Prince Hohenlohe's miracles: Supernaturalism in the Irish public sphere

MIRACULoushealings of the sick were reported in several different parts of Ireland and credited to the agency of an aristocratic German Catholic priest, Alexander Leopold Franz Emerich von Hohenlohe Waldenburg Schillingfurst (1794-1850), known as Prince Hohenlohe. 1 Despite cures being claimed for him in France, England, Ireland, and America, the Prince never left Germany.Instead he practiced a strategy of" distance healing." 2 He issued instructions by letter and arranged to celebrate mass simultaneously with local clerics, even making allowance for longitudinal difference in order to ensure precise simultaneity of prayer.Following his intercession, two young women were cured of their ailments on June 19 and August 1, 1823, in Laois and Dublin respectively.Such was the scale of the Prince's celebrity across Europe that he took to proclaiming what one writer calls "field days" for miracles, with particular dates dedicated to named countries.3 On September 1, 1823, when he prayed for all of the sick of Ireland, "[t]he poor stayed away from work and crowds flocked to the country's chapels from 4 a.m.onwards on that autumn morning, filling them with 'infirmity in all its varied shape.' " 4 The events generated a "mass of narratives" (as one contemporary observer punningly called it 5 ) and sparked off a mini pamphlet war, with .opposingsides staking out differing positions as to the possibility of miraculous powers manifesting themselves in the early nineteenthcentury United Kingdom.An uneven experience of modernity within this relatively new political entity forms an undercurrent to the debates, with even liberal commentators wondering what role faith-ridden Ireland could expect to play in the modern world: "Can those men be fit for the exercise of rational freedom and political power who are so far sunk in stupidity and ignorance, that even the minds of the highest order amongst them~their primates and bishops~ ... have felt no shame~ have felt unconscious of any burning blush upon their cheek,