Our Rejoice in Mary Jubilee Journey ended magnificently at Fredericksburg. I commenced writing this post on the evening of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which brings even fonder memories of our visit to this extraordinary parish. Father Dansereau, who joyously welcomed us to the parish, pointed out the connection between the church and the Ineffabilis Deus by Pius IX issued on December 8, 1854, declaring the Blessed Virgin Mary was “preserved free from all stain of original sin.”¹ My eyes thus opened, I am discovering far larger connections of the parish to Virginian Catholic history and the fuller story of the Immaculate Conception and its significance for the American Church.

** update: 2/17/24: mobile view rendering errors fixed (was caused by footnotes) **

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by Michael

Above all, we looked forward to attending the 5:30 Vigil Mass that evening, the start of the new Liturgical year, ministered by Father Dansereau, whom we got to know the last year of his duty at our home parish, the Cathedral of St. Thomas More. Father Dansereau is very special to us, as he guided Terry and me into our proper relationship, marrying us in the Church on St. Joseph’s Feast Day last March, and bringing me through RCIA and into the Rite of Confirmation at the Easter Vigil Mass at the Cathedral on April 8. Father Dansereau literally saved us both.

We arrived to the church Saturday morning within plenty of time for the 9am Mass, but had to drive around back to find a parking space — 9am Mass! — Saturday! nobody goes to 9am Saturday Mass! Well, let’s just say that most of our visits have been on Saturday mornings, and these masses are not the most attended. It’s Saturday, after all. No parking spaces, really? And, yes, this is a Catholic parish, not some “megachurch,” one of which we passed along I-66 on the way to the Piedmont.

I was worried about the dogs — “Macduff of Fife the Fifth,” actually, the crazy one with whom I share separation anxiety (seriously, it’s pathetic…), so Terry reluctantly allowed me to use one of her phones as a baby monitor. Mackie howled when we left, but calmed down by the time we got near to the church, so all seemed well. But just as we pulled up to the church, he started whining again, and I caved like a clueless victim walking over a poorly concealed, nay, deliberately poorly concealed, pit trap. So Terry joined Mass, while I circled back to get the dogs.

She truly enjoyed the celebration, and taunted me for having missed it, as Father Cozzi’s homily was a play on “wokeness” — after my heart! — and how true wokeness is spiritual wokeness, awake and ready for God. You can see the Mass here on the parish Facebook page. If you do, you’ll notice something Father Cozzi did which is fantastic — after returning the hosts to the tabernacle and while cleaning the paten and chalice, he led the congregants in the Salve Regina. That’s marvelous!

A lovely statue of the Mother and Son greeted us on the way through the campus from the back parking lot

After the Concluding Rites, Father Cozzi picked up a handout, which Terry says was given out at the beginning of the Mass, and together all recited a prayer that beings with “My Lord and my God” — love that! I sometimes recite these lines from John 20:28 to myself as I approach the altar to receive the Eucharist. So glad that St Mary’s has adopted this prayer:

My Lord and my God, you take the bread and wine we offer, and through the priestly prayer of consecration, make them your Flesh and Blood, which was born of the Virgin Mary, hung upon the cross, rose from the dead, and sits at the right hand of Father.

Your body is true food, and your blood is true drink. Renew my heart and mind, in love of the Most Holy Eucharist, and draw all God’s children to your wedding feast.

May the Heart of Jesus, in the Most Blessed Sacrament, be praised, adored, and loved, with grateful affection, at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world, even until the end of time.²

I returned with the dogs and wandered around the grounds, taking in the constant flow of parishioners in and out of the various buildings. Seems that there is always something going on at St. Mary’s. (Btw, it’s either “St. Mary” or “St. Mary’s,” which are used interchangeably in the parish bulletin.)

Father Dansereau kindly agreed to meet us after the Saturday morning Mass to take a celebration photo of the completion of our pilgrimage dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. I left the dogs in the truck parked out back, of course, and I met Father Dansereau out front. Terry was inside praying, from which, startled but happy, she was interrupted by Father’s tap on the shoulder and huge smile. He led us to the Mary grotto out front, where, after a prayer, a blessing, and thanks for our Mary pilgrimage, we took a few photos:

Father showed me around the complex, explaining to my bewilderment the various buildings and parts. He also pointed out how certain neighbors are not yet reconciled to the church’s presence, which, as I will elaborate on below, is perfectly consistent with the Catholic experience in the state — and which makes us all stronger for it. The Campus is about two residential blocks, with multiple buildings and houses dedicated to a variety of uses. For the season, a garden area is stocked with Christmas trees. I failed to ask what it’s used for the rest of the year, although I’m guessing, or hoping, it’s for parish and/or priestly barbeques. Here from my walk around the grounds:

After we bade Father Kevin a happy goodbye, and looking forward to his presiding Advent Vigil Mass that evening, we snuck back into the church to look around:

Afterwards, we found ourselves in the narthex, awestruck before a poster of Our Lady of Guadalupe. A lovely woman looked at it with us, and we vigorously explained to her all the elements of the Tilma image, with Terry esspecially pointing out the flower on her womb that to the Aztec meant she was pregnant. Our happy friend in turn shared with us her First Saturdays Devotional as per here:

After stopping by Freddy Donuts, most conveniently located along William Street down from St. Mary’s, we headed back to the cabin. Terry spent the rest of the morning relaxing and catching up on missed work from our trips, while I set off to explore the Battle of Fredericksburg National Park site, as well as Chatham Manor, just across the street from our cabin. I’ll discuss both later in this post. We spent a lovely rest of the day at the cabin reflecting on our Mary-church pilgrimages.

It’s been a great honor for us to visit and meet the priests, parishioners, churches and history across this wonderful Diocese. We can’t thank Bishop Burbidge enough for the call for this celebration. We feel blessed and edified — a word too easily dropped, but which really describes how we feel for the graces the Lord has given us on this journey.

Turns out that this first Saturday of December is a big deal in Fredericksburg, with the Christmas Parade. I figured it out when I tried to buy lunch at a BBQ restaurant I had seen earlier along the river, but street parking was closed and all the private lots were full. Back to our cabin, I found cars parked on the grass across from us, as people left their cars there to walk across the river to the parade.

Looking out from a little second floor reading room of the cabin, I watched as a car tried to park on the incline between our street and the highway above us. “Perfect!,” I thought, as the back wheels raised on a bump that leveled with the front. Then, “Oh no!,” as the driver tried to pull up a touch further, bashing both front and read ends into the ground as the back wheels fell down the bump. The poor thing panicked and backed out, which pulled the panels outward now, making it worse. I went out to see what I could do, and as I approached the driver, a woman with her daughter, said rather plaintively, “Sir, can you help us?”

A little muscle grease and encouragement from her rather positive-minded daughter who calmed her mother’s panic, assuring her it’d be okay, the panels were back in place, sort of, and enough to leave it be. I wished them well, then whispered to the daughter, to her amusement, that she’d one day make either a brilliant auto mechanic or psychiatrist, or both.

Given the downtown closures for the parade, and having learned about difficulty parking at St. Mary’s, we left early enough for the 7:00 Vigil Mass. We were thrilled to start our New Year with another Mary-church visit and heading into whatever is next.

Father Dansereau presided in full Advent purple, upon which he thoughtfully built the entire Mass, from his purple robe to the purple advent candles and, along the way, to the purple Converses his high school basketball team had to use during Advent. He admitted it didn’t help the team much, but it reminded them of the purpose of Advent and to always run toward God.

Father opened mass by wishing us a “Blessed New Year!” He explained that on this first day of Advent, “purple” means penitence and joyful preparation for the coming of Christ. As Advent starts, we are waiting and watching, so we should turn to the lessons and words of scripture. The prophet Isaiah prayed for restoration of the people of Israel with God, which, Father pointed out, is why St. Paul frequently turns to Isaiah for guidance in our exile on earth, waiting impatiently for reunion with God– “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!” (Isa 63:19) In our impatience and trials, Father counseled, we can learn from the Blessed Mother who awaited in expectant hope, patiently carrying in her womb for nine months the promise of Christ. Marvelous to think about! Above all, Father explained, we have the words of Jesus himself, such as in the day’s Reading from Mark, to be on the watch! to be spiritually alert and prepared. Advent, he said, is the time to “quiet down and enter these twenty three days of preparation spiritually for the Coming of Christ.”

Before closing Mass, Father blessed the Advent candles, and lit the first one. Father Dansereau, we know from our time with him at St. Thomas More, loves a good ceremonial act, and it made us both very happy to be there with him for this Mass. Terry and I both commented to each other afterwards on the demeanor of the altar servers, two boys and a girl, which really impressed us, especially that of the young lady whose every movement was purposeful and deliberate. It was a beautiful and fulfilling Mass, and well-attended. I don’t recall it, but I see from the Pastor’s newsletter that the Marian Antiphon changed to Alma Redemptoris Mater, which even pastor Father Mosimann said he was just getting down as Advent commenced. The newsletter offers a link to a wonderful Gregorian chant rendition.

We always enjoyed Father Dansereau’s homilies, as he invariably touches upon all the Readings (please, dear clerics, Mother Church gives the Readings to us for a reason!), and weaving them into his larger points, even if, at first, seemingly unrelated. A similar Advent message, I know, came that day from pulpits across the world, but I am guessing this was the only one to include a thought on purple basketball shoes. Father Dansereau always provokes a new thought or question, and he used to make fun of me for always coming out of Mass full of theological questions, which he would patiently answer for me outside the Cathedral, even on a cold February morning. He didn’t have time for my questions after this Mass, but had he done so I would have jumped all over St. Paul and Isaiah. (I will save that one for next time, Father!)

Terry and I thank the Lord for every wonderful moment of this journey, and for making this final Mary-named church visit so special.

As does the parish website, most of the historical literature I have found on our Fredericksburg³ church calls it simply, “St. Mary” or “St. Mary’s.” As we prepared our visit, I got to wondering, then, when the “Immaculate Conception” was added to the “St. Mary”? — It was not added, I discovered, as it was so named, as John might say, in the beginning, “Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception.”

That beginning was in 1858 with the laying of the cornerstone in the presence of Bishop John McGill, the third Bishop of Richmond. The literature universally states that Bishop McGill’s 1856 sermon “of great ability and spiritual power”⁴ to believers in Fredericksburg inspired the building of a mission church named for Our Lady. God knows us by our name, so there’s a reason for the name of this parish. And it’s the same reason why Saint Patrick Church of Norfolk, founded in 1791 (predating the Basilica of Saint Mary in Alexandria by four years, and probably the earliest Catholic church in Virginia) was renamed to “Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception” when it was rebuilt under Bishop McGill after a fire in 1858.

As Father Dansereau later explained to me, that reason is Pius IX’s 1854 Ineffabilis Deus, affirming, ex cathedra, as official dogma (to be redundant, as “dogma” essentially means “official”) the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The decree is deemed by secular academics as merely a response to popular demands following Saint Catherine Labouré and the “Immaculate Medal”, which had created a worldwide sensation, or as a political move to shore up support for the Pope during challenging and turbulent times.⁵

Silly academics — the Pope may have been responding to the people, but the people were responding to the Perfect Virgin, to whom the Pope more importantly responded. As for politics, whatever: Our Lady cares about souls, not politics, and God always finds goodness in chaos. Whatever the motive, Pius IX more importantly both settled a longstanding theological debate — a perfectly normal step in the accumulation of the Church’s Magisterium — and affirmed the people’s own acclamation. He wrote:

Let all the children of the Catholic Church, who are so very dear to us, hear these words of ours. With a still more ardent zeal for piety, religion and love, let them continue to venerate, invoke and pray to the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, conceived without original sin. Let them fly with utter confidence to this most sweet Mother of mercy and grace in all dangers, difficulties, needs, doubts and fears.⁶

And so Catholics of Virginia, under the guidance of Bishop McGill, flew “with utter confidence” to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception — as did Catholics across the country. A quick count from the Metropolitan Catholic Almanac of 1851 shows about ten churches or chapels in America named for the Immaculate Conception; the 1861 Almanac shows over one hundred (I didn’t conduct a full count). That’s not just a lot of new St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception churches, that’s a lot of new churches! Something was going on.

Here for the listing of St. Mary’s of Fredericksburg:

Fredericksburg, Spottsylvania Co., St. Mary’s of the Immaculate Conception, visited every third Sunday from Richmond. New brick church. Alexandria, St. Mary’s, Rev. P. P. Kroes, S.J. [This church was by rescript of 15th August, 1858, transferred to the Diocese of Richmond, at the request of the last Provincial Council of Baltimore.]⁷

The theological doctrine was long debated between Franciscans and Dominicans, and became so divisive that in 1481, and again in 1483, Sixtus IV forbade preaching for or against the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Yet, following Pius IX’s declaration, overnight, the contrary Dominicans became ardent lovers of Our Lady so immaculately conceived. And the moment of the pronouncement was large enough for Pius IX to summon to Rome bishops from around the world, including one John McGill of Richmond, Virginia. Make that December 1854 — add in travel time by sea, and it’s within a year of his electrifying speech at Fredericksburg. Mary of the Immaculate Conception was on his mind when he visited the little town along the Rappahannock.

Pius IX’s pronouncement of 1854 didn’t come from nowhere, so let’s make sense of it with a little timeline:

Pius IX: a Pope for the times

Well, you won’t hear that in your modern texts, which treat Pius IX as a promising liberal reformer who quickly dissolved into the reactionary elixir of tradition, constancy and defiance of progress. As an antidote, I recommend this wonderful biography, Life of Pius IX and the Great Events in the History of the Church During his Pontificate, by John Gilmary Shea (1877).¹²

Amidst the European secular breakdown, Pius IX found a particular affinity for the American Church. He recognized its growing importance and guided it closely. Obviously, Our Lady of Guadalupe’s conversion of millions of Amerindians is altogether different, but we must recognize that Pius IX oversaw the rise of the American Catholic Church from around two million Catholics in 1846 to nearly seven million by the end of his papacy in 1878. We can’t credit Pius IX for it, but we can confidently state that he guided it, nurtured it, and affirmed it. That’s a lot of people, and, as we shall see, they weren’t just immigrants.

One wonders, then, if, as in Guadalupe, the Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of the United States, wasn’t at work here.¹³

Given the murderous 20th century, and with our own Civil War so large in our national memory, it is easy to overlook the disruptive and unsettled world, and not just in Europe, of the 19th century. China underwent one of the worst civil wars in its long history, the Taiping Rebellion, blandly known as a “syncretic movement,” a bizarre combination of Confucianism, Daoism, socialism, and a a vaguely Christian deism, that ended with 20-30 million dead (ever hear of that one?). Europe imploded multiple times, and along with Russian and British expansion, Austrian, Spanish and Ottoman declines, German and Italian nationalism, the world upended as much as, or, at least in prefigurement of, the 20th century. Protestant animosity for the Church didn’t end with the Thirty Years War; it carried on well into the 19th century, especially in Germany, sparking a diaspora. Amidst it all, Pius IX unwillingly oversaw the removal of the Vatican as a governing state — to becoming even stronger as a governing church.

We modern Americans have a vague sense for the historical territorial and secular rule of the papacy and its entanglement with European powers. Did you know about, for example, the 1849 “Roman Republic,” which was declared following the assassination of the papal Minister of Justice and subsequent street protests that forced Pius IX to flee to Gaeta (south of Rome), with Giuseppe Garibaldi himself leading an army of several thousand followers to take control? Pius was restored with Spanish and French, principally, help, later that year.

Then, after two decades of European gamesmanship resulting in its disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870, France pulled its troops from the Papal States, removing the remaining effective resistance to the King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, who had declared himself ruler of the first unified Italy since the end of the Roman epoch. Pius IX ordered his remaining forces to put up a token resistance in order to deny his consent to the kingdom, defiantly leaving the papacy to operate as the “Prisoner in the Vatican” until the 1929 Lateran Treaty that settled Vatican independence and, ultimately, international recognition as an autonomous state. The treaty was named for the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, the papal seat, which lay outside Vatican City and which popes from Pius IX to Pius XI refused to visit by way of protest of their subjugation to the Italian state.

American Catholics, many of whom had escaped religious oppression only to find resistance, if not outright discrimination, again in the United States, needed Pius’ steady hand, which the American bishops repaid in kind with tremendous support of his leadership, irrespective of his appointments of many of them (which would have happened whoever was in charge, as leadership in the States was derived from a narrow band). As did several other important bishops, but not all, especially at first,, Bishop McGill endorsed the doctrine of Infallibility of the Pope, and the First Vatican Council of 1869, led by Archbishop James Frederick Wood of Philadelphia, was well attended by American bishops, marking acceptance of their importance to the universal Church. The American Church was a steadfast ally and bulwark for the Pope.

Research for this post has raised in my view Pius IX’s importance to that of Saint Pope Pius X, long a hero of mine for his stance against “modernism.” I did not know of Pius’s “Syllable of Errors,” which took on the Enlightenment and socialism. And, guess what, the Holy See issued the document under the letter, Quanta cura (“With great care”), which was released — ten years after to the day of Ineffabilis Deus, yep — on December 8 of 1864. I urge you to review the “Syllable of Errors” as Pius saw it in 1864, and see how little has changed since, even as regards his assertions of temporal powers. While he may have reluctantly overseen the dismantling of the Papal States, by maintaining Papal claims on that territory, Pius IX saved the Church from submission to a secular power, and in doing so enormously enhanced the Vatican’s ecclesiastical powers.

Your basic U.S. History course will run quickly through the 1850s “American Party,” a xenophobic, anti-immigrant and vehemently anti-Catholic political movement known more generally as the “Know Nothings,” as the party arose from secret societies that required members to say “I know nothing” to inquiries. (Parallels to any “America First” movement of today are incoherent.¹⁴) While a rush of Irish and German immigration sparked the hysteria, prior Irish and German immigration didn’t bother these sensitive souls, as the incoming then were largely Protestant. We all know the Great Irish Famine, starting 1845, but few know about the German Protestant nationalism¹⁵ of the same period that pushed large numbers of German Catholics to the United States.¹⁶ By 1860 there were 1.6 million Irish-born residents in the U.S. and about 1.2 million German-born. This sudden influx of immigrants frightened Protestant America not for their entrance but for their Catholicism.

The Know Nothings started in 1850 in New York City as a secret society, the “Order of the Star Spangled Banner.” Using Masonic techniques of wigwams and arcane rituals, the movement had spread across the country, including, to the South.¹⁷ Up to that time, the nativist movement’s public expressions consisted of disconnected outbursts, such as public Catholic Bible burnings (oh, the Deuterocanonical books!), street demonstrations and riots.¹⁸ In a “nativist outburst”, in 1844, led mostly by Scotch-Irish protestants, many of whom were first or second generation immigrants themselves, Catholic churches were burned in Philadelphia.¹⁹ It was the collapse of the national Whig party that opened the opportunity for formal, outward organization of the Know Nothings in the “American Party,” especially over Southern anger at the failure of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act to limit voting in to American citizens, which was seen by them as an obstacle to the expansion of slavery in the territories. Once adopted by political organs, so, too, went the press, which in those days was directly partisan. Into the mid-1850s, we see the anti-Catholic uproar expressed such as this from a Richmond newspaper editorial:

Bishop McGill came into the Richmond Diocese in 1850 at the rise of the anti-Catholic furor, which Richmond politics came to fully embrace. But for their anti-slavery northern counterparts, Virginia Whigs and Democrats would have aligned entirely with the Know Nothings (“American Party”) and their principles. The 1855 Virginia gubernatorial election was narrowly won by a former Whig candidate, Henry Wise, running as a Democrat, whose most salient defense against Know-Nothingism, which had infected both parties, was that there were too few Catholics in the state to worry about, and — get this — you Know Nothings with your religious intolerance are acting like Catholics, anyway.²² Know Nothing candidates won various municipal elections, including in Fredericksburg. But in the end, Wise fell back on slavery to fend off the Know Nothing ascendency by accusing them of being abolitionists, as well as to publicize the Know Nothing gubernatorial candidate’s once-stated (and valid, btw) position that the institution of slavery led to economic stagnation. The race caught national attention and generated the largest voter turnout in any prior Virginia election, with Wise winning by only 10,000 votes out of 156,488.²³

So that you know the extent of the Know Nothing freakout, consider the case of the Washington Monument. In 1854, Pius IX sent a memorial stone to be installed in the building dedicated to the great George Washington. Countries and leaders across the world did the same, such as the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who sent a stone inscribed with his good will, along with $30,000 in cash. I, the Know Nothings seized the moment of outrage at “Papal” interference, invaded the construction site, tied up the watchman, poisoned his dog, seized the “Pope’s Stone,” and broke it into pieces and threw it into the Potomac River.²⁴ If you’ve ever wondered why the coloration of the Monument changes about a third up, here’s why: anti-Catholicism.

The parish of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception at Fredericksburg, Virginia, exists as result of a persistence of the faith in hidden Masses at private homes and of brave evangelizers who set that cornerstone for this incredibly vibrant Diocese amidst tremendous anti-Catholic agitation from the colonial period through to the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s, amidst which Bishop McGill arrived to Fredericksburg and, despite it, inspired the church’s enormous growth.

History of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception church

Note: the St. Mary website has excellent articles documenting parish history, including “150 Years of History,” so I will address only what I believe usefully draws from or adds to that excellent review.

At the 150th anniversary of the Fredericksburg parish Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception, Bishop Loverde said, “The seeds of faith that were planted by 150 immigrant workers who formed our parish in 1858”.²⁵ Eight years before then, when Bishop McGill was consecrated Bishop of the Richmond Diocese, he presided over all of eight priests and ten churches,²⁶ a modest increase from the six priests and eight churches as of 1841 (give or take the two priests and churches moved under the new Diocese of Wheeling in 1850).²⁷ So humble as that may seem, it was a long way from neat total banishment of Catholicism in the early colony of Virginia.²⁸

But there has to be more. To put the question differently,

How come we can’t find a parking space at a Saturday morning Mass at this parish?

Then, of course, came the Civil War, which put a halt to new institutions. Presiding over the Diocese of Richmond during the war could not have been easy. His biographer notes,

“though his sympathies were with his own flock, his charity was not confined to them: the federal officers and soldiers taken prisoners and held in the Libby prison were objects of his especial attention, and many acts of generosity did he perform for them.”³¹

During the War, Catholics in the South were cut off from the larger dioceses in the North — and their resources, including Bibles. Bishop McGill sustain MI ed Church teachings with his own writings, including his, “The Creed of Catholics,” which served as a catechism for Virginia Catholics.

I can best sum up Bishop McGill’s role in making this parish and the entire Richmond Diocese through what it has become through my favorite moment in the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Our Lady says to Juan Diego,

But it is very necessary that you personally go and plead, that my wish may, become a reality, that it may be carried out through your intercession.³²

Bishop McGill was necessary.

St. Mary’s at Frederick remained a mission church until 1871, even as the Diocese had expanded enormously, as had the Catholic population. But the numbers don’t add up, especially given the Civil War, which halted all immigration and, sadly, cut the population. What does add up is that there were fervent, needing believers and a strong Church Militant that drove Church presence in Fredericksburg and beyond. The biography of Bishop McGill notes,

A Catholic population emigrating from one part of the word to another occasions a loss to the Church… But to gain souls to the Church from among non-believers is a truly apostolic work. Such was Bishop McGill’s vocation in Virginia.³³

As discussed in my post on Our Lady of the Valley, establishment of Catholic churches in anti-Catholic Virginia followed specific historical and/or migration events, such as the need for French priests to minister to French troops at the Battle of Yorktown³⁴, port and railroad construction on the coast and in the Shenandoah. But on review of the Saint Mary’s “Memories” oral history lies the larger answer to my question, one I should have figured out from my own conversion story: these Catholics came from everywhere, including from within, of which I can personally attest. A quick review of the oral histories counts origins of German-Swiss (1903), Irish (1948), Slavic (1921), Netherlands (1952), and England (1944).

I see everywhere that “Irish railroad workers” provided the impetus for formation of many a Virginia Catholic church, but the causality is incomplete, and not just because it ignores German Catholic immigration. While migration follows chains and intermarriage expands and integrates communities, I’m getting the sense that conversions had a significant impact upon Catholic growth in Virginia. Bishop McGill’s biographer anecdotally shows that conversions drove Church expansion under the Bishop and, we can imagine, in no small part due to the Bishop’s own vigorous evangelism:

His episcopal administration was a zealous and laborious one. The Church of Virginia had few churches, few priests and few resources. The tide of immigration did not set in that direction, and hence the Catholic population did not increase rapidly. But so far as it did increase, the increase was almost entirely a pure gain to the Church. It was not a transfer of Catholics from Europe to America, with a large percentage of loss to the Church. Some of the most intellectual citizens of the South sought truth and peace in the bosom of the Church under his lucid instructions. A Catholic population emigrating from one part of the world to another occasions a loss to the Church, as by the statistics has been ascertained. But to gain souls to the Church from among non-believers is a truly apostolic work. Such was Bishop McGill’s vocation in Virginia.³⁵

As an 1876 study of the American Catholic Church shows from a survey of bishops,

“Fourteen per cent, of those I have confirmed,” writes Dr. Gibbons, of Richmond, ” since I came to this diocese are converts. … In North Carolina, about thirty-five per cent, of those I have confirmed are converts.” We have been told of a parish in North Carolina, the members of which are all converts. In five years, the late Archbishop Spalding, of Baltimore, confirmed twenty-two thousand two hundred and nine, of whom two thousand seven hundred and fifty-two were converts. The more Catholicity becomes known, the greater will be the number of conversions; indeed, from this source alone there is much to be hoped.³⁶

McGill’s biographer’s enthusiasm aside, that fourteen percent of confirmations as conversions under his successor represents a significant absolute gain in the Catholic population, as the rest of the confirmations would have been from the children of existing Catholic families who were already confirmed. If so, conversions were — and likely are yet — a tremendous driver of Catholic growth. And we can thank Bishop McGill for it.

I leave this study satisfied of the organic and designed growth of the Virginia Church starting under Bishop McGill.

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So back to my question about the parking lot at today’s Saint Mary of Immaculate Conception:

We left our cabin to go home Sunday morning, and on the way out we drove by the church so that Terry could say a prayer in the Mary Grotto out front. We came by well before the 11am Mass, but the lot was already full, cars had lined the side streets, and people streamed onto the premises by foot. Whatever has gone on there, whatever the need for more parking, something is going right, and it’s a beautiful, blessed thing to behold.

From the quick view of our little visit, it is clear that the parish has a stream of activities, both parochial and social. After Saturday Mass, there was a class going on in one building, another class gathering in another. Christmas trees were being sold, people were gathering to chat, and, as with our friend we met in the narthex, people just stick around. It’s truly beautiful and exemplary.

Best of all, Father Dansereau tells me that there are more than 75 adult RCIA candidates this season. Wow. Something’s going right at St. Mary’s! (or is it Marys?)

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We had a marvelous trip, and, best of all, Fredericksburg is but a traffic jam away from Arlington, and without one, within an hour, at least the way I drive. Indeed, Saint Mary of Our Immaculate Conception is just down the street. We heartily recommend you to visit.

Terry’s smile here, as we headed out says it all:

– Michael

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Battle of Fredericksburg

I did make it to Chatham Manor, which is literally across the street from our cabin.

Built by a member of the “First Families of Virginia”, William Fitzhugh, the manor is now the headquarters for the National Park Service Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (nice), also used, I discovered for weddings. It’s a fabulous property that overlooks Fredericksburg across the Rappahannock. It was taken as headquarters for Union forces that approached Fredericksburg with hopes to annihilate the Southern Rebellion in 1862. Seriously, if you were about to launch an attack on an incredibly well fortified enemy who commanded heights over your field of approach, wouldn’t you want to hang out the night before at this place? General Burnside did. And so did the following days many of the 12,600 Union casualties from the next day who were brought back for care by army doctors and volunteers, including Walt Whitman and Clara Barton. A year later, another 1,000 wounded soldiers were evacuated to Chatham Manor following General Hooker’s horrid defeat to Lee at Chancellorsville.

Today, they have weddings, a bridal photo shoot of one you can see if you zoom in to the left in the first photo here. I posed the dogs in front of the mansion, as it wouldn’t be complete without a couple Cavalier King Charles Spaniels running around.

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On our way in to Fredericksburg on Friday afternoon, we passed by the Wilderness Battlefield. It’s been a while since I immersed myself in Civil War history, and I honestly forgot much about the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg itself, as it was one of the early battles that taught both sides just how brutal a war this would be.

The Wilderness battle came two years later. Historians call it a stalemate, but I’ve always seen it as a Confederate victory, despite a near disaster with the Third Corps, saved, as usual, by General Longstreet, Lee’s “Old War Horse.” It was a crazy battle. The forest made movement difficult, negating effectiveness of both calvary and artillery. With limited visibility and winds that carried battle noise in different directions, troops were isolated and blind, leading to friendly fire incidents, including one that took out of action General Longstreet (not far from where Stonewall Jackson was killed by friendly fire in 1863). His removal from the field caused confusion and delay in the Southern attack, which, had it gone forward as planned, may have broken the Union lines and led to a rout. As happened, the delay allowed the Northern army to regroup and withstand the attack.

Overall, Lee won by not losing, but as with Gettysburg, he was unable to break the Northern Army. Worse for him, this time he faced a new Union General, U.S. Grant. Grant had the military qualities that a Ceasar, Napoleon or Frederick the Great admired: tenacity and luck. More than once, Grant was saved by last minute replacements, and, his nickname, “Unconditional Surrender” was well-earned: he never gave up. (See the Vicksburg campaign for his hold on strategy when others around him, including Sherman, saw only failed tactics.) After the battle, the weary Northern troops, used to the revolving door of Commanding Generals, were given the order to muster out. As they started to move, they realized they were moving south and not north; that is, they were advancing, not retreating. Cheers broke out across the entire Army of the Potomac, from one unit to the next.

It must have been bittersweet for any survivors of the first Battle of Fredericksburg there at Wilderness to have been back to the area, get schooled by Lee once again, then realize, for the first time, two years later, that it would be different now — and only to be thrown into the most murderous battles yet. And, I am just as sure the hold at the Wilderness was bittersweet for the Confederate soldiers who had so cleanly routed other Northern Armies, but now realized they’d just keep coming back at them.

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The Park Service said I could bring a dog through so long as I didn’t enter the cemetery (I watched a guy walk his pit bull right up the hill and through it). MacDuff and I climbed the hill and wandered to the ridge, which overlooks the city. There, it all starts to make sense. Later that day, when I stood on Chatham Manor and looked over the city, from where the Northern approach commenced, and now, looking back in that direction from the Southern position, well, no wonder the park site is so small — this battle took place in the city. The Union army, under the hapless General Burnside, had moved over the river and loaded the lower city with troops and artillery, and began lobbing shells at the Confederates who had formed a line along a western ridge above the city — which includes St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception church.

Nearly directly in the line of the Union advance, St. Mary’s church was used as a hospital and storehouse, as the city around her was beaten by artillery shells. She again served as a hospital when the war returned to the area in 1864. A priest recollected,

 “Floors and walls…were literally bespattered with the blood of the wounded and dying soldiers brought there for hospital treatment.”³⁹

Already shorn of the delusion of a quick war, the Battle of Fredericksburg destroyed Union confidence that Antietam had falsely created, and left Lincoln’s administration in a crisis, as, despite successes elsewhere, he continued to sort through commanding Generals for his Army of the Potomac. From Lee’s perspective, it was simply, and grimly, onward.

Father Dansereau tells me he walks the battlefields and prays for the souls. It brings to my mind what I can only hope was the lesson from Jesus to always be prepared,

At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices.

He said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?

By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent you will all perish as they did!

Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?

By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”

Luke, CHAPTER 13 | USCCB

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Some photos of the Battle of Fredericksburg National Park

“My soul rejoices in the Lord”

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Notes