St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Who they were

Elizabeth Bayley Seton was New York Episcopalian society: a doctor's daughter, a merchant's wife, five children, charity boards, the whole gilded round. The round collapsed in sequence. Bankruptcy first, and then the voyage to Italy for her husband William's health that ended with the family locked in a stone quarantine lazaretto at Livorno, where she nursed him on the cold floor and he died.

The Catholic Filicchi family who sheltered the widow showed her their faith, above all the Real Presence, and her conversion back home in 1805 cost precisely what she knew it would: her society, her income, most of her family's regard, and years of documented hostility from her late husband's relations. Invited to Baltimore, she founded in 1809 at Emmitsburg the Sisters of Charity, the first American religious community, and the school from which the parochial system in the United States traditionally dates its start. St. John Neumann built that system on her foundation. She buried two of her own daughters at Emmitsburg before dying at forty six, and was canonized in 1975, the first saint born in what became the United States.

Why people turn to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Widows rebuilding with children, which was her exact road. Converts who paid in family and friends, with St. John Henry Newman and St. Margaret Clitherow. Every Catholic school family in the United States, with St. John Neumann and St. Katharine Drexel. And the in law patronage is real, and quietly the most searched thing about her.

How to ask their intercession

For a widow with children, by name. And for the convert counting the cost, her own counsel to herself applies: begin, and the strength arrives with the step rather than before it.