In 1817, Ann Carbery Mattingly was a 34-year-old widow, socialite, and sister to the mayor of Washington, DC, Captain Thomas Carbery, and they were both from an old Catholic Maryland family. Mrs. Mattingly had been the picture of health until about this time she was diagnosed with breast cancer and her life quickly became a painful endurance.
For seven years, Mrs. Mattingly was bedridden from pain and weakness and the slightest touch on her skin brought on excruciating pain, and she developed other painful ailments from being in bed for so long. She was taking so much laudanum--a powerful painkiller of the time derived from opium, morphine, and codeine-that she was rarely lucid and doctors were resigned to trying to control the pain until death inevitably took her.
However, Ann was not scared of death and throughout her ordeal she "exercised a Christian fortitude, and practiced a habitual piety and resignation, truly edifying and consolatory to her relatives and friends," according to Bishop John England of Charleston, who wrote about her later.
But two Jesuit priests were not ready to give up. Fr. Stephen Dubuisson and Fr. Anthony Kohlmann were family friends and had heard about a miracle-working priests in Germany, Rev. Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, who had built up a following in the 8120s after a number of miraculous cures through his intercession. So, the Jesuits wrote to Prince Alexander on Ann's behalf in January 1824, asking for him to remember her at his monthly special Mass for those outside of Europe requesting his intercession. They then followed Prince Alexander's specific process of making a novena to the Holy Name of Jesus, administering a particular blessing, and then having the miracle-seeker go to Confession and receive Holy Communion at the same moment as Prince Alexander's Mass in Germany.
All of these conditions were fulfilled on March 10, 1824, the two priests offered successive Masses in Washington, DC, at 2am and 3:30am in order to ensure they were synchronized with Prince Alexander.
After Ann received Communion with difficulty, the effect was immediate. Within moments, all evidence of sickness was done and her strength returned. She sat up, and she said, “Lord Jesus! What have I done to deserve so great a favor?”
As word spread, thousands came to see Ann. While her cure was a sensation in Washington, DC, many Catholics--including her brother, Mayor Thomas Carbery and Archbishop Marechal of Baltimore--took a more cautious approach. They were rightly concerned that there was already deep anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States and word of such a miracle could inflame charges of sorcery and fraud. Which it did.
In fact, some historians attribute the controversy over the miracle as one of the causes of the rise of the Know Nothing Party, a movement to restrict Catholics and strip them of their rights through the realm of politics.
But through it all, Mrs. Ann Mattingly lived in Washington, DC, free of her cancer, for 31 more years, dying at 70 years old in 1855. And she was forever grateful to God for the miraculous deliverance from seven years of horrible pain and disease.