[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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