Anthony Kohlmann (13 July 1771 – 11 April 1836) was a German Jesuit. He is known for his part in the establishment of confessional privilege in United States law. He spent nearly a quarter of a century in the USA as an educator.
Kohlmann was born at Kaisersberg, Alsace. At an early age he was compelled by the troubles of the French Revolution to go to live in Switzerland, where at the college of Fribourg he completed his theological studies and was ordained priest. Soon after, in 1796, he joined the Congregation of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart. With them he spent two years in Austria and Italy as a military chaplain. From Italy he was sent to Dillingen in Bavaria, as director of an ecclesiastical seminary, then to Berlin, and next to Amsterdam to direct a college established by the Fathers of the Faith of Jesus, with whom the Congregation of the Sacred Heart had united (11 April 1799).
The Society of Jesus in Russia having been recognized (1801) by Pope Pius VII, Father Kohlmann joined it and entered the novitiate at Dunébourg on 21 June 1803. A year later, in response to a call for additional workers in the United States, he was sent to Georgetown, D.C., where he was made assistant to the master of novices, and went on missionary tours to the several German congregations in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Affairs in the Catholic Church in New York having gone badly, Bishop Carroll picked him out as the person best qualified to introduce the needed reforms and to restore order, and with his fellow Jesuits, Benedict Fenwick and four scholastics, James Wallace, Michael White, James Redmond, and Adam Marshall, he took charge there in October, 1808. It was a time of great commercial depression in the city owing to the results of the Embargo Act of 22 December 1807. The Catholic population, he states in a letter written on 8 November 1808, consisted "of Irish, some hundreds of French and as many Germans; in all according to the common estimation of 14,000 souls". Such progress was made under his direction that the cornerstone of a new church, old St. Patrick's Cathedral, the second church erected in New York City, was laid on 8 June 1809. He started a classical school called the New York Literary Institution, which he carried on successfully for several years in what was then a suburban village but is now the site of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. In April, 1812, he also started a school for girls in the same neighbourhood, in charge of Ursuline nuns who came at his instance for that purpose from their convent in County Cork, Ireland.
About the same time Father Kohlmann became the central figure in a lawsuit that excited national interest. He had been instrumental in having stolen goods restored to a man, who demanded in court that the priest should reveal from whom he had received them. Father Kohlmann refused to do this, on the ground that his information had been received under the seal of confession. The case was taken before the Court of General Sessions, where after a trial the decision rendered by De Witt Clinton was given in his favour. Its principle was later embodied in the State law passed on 10 December 1828, which enacted that
To a report of the case when published Father Kohlmann added an exposition of the teachings of the Church on penance. (Sampson, "The Catholic Question in America", appendix, New York, 1813.) The book excited a long and vigorous controversy with a number of Protestant ministers, and was followed in 1821 by another learned work, "Unitarianism, Theologically and Philosophically considered", in which Father Kohlmann replied to the assertions of Jared Sparks and other Unitarian leaders.
New York had no bishop as yet, the first appointed having died in Italy before he reached his see, and Father Kohlmann governed as administrator for several years. In 1815, expecting the early arrival of the second bishop (Connolly), he returned to the college of his order at Georgetown, D. C., as master of novices, and in 1817 became superior. He served as the President of Georgetown College from 1817-1820.
In 1821 he founded the Washington Seminary, which later became Gonzaga College High School.
Shortly afterwards Kohlmann became interested in the work of Prince Alexander von Hohenlohe, a charismatic German priest and nobleman who claimed to be able to effect miracle cures. Hohenlohe was supposed, in particular, to have saved the life of a German princess, Mathilda von Schwarzenburg, when he and a peasant associate prayed over her. The case was much publicized, and, although the Catholic authorities in Europe never endorsed Hohenlohe’s cures, many, including Fr Kohlmann, believed in them.
In 1824 he learned that a prominent Washington Catholic, Mrs Ann Mattingly, was suffering from cancer, and decided to contact Hohenlohe in an effort to cure her. He wrote to the princely miracle-worker in Bamberg, Germany, and got him to agree to pray for Mrs Mattingly at a certain precise time several months later. In Washington he arranged for one of his Jesuit colleagues to say mass by her bedside at the chosen hour, while he celebrated yet another mass in the Georgetown University chapel.
These trans-Atlantic negotiations took some time, and meanwhile Mrs Mattingly’s condition worsened. Her brother, the mayor of Washington, protested to Kohlmann that she would be dead before the prayer session could occur, but Kohlmann told him not to worry, that the splendour of the miracle would be all the greater for occurring at the very last minute.
At the appointed time, the three priests said their masses in different places and soon afterwards Mrs Mattingly was healed. She arose from her bed, proclaimed herself entirely cured and went on to live in good health for another thirty years.
The story of her cure attracted great interest in the press. To some Catholics it was proof of the power of prayer and of the superiority of their religion, while to Protestants and “free thinkers”, it smacked of medieval superstition and priestly chicanery. The Catholic hierarchy stood aloof from the conflict: None of Hohenlohe’s “miracles” was ever endorsed by the Church, and certainly not the cure of Mrs Mattingly, at which he had not even been present.
Later that year, when Pope Leo XII restored the Gregorian University to the direction of the Society of Jesus, Father Kohlmann was summoned to Rome to take the chair of theology, which he filled for five years. One of his pupils then was the subsequent Pope Leo XIII; another became later Archbishop of Dublin, and the first Irish cardinal (Paul Cullen). Leo XII and Gregory XVI both held Father Kohlmann in high esteem, and had him attached as consultor to the staffs of the College of Cardinals and several of the important Congregations, including that of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, of Bishops and Regulars, and of the Inquisition.
The last part of his life he spent as a confessor in the church of the Gesù at Rome, where during the Lenten season of 1836 he overtaxed himself and brought on an attack of pneumonia that ended his career.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.
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| Preceded by Most Rev. Benedict Joseph Fenwick S.J. #10 |
President of Georgetown University 1817-1820 #11 |
Succeeded by Rev. Enoch Fenwick, S.J. #12 |