St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and the Birth of the American Church

Celebrations of the semiquincentennial for American Catholics raise the question of how the Church in America has come to be what it is. That story is usually told in terms of great, abstract historical forces like mass immigration, interethnic tensions and assimilation, industrialism, modernism, and so forth. But hiding inside those forces—resisting them, directing them, ameliorating their effects—were remarkable men and women who contributed in substantial ways to the building of the American Catholic Church. 

Some were powerful bishops. Some were influential thinkers. Some were talented organizers. And some were saints. Thirteen people who were born or died within the borders of the contemporary United States have been canonized by the Church. The list comprises Sts. Isaac Jogues (1607–1646), René Goupil (1608–1642), Jean de Lalande (d. 1646), Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), Junípero Serra (1713–1784), Rose Philippine Duchesne (1769–1852), Theodora Guerín (1798–1856), John Neumann (1811–1860), Marianne Cope (1838–1918), Damien of Molokai (1840–1889), Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917), and Katharine Drexel (1858–1955). It also includes a person who is closely associated with the American revolutionary period and its aftermath, a person who planted and watered the seeds of Catholic education and female religious life in the United States: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821), the daughter, somewhat ironically, of Tories.

One-sentence descriptions of St. Elizabeth Seton usually say that she founded the American parochial school system and first Catholic religious order. She did do those things (arguably), and it is easy to understand their importance for the growth of Catholicism in America. 

But that is not why Elizabeth Seton is a saint. Sustained by her love of the Eucharist, she is a saint because  she attained a deep and radiant love of God and neighbor even though (or perhaps because) she lost almost everything: a dozen close friends and family members, a financial fortune, social status, the affection and support of those who had once cared for her, and finally her own health. For American Catholics, Elizabeth Seton’s faith- and hope-filled response to these tragedies may be the most important aspect of her legacy, for it provided both a marker of her sanctity and spiritual fuel for institutions that had a powerful influence on American life. As we reflect on the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, it is an apt time to reflect on her story as an example of the courage, sacrifices, and faithfulness that built the early American Church.

Elizabeth Bayley was born on August 28, 1774, to a family of upper-class, nominally Episcopalian WASPs. Her father, Richard, was a physician, her stepmother a Barclay and a Roosevelt. When Elizabeth married, in 1794, it was to William Seton Jr., a Scottish laird and shipping magnate. One does not associate Barclays, Roosevelts, physicians, or magnates with poverty, and rightly so. The Bayleys, and especially the Setons, were people of means.

Even so, Elizabeth’s life was never easy. She was two years old when her young mother died. Two years later, her baby sister went to the grave. As the years went by, tuberculosis and the dreaded yellow fever struck down others in Elizabeth’s orbit. Then as now, there was only so much the rich could do to escape the ills of the flesh.

The chilliness of Elizabeth’s stepmother, Charlotte, did not help matters. Once she and Richard started having children of her own, Elizabeth was relegated to second-class status. She responded by desperately trying to connect with her workaholic and rather distant father—running out to the street, for example, to kiss him when he passed by on his medical rounds. Eventually, Richard became the supervisor of a quarantine facility on Staten Island. Here he evaluated passengers who arrived on the overcrowded ships that sailed daily into the city’s harbor. As many of the immigrants stuffed into these crafts arrived either dead or riddled with communicable disease, Richard’s task took tremendous bravery. Elizabeth’s admiration for him grew. Inevitably, Richard contracted yellow fever himself. He died in 1801, his beloved daughter at his bedside.

Elizabeth was then twenty-six. By that time she was married, and her husband William Seton was already living under death’s shadow. Tuberculosis was known in the family as the “Seton complaint,” and Will was harrowed by an ominous cough. The Seton family’s shipping firm was faring little better than his health. Will had inherited leadership of the business thanks to his father’s death. He had also inherited the responsibility of caring for six of his young siblings. In 1798, Elizabeth became their de facto mother. By 1802, she had had five children of her own and the Seton shipping concern had gone under. Eleven children, husband dying, financially bankrupt—in someone else this dire situation might have caused resentment or despair. In Elizabeth it produced an increased abandonment to Providence. As she wrote in one of her meditations, “Blessed Savior . . . if Thou so ordainest it: welcome, disappointments and poverty; welcome, sickness and pain; welcome, even shame and contempt and calumny! If this be a rough and thorny path, it is the one which Thou hast gone before us.”

In 1803, Will Seton conceived the notion that any hope he had for recovery—both of his health and his financial fortunes—lay in a journey to Italy, where he would benefit from a change of climate and see his old friends and business partners Filippo and Antonio Filicchi. Elizabeth and their eight-year-old daughter Anna accompanied him. The trip was a disaster. Italian port officials, having discovered that yellow fever was raging through New York and that Seton was seriously ill, quarantined the family for weeks in a cold, damp, dungeon-like cell. There a dispirited Will slid toward death. During the short periods when he slept, Elizabeth prayed—long, deep, pleading prayers that came from her depths. Husband and wife read the Bible to one another, and Elizabeth led them through the Episcopal service. Will repented of his former religious indifference and got in the habit of repeating, quietly, “My Father and my God, Thy will be done.” He died on December 27, 1803, soon after the family’s discharge, well prepared by his wife to meet his maker—and under the feverish delusion that a winning lottery ticket in London had wiped out his debts.

In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth Seton’s life took another unexpected turn. The sympathetic Filicchis attempted to distract her from her grief by showing her the sights. The itineraries they created included many splendid churches. The churches led to conversations, the conversations to new thoughts, and in the midst of her pain Elizabeth was soon forced to contend with an existential possibility she had never imagined. 

Elizabeth was deeply dedicated to her Christian faith. She read the Bible and other spiritual works frequently, she was a key member of a women’s benevolence society that served New York’s poor, and she would often go to multiple churches on Sundays when communion was being offered. But those beautiful Italian churches opened new vistas. Faced with the palpable sacredness of their spaces—the shadowy interior, the candles, the richly decorated walls and altars, the paintings, and especially the Tabernacle—Elizabeth seemed to be confronted with something she had always, without knowing it, been looking for. The ardently Catholic Filicchis encouraged, and sometimes gently challenged, Elizabeth to consider the consequences of her discovery. By the time she and Anna returned to New York, Elizabeth Seton stood longingly, if uncertainly, on the precipice of the Catholic Church.

There followed the phase of torturous confusion and hesitation with which most converts are familiar. The truths that had become obvious to her in Italy became less obvious in America. What was clear was that virtually everyone thought her possible conversion to be ill-considered at best. Catholicism was strongly connected in early-American minds not only with political tyranny and intellectual oppression, but also with impoverished, superstitious immigrants—“dirty, filthy, red-faced” kinds of people, in the words of Elizabeth’s sister Mary. Elizabeth Seton could rise above that kind of prejudice, but the pleadings and counterarguments of her family and friends kept her from taking the final step. It seemed that no matter how much she prayed and read, doubts and hesitations remained. She cried, lost weight, and tried the patience of those around her. “A fear arises in my mind that God discovers in her some lurking imperfection,” wrote America’s lone bishop, John Carroll, to whom Elizabeth’s friends had applied for advice, “and defers the final grace of her conversion till her soul be entirely purified of its irregular attachments.”

The purification Carroll thought Elizabeth required finally came in early 1805, during the Sunday service at St. George’s Episcopal Church. That morning Elizabeth had declared to God that she would “trudge on in the path You suffered me to be born in” until he showed her “the way You mean me to walk.” God acted quickly. During the service’s general absolution, Elizabeth discovered to her surprise that she “had not the least faith” in it. More importantly, she found herself shuddering when she was presented with the communion cup and wafer, knowing that the Episcopal Church did not believe Christ to be really and physically present therein. That wasn’t good enough, she thought, and it would never be good enough. 

That evening, calm entered her soul. “I will go peaceably and firmly to the Catholic Church,” she decided. “May God accept my intention, and pity me.” Elizabeth Seton was received into the Catholic Church on March 14, 1805, at St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street. 

Elizabeth left St. Peter’s with a lightened heart. But from a worldly perspective, her decision brought poverty and pain. Her godmother disinherited her, most of her friends and family cut her off, and many busily spread gossip. Elizabeth took to supporting her family by operating a series of tiny schools and boarding houses. None of these institutions flourished, in part because of anti-Catholic prejudice. She was heartened by the fact that Will’s two youngest sisters, Harriet and Cecilia, remained devoted to her. Indeed, each articulated a desire to become Catholic herself. That brought Elizabeth even more condemnation from the Setons, who did everything they could to keep the girls away from her bad influence. 

As time passed, Elizabeth confided her challenges and hopes to her new Catholic friends, including Bishop Carroll himself. After many conversations, a new plan took shape. There was a crying need for both Catholic schools and religious sisters here in the United States. Why shouldn’t Elizabeth be part of the solution? She and her daughters should move to Baltimore. There, Elizabeth could found a new school and, if all went well, a community of sisters. It took a while for all this to come together, but in June 1808 Elizabeth Seton sailed from New York for a new life.

Elizabeth loved her new situation in Baltimore, but her time there was brief. She was soon given land to establish a new religious community and school in Emmitsburg, Maryland, near the fledgling Mount St. Mary’s College. There she finally found herself at home, spending the remaining eleven-plus years of her life in the frontier community.

The first building that housed Elizabeth Seton’s tiny band of sisters—five of them arrived in June 1809, not all of them yet professed religious—was a two-room log cabin. After a month, they were able to move into the so-called Stone House. This farmhouse was larger than the cabin, but as more members of the community arrived it was soon cramped. Mattresses on the cold floor, a tiny alcove for an altar, a kind of coffee made from carrots, the only water for washing and drinking located hundreds of yards away—life at Mount St. Mary’s was no picnic, but the well-bred, once-wealthy Elizabeth was delighted.

Gradually and steadily more sisters and students came to the mountain. Soon the community came to be called the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph; later the “of St. Joseph” was dropped. From her base at Emmitsburg, Elizabeth eventually sent sisters to form new communities in Philadelphia and New York. By 1821 there were more than fifty Sisters of Charity (there are some 15,000 in the world today, though they do not all claim lineal descent from Mother Seton’s establishment).

The order’s dynamism was apparent, but death remained Elizabeth’s constant companion. Her daughters Anna and Rebekah, and the young sisters-in-law she had essentially raised, Harriett and Cecilia, all joined her at Emmitsburg, and all died of tuberculosis not long thereafter. Elizabeth mourned them as any mother would. She cried out to God and poured out her heart to her spiritual directors. But her faith was now unshakeable. She had come to accept death, even the most tragic, as part of God’s mysterious plan. As the community became more established, she matured in wisdom. Her notes, journals, and letters suggest that she became a true spiritual master. Like most spiritual masters, she experienced times of interior aridity, and, not surprisingly, she placed a strong emphasis on the cost of Heaven. 

All the while, Elizabeth’s own latent tuberculosis made its inexorable advance. For the last several years of her life it was obvious that she hadn’t much time left. Not that she was morose. “Mind not my health,” she told her good friend Fr. Simon Bruté. “Death grins broader in the pot every morning, and I grin at him and I show him his master.” There was nothing to fear, so long as one persevered in faith and obedience. As she counseled the sisters who crowded around her deathbed, “Be children of the Church, be children of the Church!” Elizabeth Seton died on January 4, 1821. She was buried beside her two sisters-in-law, her two daughters, and some fifteen of her religious sisters under the peaceful forest trees. 

At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Catholic Church had but a bare foothold in the British colonies—Maryland only partially excepted. It was hardly more established by the time Elizabeth converted in 1805. As much as anyone else, Elizabeth Seton injected energy into the American Church and inspired its growth. Her fidelity and example left an indelible impact on those clerical friends she encouraged and counselled, and who in turn became her ardent admirers, friends like John Carroll; Fr. John Cheverus, who would become the first bishop of Boston; Fr. John Dubois, who would serve as the third bishop of New York; and Fr. Bruté, who became the first bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, and is now a Servant of God.

 In the generation after her death, Elizabeth’s Sisters of Charity went wherever the Church and nation needed them. By 1829 they were in Cincinnati. They then planted themselves in Massachusetts, New Orleans, Richmond, Alabama, Indiana, even California. They founded the first Catholic hospital in the United States in 1828 and the first Catholic institution for the mentally ill in 1840, and they cared for the wounded in America’s too-frequent wars. Ultimately, they created a model for Catholic service that would ultimately be imitated and adapted by many others. It was a powerful witness, and it was all made possible by the faith and hope of the indomitable Elizabeth Ann Seton, daughter of Tories, daughter of colonial New York, daughter of the Church.