St. Mary of Sorrows, Clara Barton, and the Red Cross

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

In 1862, Clara Barton got some of the experience which would lead to her founding the Red Cross. That year, St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax Station, Virginia, became a field hospital during the Second Battle of Bull Run — or Second Manassas, if you’re from the South. The church was only about a year old. The pews were pulled out to be used for beds around the grounds as thousands of wounded and dying were brought to the church grounds, which were only about one quarter mile from the new railroad depot for Fairfax. During the battle, Clara Barton came out to held nurse the wounded. She served admirably, and remained at the work until the last wounded soldier was loaded on a train bound for a hospital in Alexandria or Washington, DC. After the war, all but one of the many dead who were buried in the Church grounds were exhumed and relocated to Arlington National Cemetery. In the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered that new pews be provided for St. Mary, as the one original ones had been destroyed during their usage as hospital beds and firewood.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.0	If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit Americancatholic
0:16.2	History.org slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crow. And I'm Tom Crow. Today we're talking about Clara Barton
0:24.1	and St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax Station, Virginia. This story is similar to one we told
0:30.4	a while back. Yes, we talked previously about St. Francis Xavier Church in Gettysburg,
0:36.2	Pennsylvania, which was used as a field hospital during
0:38.7	the Battle of Gettysburg. In that case, the church was used as a hospital for three months
0:43.7	after the battle and was out of commission as a place of worship for another three months. As we'll
0:49.9	see, St. Mary's wasn't used as a hospital for quite as long, but it did have a similar experience
0:55.4	of being out of commission for a while. Yes, and this is another topic that we both have
1:00.1	personal experience with since we both lived in Northern Virginia for a time. I got to know St. Mary
1:06.3	of Sorrows through their longtime DRE there, as I was also working as a DRE.
1:15.3	And also it was one of those churches that I would stop at on my regular seven churches rotation on Holy Thursday.
1:17.3	And of course, by the DRE, you mean Esther Silva.
1:20.4	Oh, okay.
1:20.8	That wasn't who I was thinking of.
1:22.0	I was thinking of Brian Kissinger, who was their youth minister.
1:23.9	He was the youth minister.
1:24.8	Right.
1:25.1	We have a lot of connections with Brian.
1:27.1	Yeah, we both do.
1:28.4	Actually, so he was the youth minister who started the summer that I spent a summer as a seminarian there back in 2007.
	...

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