The religious census of 1890 revealed that there were just over seven million Catholics in America, compared to a total of 15 million Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Then the substantial Hispanic, Irish, and German Catholic population was joined by the surge of Polish and Italian immigrants over the next few decades. So by 1916 there were nearly sixteen million Catholics, some sixteen per cent of the population. The 1890 statistic came as a shock to the Catholic Church, as it had been assumed that there were millions more. This was because the statistics bandied about in the nineteenth century were wildly inaccurate as they were usually based on the false assumption that all Irish, Italians, Poles, French, and Belgians were practising Catholics.91
The reciting of the Catholic Creed, Ave Marias, Hail Mary’s, and Our Fathers were all common components of healing charms. In Mexican-American belief, exclaiming ‘Madre de Dios!’ (Mother of God) had the power to break spells. The sick could also invoke and worship the many saints in Catholic popular religion for both cure and protection from witches. Making the sign of the cross was a potent anti-witchcraft charm. Amongst Texan Mexicans, a cure for the evil eye involved forcing the person who cast it to spit on his or her thumbs and make the sign of the cross on the victim’s forehead, and then on either side of the head behind the eyes.92 Holy water was a venerable weapon. A French priest travelling in the United States during the 1870s observed that it was particularly important in Irish devotional life, and reported a case where it miraculous cured an Irishman of cholera.93 In 1872 Mr and Mrs Joseph Gutzweiler, a Swiss-German couple from Buffalo in their fifties, told police through an interpreter about their suffering from witchcraft. The witches tormented them at night calling them vile and filthy names. When police visited their apartment at 426 Hickory Street, Mrs Gutzweiler held in her hands a well-worn book of Catholic devotions in large Gothic type. She showed the police a bottle of holy water and a small Catholic medal obtained from a missionary at St Michael’s Church, Washington Street, that they hoped would see off their tormentors, but they did not. Catholics in the Rio Grande similarly wore medals dedicated to San Benito to ward of witchcraft.94
A wealthy Belgian, Father Suitbert Mollinger (1828—1892), was the most successful purveyor of Catholic cure and protection in late nineteenth-century America. He settled in Pittsburgh in the 1860s to work amongst the large Germanspeaking population in the city, and in 1868 became the first pastor of the Most Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church in Troy Hill.95 He was an avid collector of relics, employing agents in Europe to seek out and purchase any that came on the market. He paid for the building of a new chapel dedicated to St Anthony of Padua across the street from the Church. It opened in 1882, one of eleven pilgrimage shrines created in the United States by that time, and housed the thousands of relics he had collected. It is said that the chapel contains the largest collection of relics outside the Vatican. Amongst its amazing treasures are fabric from the Virgin Mary’s veil, a thorn from the Crown of Thoms, splinters from the True Cross, and the skeleton of Saint Demetrius. No wonder people flocked to Troy Hill to visit the chapel in search of spiritual succour.
Father Mollinger accrued a reputation for miraculous cures, attracting considerable attention in the American medical press. He had studied medicine at university, and his name was given to a popular patent medicine that brought in revenue long after his death.96 But people went on pilgrimage to his church for the potency of his blessings and spiritual healing power. St Anthony’s day, 13 June, was the peak in the calendar with thousands flocking to the chapel from hundreds of miles around, and even from abroad. On such days the streetcars were so packed with invalids that they were known locally as ambulances. In June 1891 it was reported in the press that Mollinger’s blessing had even cured a disabled fifteen- year-old boy named Martin Lavin, of Somerset, Niagara County, who had been unable to walk since childhood.97 Mollinger made no charge for his healing work but thousands of dollars in donations were placed in a basket at the side of the altar. We shall see in a later chapter how a bewitched German made his way to Pittsburgh to be blessed by Mollinger.
The Catholic clergy were reluctant to get involved in dealing with witches or witchcraft, and some actively tried to disabuse their flock of the existence of witches in their communities. But the priesthood was comfortable with employing their most potent weapons—blessings and exorcisms—in cases of bodily possession and hauntings; in other words, supernatural assaults that could be attributed directly to the Devil or his minions rather than human intermediaries. In 1904 Monsignor Michael J. Lavelle, Rector of St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, expressed the opinion that people had been and still could be possessed by evil spirits: ‘Whether there are any instances at present I do not know. None has ever come to my personal notice. But that the Church recognizes the possibility is evidenced by the rules prepared for exorcising’.98 While Lavelle had never been approached to deal with evil spirits, in 1901 Father Westharp of St Alphonso’s German Catholic Church, Lemont, Illinois, paid visits to a German farmer named Seraphim Wilming to rest the troublesome spirits that plagued his farm by making loud noises and moving objects. Three times Westharp returned to bless the house and its grounds, all to no effect. The phenomena were finally revealed to be a hoax perpetrated on Wilming by a man who held a grudge against him.99
Not a few of the many thousands who flocked to Mollinger and his fellow priests were Protestants desperate for help. So it was that in 1886 Father Peter Becker, of Holy Trinity Church, Woodland Avenue, Cleveland, was called to attend to a middle-aged, Protestant, German woman who believed she was possessed. The Church, and Becker’s clerical position, had been established only a few years before to serve the swelling German population in the city.100 The widow lived with her son-in-law and daughter in a cul-de-sac off Madison Avenue. Her husband had died some years earlier, a victim of possession, they believed. The evil spirit of a witch who many years before had bewitched the couple’s pigs, transferred itself to the man on the witch’s death. On his demise it moved to his wife. She suffered from palpitations, her brain seemed as though it was on fire, while the blood in her veins felt freezing. Father Becker was called in and brought with him a Jesuit priest and a Dominican monk. They held a crucifix before her eyes and went through a rite of exorcism. The woman writhed in agony but felt no relief after. Becker concluded that she was not possessed but suffering from ‘religious mania’. He requested that the woman’s family not discuss religious matters with her and called in two physicians instead.
When the woman’s family came to hear of the amazing cures of Father Mollinger they resolved to take her to him. In July she went to stay with a Troy Hill resident named John Hock. Mollinger paid a visit the next day and placed a medallion containing the bust of St Anthony around her neck. She tried to tear it off and suffered terrible agonies that night. Mollinger returned with some nuns and exorcised her, but found it impossible to feed her holy water, so they secretly put some in her coffee. Still she struggled violently, until she was taken to the Most Holy Name of Jesus Church, where a special service was held for her in the presence of the holy relics. The accumulative power of Catholic armaments finally had the desired effect and the woman returned to Cleveland apparently cured.101 The Catholic Church’s role in healing in urban America was further reinforced with the large-scale immigration of Italians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 115th Street, Harlem, New York, became an important focus, for example, with thousands resorting to its statue of the Madonna to heal them of mundane and supernatural ailments such as the malocchio.102