Washington mayor’s sister healed by Jesus
In 1817, Ann Mattingly, the widowed sister of Thomas Carbery, mayor of Washington D.C., became seriously ill, and was eventually diagnosed with cancer. In 1824, as her health had seriously deteriorated, Father Teissier, superior of the Baltimore seminary (Maryland, USA), asked many of his friends to pray for her.
Someone contacted Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe, a German priest and reputed miracle-worker. The latter recommended a novena, and replied that he would offer mass on March 10, 1824, at 9 a.m., and that he wanted everyone to join him in prayer. On March 10, Mattingly woke up at 3 a.m., to allow for the time difference between Europe and America. A mass, attended by a dozen people, was celebrated in her room by Father Dubuisson, a French Catholic priest and Jesuit missionary to the United States. The dying woman could barely swallow the host.
Suddenly, all present heard her exclaim from behind the bed’s curtains: “O my God, who am I that you should grant me such a grace!” She had been cured instantly. She then got up joyfully, dressed herself and started striding around the room.
Thirty Protestants converted to Catholicism after learning of this miracle.
Adapted and translated from Jean-Marie Mathiot, Miracles, signes et prodiges eucharistiques, du début du christianisme à nos jours, Hauteville, Le Parvis, 2018, p. 243-244.
Let us pray:
Come then, good Shepherd, bread divine, still show to us thy mercy sign. oh, feed us, still keep us thine; so we may see thy glories shine in fields of immortality. O thou, the wisest, mightiest, best, our present food, our future rest, come, make us each thy chosen guest, co-heirs of thine, and comrades blest with saints whose dwelling is with thee.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Encyclical letter “The Church draws her life from the Eucharist”
I would like to rekindle this Eucharistic “amazement” by the present Encyclical Letter, in continuity with the Jubilee heritage which I have left to the Church in the Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte and its Marian crowning, Rosarium Virginis Mariae. To contemplate the face of Christ, and to contemplate it with Mary, is the “programme” which I have set before the Church at the dawn of the third millennium, summoning her to put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of the new evangelization. To contemplate Christ involves being able to recognize him wherever he manifests himself, in his many forms of presence, but above all in the living sacrament of his body and his blood. The Church draws her life from Christ in the Eucharist; by him she is fed and by him she is enlightened. The Eucharist is both a mystery of faith and a “mystery of light”.
Whenever the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the faithful can in some way relive the experience of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus: “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Lk 24:31).
Ecclesia de Eucharistia – Introduction.
Last encyclical letter published by Pope John Paul II on 17 April 2003.
In the "Wilds of Wisconsin & Cornfields of Iowa" 