One of my father’s favorite spots to visit whenever he returned to his native New York is at the lower tip of Manhattan, a few yards from where one catches the Staten Island Ferry. It doesn’t attract as many travelers as the ferry does, and there are other sights on nearby Wall Street and the Financial District that are a bit more famous. But if he had his druthers, every visit to the Big Apple would include a stop at the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton at Our Lady of the Rosary Church.
Elizabeth Ann Seton wasn’t my father’s favorite saint—he was a Thomas More enthusiast and also carried an unlikely torch for (the uncanonized) Orestes Brownson—but she was close. Nor was he alone in his devotion: There are more than 40 parishes around North America named in her honor, even though she has only officially been a saint for 49 years, a blink of an eye in the timeline of the church. In the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, she is a towering figure.
Born Elizabeth Ann Bayley in 1774, Elizabeth Ann Seton was the daughter of a prominent New York physician and the granddaughter of an Episcopalian priest on her mother’s side. When she was 19, she married William Magee Seton, with whom she had five children. “The young couple lived at fashionable New York addresses close to the homes of Alexander Hamilton and Duncan Phyfe, the famous furniture designer,” Regina Bechtle, S.C., wrote in a 2008 essay in America. “A devout Episcopalian, she thrilled to the preaching of the Rev. John Henry Hobart at Manhattan’s elegant Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel.”
Though the family was initially wealthy (their first home was on Wall Street), they took in William’s six younger siblings after his own father died. Financial misfortunes in his shipping trade followed, forcing William to declare bankruptcy, and the family moved in for a time with Elizabeth’s father.
William suffered from tuberculosis, and on the advice of doctors he and Elizabeth went to Italy to recuperate in a better climate. William died there in 1803. While waiting to return to the United States, Elizabeth became close friends and traveling companions with William’s friend and business partner Filippo Filicchi and his wife, Mary. Both were devout Catholics, and Filippo “had grand dreams of spreading Catholicism in the United States,” former America editor Raymond Schroth, S.J., wrote in a 2018 review of Catherine O’Donnell’s biography, Elizabeth Seton. “He even wrote personally to Bishop John Carroll, suggesting that Providence had sent Elizabeth to Europe so she could re-encounter the divine message, for she was being called to spread the faith.”
Two years later in New York, Elizabeth entered the Catholic Church. It didn’t make her popular with New York society, which was overwhelmingly Protestant at the time. She took on boarders to make ends meet and briefly entertained a plan to move to Catholic Quebec before receiving an intriguing offer from Louis William Valentine DuBourg, S.S., a French Sulpician priest and the president of St. Mary’s College in Baltimore. (He had been president of Georgetown University, but the Jesuits drove him out for financial mismanagement; he would later become the bishop of “Louisiana and the Two Floridas.”) Father DuBourg had plans to make St. Mary’s College an intellectual center for Catholicism, complete with the nation’s first Catholic seminary and other educational institutions.
At his invitation, Seton moved to Emmitsburg, Md., in 1808 and established a school for young Catholic women. Soon after, she established a religious community in Emmitsburg to care for poor children, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph. It was the first congregation of women religious founded in the United States.
Within five years, the sisters put down roots in Philadelphia; three years after that, they began establishing schools and social welfare agencies in New York City. By Elizabeth Ann Seton’s death four years later in 1821, her congregation numbered more than 60 sisters, running schools, shelters and orphanages in three different dioceses. Their schools became the basis for the American parochial school system; their hospitals grew into entire medical systems; their witness and service attracted thousands of young women to join their ranks over the next two centuries.
Three decades after her death, Archbishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Baltimore told his fellow prelates in the United States that “Elizabeth Seton did more for the church in America than all of us bishops together.”
As Stephen Adubato noted in America earlier this year, Seton’s life was never an easy one: She suffered from depression and suicidal ideation, and lost numerous family members and friends to early deaths. She is not called “the patron saint of grief” without reason. Her biographer Catherine O’Donnell noted, “Elizabeth Seton’s contemplation of death was not unique to her; mortality was the soil from which theologies and philosophies had always grown, and in the eighteenth century death remained as common as dirt.”
After examination of her life and writings, Pope Pius XII opened Seton’s cause for sainthood in 1940. She was beatified in 1963 and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1975, becoming the first saint to be born in what is now the United States. At her canonization ceremony in Rome, the pope noted her special place in the American story:
Elizabeth Ann Seton is a saint. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with special joy, and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she sprang forth as the first flower in the calendar of the saints. Elizabeth Ann Seton was wholly American! Rejoice for your glorious daughter. Be proud of her. And know how to preserve her fruitful heritage.
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Swift Witness,” by Jim Richards. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus this summer while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
