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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

August 28, 2024: American Catholics: Elizabeth Ann Seton

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

On three telling stages in the life of the first American Saint.

1)      Conversion: Elizabeth Ann Bayley (1774-1821) was born in New York City to a prominent Episcopalian family who raised her in that church; when she married William Magee Seton at the age of 19, she continued to practice that faith, passing it on to their five children who were born between 1795 and 1802. But when William’s recurring tuberculosis brought the family to Italy and he passed away while in quarantine in the winter of 1803, Elizabeth was taken in by William’s Italian business partners Filippo and Antonio Filicchi and introduced to Catholicism. When she and her children eventually returned to America, Elizabeth gradually completed her conversion, being first received into the Catholic Church at New York’s St. Peter’s Church (one of the few in the city at the time, as anti-Catholic laws had been in effect until just a few years before) in March 1805 and then receiving confirmation from the nation’s only Catholic Bishop, Baltimore’s John Carroll, in 1806.

2)      Good Works: When she was just a child Elizabeth helped her stepmother, Charlotte Amelia Barclay, who was active in social ministry efforts in the city; as a married woman she continued those efforts, including as a founding member of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797). So when Elizabeth found herself in that precise situation, it was no surprise that she only deepened her charitable efforts, including as the founder of a congregation of nuns known as the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s (leading to her nickname of “Mother Seton”). But she also extended her charitable efforts to educational endeavors, with her most lasting legacy likely being the 1809 founding of the Emmitsburg, Maryland Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School. Since Elizabeth’s own religious story was very much one of education, experienced when she was a young widow in need of communal support in a variety of ways, this combination of good works was quite appropriate.

3)      Sanctification: Elizabeth died (like her husband, of tuberculosis) at the tragically young age of 46 in January 1821, but the Sister’s of St. Joseph’s continued to found schools and other communal and charitable organizations over the remainder of the 19th century. Those legacies certainly made Elizabeth worthy of canonization as a Saint, but that process proceeded quite slowly, no doubt due in part to the lack of any American-born Saints. It formally began with her receiving the title Servant of God in 1940, and after a child’s miraculous healing was attributed to prayers to Seton in 1952, she was beatified in March 1963. But sanctification requires at least two miracles, and it was a second such miraculous healing, of a man given hours to life with meningitis in 1963, that cemented her case and led to her September 1975 canonization by Pope Paul VI. It’s hard for me to say how much of that posthumous story really had to do with Elizabeth, but I do value these words of the Pope’s: “All of us say this with special joy and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she sprang forth…Elizabeth Ann Seton was wholly American!”

Next CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

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