Mudds aim to clear name of doc who treated Lincoln killer

[L Verge]

(10-29-2015 02:53 PM)margotdarby Wrote:  Hello again L Verge. I'm curious to know where you got the suggestion that Catholics were generally not supposed to attend Mass at other parishes. I come from a Catholic family and this information runs counter to everything I know. The Mass was identical in every parish church throughout the Western world (at least).

Not to get stuck on this minor issue, but main point is that I don't think there was anything outré or suspicious about Mudd going to a different church, provided it was RC.

(07-19-2015 04:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Booth comes to Southern Maryland with letters of introduction from Canadian exiles. Those letters direct him to Dr. William Queen and Dr. Samuel Mudd. Dr. Queen gets word to Dr. Mudd to come to a Catholic church outside of his own parish (frowned upon in those days) to meet with Booth - supposedly under the guise of Booth looking to buy land and maybe a horse (the latter of which Dr. Mudd does acquire for him).
*snip*

Are you basing your comments on current practices or Catholic standards of the mid-1800s? Half of my family started out Catholic and were assigned to "home parishes." All followed the same liturgy, but I was led to understand that the diocese made the assignments in order to assure fairly equal congregational attendance and monetary support. I have a friend whose family had belonged to one Catholic parish for generations, but as late as the 1980s was reassigned to another, newer parish.

I worked with James O. Hall when he was researching this facet of the Mudd introduction to Booth. His research determined that St. Mary's Bryantown was his wife's family's (Dyers) home church; but once they were married, they and the children were to go to St. Peter's, the Mudds' home parish. The church records for St. Peter's shows the children being baptised there, and we know that Dr. Mudd saw to Ned Spangler being converted to Catholicism near the time of his death and subsequently buried in the old St. Peter's Cemetery.

Finally, that fateful Sunday in November of 1864, Dr. Mudd went alone to St. Mary's Bryantown - no family with him. In April of 1865, he was going to St. Peter's - where he reported to his first cousin (Union man Dr. George Mudd) that he (Dr. George) might want to mention those strange visitors that Dr. Sam and Frankie tended to on April 15.

One more point: As a young married lady, Mary Surratt and a friend, Christiana Summers, rode horseback in their area to raise funds to establish a Catholic church (St. Ignatius) in the area of what is now Oxon Hill, Maryland. After the Surratts moved to Surrattsville, however, she no longer went to the little church she loved. Their home church became St. Mary's Piscataway - even though only a few miles separated the two churches. If you read her letters, you'll also see that Mr. Surratt likely solved the problem by refusing to take her to Mass period.