PAPERBACK

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If we consider the history of Fredericksburg and its association with George Washington--his boyhood home is across the river, his mother Mary and his sister and brother-in-law Betty and Fielding Lewis lived here, and brother Charles built what would become Rising Sun Tavern--we should think the town an auspicious site for a Catholic church.  Washington, after all, was heroic in his defense of the rights of Roman Catholics.

Fredericksburg was once again a battlefield that May of '63, and our church building again was a refuge for the fallen.  Amputations were common.  Limbs were collected in bushel baskets; corpses were lined up outside to be dealt with humanely as time permitted.  Decades later the grounds behind St. Mary were still filled  with buried relics, medicine bottles, canteens, Minie balls, bits of human bone, all the debris of war.

Each November, beginning with All Saints Day, Saint Mary honors those parishioners who have died throughout the year with their names inscribed on scrolls near our holy family sculpture, as an aid in remembering them and all those who have gone before us in faith.  "We are literally only a prayer away from each other, a breath," says [former] Pastor Don Rooney.  "It is a comforting consideration when we are confronted with the loss of a loved one, that they aren't really gone, but rather 'behind the veil' of hope that surrounds God's faithful people."