with authority and with debts, and indeed might have enjoyed the celebrity of being a thaumaturgus too much. She still suffered family estrangement and opposition to the religious vocation she thought she might have (long after her husband was dead)--and of course, she still died. 

The eventual death of someone who is saved from death by a miracle always reminds me of C.S. Lewis's poem "Stephen to Lazarus":

But was I the first martyr, who
Gave up no more than life, while you,
Already free among the dead,
Your rags stripped off, your fetters shed,
Surrendered what all other men
Irrevocably keep, and when
Your battered ship at anchor lay
Seemingly safe in the dark bay
No ripple stirs, obediently
Put out a second time to sea
Well knowing that your death (in vain
Died once) must all be died again?

At the beginning of each chapter, Schultz recounts a supernatural episode and the reactions of people in that era, the early to mid-nineteenth century. Curses, strange hauntings, amazing catastrophes, they raise the specter of what reasonable people do when something out of this world seems to occur: will they believe what they saw and heard and experienced or believe what they want to be true in accord with nature and reason?

She emphasizes that Catholics in the new American republic were enjoying the "Era of Good Feeling" after the War of 1812 during the presidency of James Monroe before Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle: they had fit into the community and the government (Mrs. Mattingly's Catholic brother was the mayor of Washington City when she was cured) in spite of the distrust brought over from England that Catholicism and modern liberty did not fit well together. She cites the idea that the exercise of Catholic authority by the Papacy or other superiors could be considered a violation of the Monroe Doctrine as an expression of European colonialism (the Jesuits in Maryland tried to cite that issue when ordered to divest themselves of a plantation and free the slaves!).

Perhaps the saddest note is that both Ann's husband and son may have suffered from a form of ALS--not fatal but debilitating--and may have been misjudged as ne'er do wells in ignorance of the fact they were suffering from a "creeping paralysis". Based on a likely scenario, Schultz also argues that Ann and the other Carberys may have rejected Ann's son John Baptist Carbery Mattingly because he married a mixed-race woman. It's not documented but presumed.

Contents (including the the subheads in each chapter):

Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle: The Prince, the Widow, and the Cure that Shocked Washington City

Prologue: Washington City, 1824

One. Introduction

    Bamberg, Southern Germany, 1821

    Biographical and Archival Research

    "Some Domestic Cause of Grief": A Note about Historiography

    Epigraphs and Adumbrations

    Some Historical Context

Two. The Prince and the Princess

    Bohemia, 1810

    Wurzburg, 1821

    The Prince and the Farmer

Three. From St. Mary's County, Southern Maryland, to the Federal City

    Religious Tensions in Colonial Maryland

    Ann Carbery Mattingly's Early Years, 1784-1803

    The Federal City, 1800-1822

Four. Thaumaturgus and Priest

    Ellwangen, Germany, October 1777

    In the Eyes of His Contemporaries

    Westward over the Ocean

Five. A Capital Miracle

    Western Virginia, 1797

    The Cultural Context

    German Mysticism

    The Seeds of Controversy

    "News of Supernatural Facts"

    The Protestant Response

    "Friend of Truth"

    A Great Deal of Trouble": Dissension within the Catholic Church

    The Body of Evidence

Six. Aftermath

    Washington, DC, 1844    

    Ann Mattingly's Body

    Slavery, Race, and the Mattingly Miracle

    Nemini Cedimus: John Baptist Carbery Mattingly, 1809-1839

    More Hohenlohe Miracles, 1824-1838

    Mrs. Mattingly's Foot

Seven. Conclusion

    The Carberys, the Mattinglys, and Me: Visitation Monastery, Georgetown, April 2006

    "Yield to No One": John Baptist Carbery Mattingly's Secret

    Prince Hohenlohe's Final Years

    The Death of Ann Mattingly

Carbery-Mattingly Family Tree

Notes

Index

(no bibliography--I do wish there was a separate bibliography although the end notes--meaning the reader has to flip to the back of the to find the note and the source cited--are comprehensive)

Fascinating.

From Newman to Macaulay to More to Richard Brothers and Prince Hohenlohe?

I apologize for the blogging drought. I've been working on an academic paper for the 4th annual Florovsky-Newman Week sponsored by Eighth Day Institute (EDI). Writing about Newman's religious opinions about Baptism and the Church from 1816 to 1828 has meant that I've been reading his Apologia pro Vita Sua and other works, including Ian Ker's biography of Newman and a book I think is now out of print (The Church. . . . .A Communion--in the preaching and thought of John Henry Newman by James Tolhurst DD, Gracewing, 1991).

In the Apologia, I was mostly working in the first chapter, "History of My Religious Opinions to the Year 1833" but I did skip to the fifth chapter, "Position of My Mind Since 1845". In his introduction to the Penguin edition of the Apologia, Father Ian Ker says the last chapter should be read separately to help us understand Newman's thoughts about the Catholic Church in the mid to late nineteenth century.

In Chapter 5, Newman proclaims that after becoming a Catholic, he had “no further history of my religious opinions to narrate”. Of course he was still thinking about theological and doctrinal matters, but he didn't have to form private judgments about them in the same way as he did before. For instance, he mentions the teaching on transubstantiation:

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe?

Then he cites a comment by Thomas Babington Macaulay:

Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he could bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened age could resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it." "Sir Thomas More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which stands that test, will stand any test."

So I searched for the source of that quotation. It is from Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes. Here is a fuller quotation:

But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was ready to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel some doubt whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the information on the subject that we have, or that, while the world lasts, any human being will have. The text, “This is my body,” was in his New Testament as it is in ours. The absurdity of the literal interpretation was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now. No progress that science has made, or will make, can add to what seems to us the overwhelming force of the argument against the Real Presence. We are, therefore, unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed respecting transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas More is one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which stands that test will stand any test. The prophecies of Brothers and the miracles of Prince Hohenlohe sink to trifles in the comparison.

One point is that Macaulay didn't know that King Henry VIII also defended the doctrine of transubstantiation--before and after the Break from Rome! According to Macaulay, Henry VIII was as absurd as More in taking the words "This is my body" literally! More was willing to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, but that wasn't why he was imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death. That was because he refused to sign the oaths Henry VIII required which denied the authority of the Vicar of Christ, the Pope.

So that made me wonder what the "prophecies of Brothers" and the "miracles of Prince Hohenlohe" were.

The "prophesies of Brothers" refers to the works of Richard Brothers, described as a "British religious fanatic" in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

born in Newfoundland on Christmas day, 1757, and educated at Woolwich. He entered the navy and served under Keppel and Rodney. In 1783 he became lieutenant, and was discharged on half-pay. He travelled on the continent, made an unhappy marriage in 1786, and again went to sea. But he felt that the military calling and Christianity were incompatible and abandoned the former (1789). Further scruples as to the oath required on the receipt of his half-pay reduced him to serious pecuniary straits (1791), and he divided his time between the open air and the workhouse, where he developed the idea that he had a special divine commission, and wrote to the king and the parliament to that effect. In 1793 he declared himself the apostle of a new religion, “the nephew of the Almighty, and prince of the Hebrews, appointed to lead them to the land of Canaan.” At the end of 1794 he began to print his interpretations of prophecy, his first book being A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times. In consequence of prophesying the death of the king and the end of the monarchy, he was arrested for treason in 1795, and confined as a criminal lunatic. His case was, however, brought before parliament by his ardent disciple, Nathaniel Halhed, the orientalist, a member of the House of Commons, and he was removed to a private asylum in Islington. Here he wrote a variety of prophetic pamphlets, which gained him many believers, amongst them William Sharp, the engraver, who afterwards deserted him for Joanna Southcott. Brothers, however, had announced that on the 19th of November 1795 he was to be “revealed” as prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world; and when this date passed without any such manifestation, what enthusiasm he had aroused rapidly dwindled, despite the fact that some of his earlier political predictions (e.g. the violent death of Louis XVI.) had been fulfilled. He died in London on the 25th of January 1824, in the house of John Finlayson, who had secured his release, and who afterwards pestered the government with an enormous claim for Brothers’s maintenance. The supporters of the Anglo-Israelite theory claim him as the first writer on their side.

The "miracles of Prince Hohenlohe" refers to Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a German priest and miracle worker. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia he was:

A titular Bishop of Sardica, famous for his many supposedly miraculous cures, born 17 August, 1794, at Kupferzell in Würtemberg; died 14 November, 1849, at Vöslau near Vienna. He studied the humanities at the Theresianum in Vienna, 1804-8, and at Berne, 1808-10; philosophy at Vienna, 1810-12; theology at Tyrnau in Hungary, 1812-14, and at Ellwangen, 1814-15. On 16 September, 1815, he was ordained priest and at once devoted himself to the care of souls first at Stuttgart, then at Munich. In October, 1816, he went to Rome where he had little difficulty in justifying himself against the accusations of having administered the sacraments in the German language and of belonging to the Bible Society. On his return he made a pilgrimage to Loreto, and again arrived at Munich on 23 March, 1817. On 8 June of the same year he was made ecclesiastical councillor, and, in 1821, canon of Bamberg. About this time began the numerous miraculous cures which are alleged to have been effected through the prayers of Hohenlohe. On 1 February, 1821, he was suddenly cured at Hassfurt of a severe pain in the throat in consequence of the prayers of a devout peasant named Martin Michel. His belief in the efficacy of prayer was greatly strengthened by this cure, and on 21 June, 1821, he succeeded in curing the Princess Mathilda von Schwarzenberg, who had been a paralytic for eight years, by his prayers which he joined with those of Martin Michel. Having asked the pope whether he was permitted to attempt similar cures in the future, he was told not to attempt any more public cures, but he continued them in private. He would specify a time during which he would pray for those that applied to him, and in this manner he effected numerous cures not only on the Continent, but also in England, Ireland, and the United States. Worthy of mention is the case of Mrs. Ann Mattingly of Washington, D. C., who was said to have been cured of a tumour through his prayers on 10 March, 1824. Rome did not pass judgment on these supposed miracles and Catholics were divided in their opinion. In 1824 Hohenlohe became canon, in 1829 provost, and later Vicar-General and Administrator of Grosswardein. In 1844 he was made chorepiscopus and titular Bishop of Sardica. He is the author of four volumes of sermons and ascetical treatises most of which were collected and published by S. Brunner (Ratisbon, 1851). His method of curing the sick was continued after his death by his friend and disciple Joseph Forster, pastor of Hüttenheim, who died in 1875.

So when you read all of Macaulay's comments about Saint Thomas More and his belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, you realize it's pretty faint praise. Macaulay's point in reviewing von Ranke's History of the Popes is to emphasize that the Catholic Church, in spite of all of the progress England and enlightened Protestant Europe had made, was still powerful and dominant, because, he thought, still so superstitious and simple. 

This review is the source of the famous quotation about the Catholic Church being just as strong as she ever has been "when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s." Again, when you read the rest of his review, you realize that Macaulay does not think that it is a good thing that this may be true, because it just means that progress has failed to triumph over an institution that has "stood its ground in spite of the immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of Queen Elizabeth." (Elizabeth I, of course, since Macaulay did not know of the Second!) 

There is a book about Mrs. Ann Mattingly of Washington, D. C. and her miraculous cure in 1824! And I've ordered a copy!