Mother Seton

Fr. Robert I. Bradley, S.J.
From the Jan/Feb 2010 Issue of Lay Witness Magazine

This article originally appeared in the August 1975 newsletter of Catholics United for the Faith.

On September 14, when the Holy Father [Pope Paul VI] proclaims in Rome the canonization of Bl. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the highest authority on earth will have recognized the greatest single achievement to date of the Catholic Church in the United States. If it is true that all the saints have been providentially placed in a given time and country, both in respect to their lives on earth and in respect to their recognition in heaven, this is preeminently true of St. Elizabeth Seton. She is, both by God's grace and the Church's choice, and by her intercession and example, the saint for our country and our time. In this year, which is at once our Holy Year and the beginning of our national Bicentennial, the Catholics of America can well ponder the story of her life and draw from it what God, by the fact of this canonization, evidently intends.

On August 28, 1774, within a week of the convening of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, a daughter was born to Richard and Catherine Bayley, of the Anglican parish of the Holy Trinity in New York City. Both parents sprang from an American "bourgeoisie" of several generations: that first enduring layer of rectitude and industry that built the Colonies and would later dominate the new nation as the "WASPs" of the Eastern seaboard. Having been born almost at the same time as the Untied States, Elizabeth Ann Bayley was too young to remember the Revolution itself. Nor in later life did she ever manifest any particular interest in politics, something she may have inherited from her father, who was the complete physician, so professionally dedicated to medicine that he worked for both the Tories and the Patriots and was respected by both. This preoccupation with his work (he was the first official health officer for New York City) and the early death of his wife in May 1777 left Elizabeth and her older sister practically orphans. They were eventually sent to live with their uncle, Captain William Bayley, who had built a country home for his large family in New Rochelle.

In spite of its somber French Huguenot origins, New Rochelle provided an appropriate setting for Elizabeth's springtime. Here along the shore of Long Island Sound and in the flowering meadows of Westchester County her affectionate, vivacious nature warmed to the goodness of earth and family, and first stirred with a sense of religion--an awareness of God as her Father, mysterious and loving. She was partially French on her father's side (there was even a distant strain of Catholicism in her blood, as also--interestingly--some remote Indian descent), but her Gallic heritage contained no immediate hint of the old religion. Her piety was Protestant: conventional, deeply felt but quiet, complementing her innocence, channeling her energies to love.

The idyllic interlude in New Rochelle ended as she began her teens, back in New York and with no real home in her stepmother's house. However, thanks mainly to her father, who came more and more to appreciate her spirit, she grew through these years into that winsome simplicity that would characterize her adulthood and mark her out in any group as a woman of delicacy and strength. On January 25, 1794, she married William Magee Seton, at twenty-five the handsome, wealthy, good-natured scion of one of the great merchant families of New York. Their new home on Wall Street welcomed the greatest men in the land: President Washington, Secretary Hamilton, Governor Clinton, Chief Justice Jay. The world smiled on this bright young couple, and they responded with a naturalness and spontaneity that befitted their background of family, education, and culture. Soon there were children to round out the happy family: Anna, born May 1795; Will, Jr., in November 1796; and Richard, in July 1798. But the young matron still had time to engage in public charity. She was one of the original members of the so-called Widows' Society of New York, a kind of Protestant St. Vincent de Paul Society, that ministered to the poor and visited their homes. There was goodness here, genuine and serene. But there was a lurking fear, it seems, a fear that God whom she had come to know in her young girlhood would some day come closer to her in jealous love. "My own home at twenty--the world--that and heaven too!" she years later remembered herself saying. But then immediately she added: "My God, if I enjoy this, I lose you."

It was again the end of an idyll, with consequences that young Elizabeth Bayley Seton could never have imagined. Her father-in-law died in 1798, and her adored husband became the head of the firm and of a large household of younger brothers and sisters. The burden of responsibility soon began to tell on his never-robust health. His fortune suffered from several unavoidable reverses in the precarious wartime European trade, and by 1800 the Setons were living under the shadow of bankruptcy.

In these strange new surroundings Elizabeth's soul strove for some surer basis for her faith. She found it through two relationships: with her sister-in-law Rebecca, whom she would always remember as her "soul's sister," and with the new curate at Holy Trinity, the Rev. John Henry Hobart. These contacts purified her of a certain romanticism that had led her into starry-eyed reading of--of all people--Rousseau, disciplining her sensibilities and sharpening her awareness of the invisible world of eternity.

Two more children were born during this darkening time: Catherine, in June 1800; and Rebecca, destined to be her last, in August 1802. But these new lives could be but a partial compensation for what was being lost. Her Will, her "dear Hub," was visibly failing, not only in his noble efforts to meet his creditors but in the more desperate contest for his health. He was dying of consumption before her eyes.

Sometime late in the summer of 1803 the Setons suddenly made a fateful decision. Will would go to Italy, to avail himself of the hospitality of the salubrious Tuscan home of his family's longstanding commercial friends, the Filicchis of Leghorn; and Elizabeth would go with him, along with their eldest daughter, now eight years old. The other children they would leave with friends, since a complete change and rest were imperative for the invalid, and their stay abroad would not be long. On October 2 they sailed from New York, leaving their home on the Battery (the house is still there). On November 18, after stops at the Azores and Gibraltar, they landed at Livorno (or Leghorn) on the Italian coast. However, it was not really a landing, because the Tuscan authorities had declared a quarantine on all travelers from New York on account of the recent epidemic there of yellow fever. So the little family had to spend a whole month in a dank, barracks-like building on the shore, aptly called by the natives the "Lazaretto." It was a month of sheer agony. Elizabeth, laden with grief yet doggedly keeping to her ministrations and prayers, the little girl a faithful companion to her mother, and both feeling only for their poor, wasted husband and father--shivering, sometimes delirious, never far from death. He survived the quarantine, but just barely. In the Filicci home, on the second day after Christmas, Will Seton died, in his thirty-sixth year, a prayer for his family on his dying lips.

Widowed at twenty-nine, her children far away, a penniless guest in a foreign country, bone weary and desolate, what was Elizabeth's future to be? Her former life was forever past. It was the good sense of her host, the brothers Filippo and Antonio Filicchi, to see this and provide some way for her to build a new life. With exquisite discretion they sought to share with her their own greatest treasure: their Catholic faith. She accepted their invitation to visit churches in nearby Pisa and Florence. Perhaps strangely, what moved her most was not the placidity of the Renaissance but the exuberance of the Baroque. The first Catholic church she ever entered was the Annunziata in Florence. Immediately, amid the "sumptuous worship" that her dear Rev. Hobart had once warned her about, she sensed a Presence, the utter fascination of which would never leave her. This, together with her reading--St. Francis de Sales, Bossuet, St. Bernard's prayers to Our Lady--filled the weeks and months that providentially postponed her return voyage to America until April 8, 1804. Mrs. Seton was still a loyal Protestant when she left Italy, but she was a troubled one--troubled by an aching desire to share the faith of these "Romans" who

possess God in the Sacrament, and . . . He remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick! . . . I cried in an agony to God to bless me, if He was there--that my whole soul desired only Him.

Elizabeth's arrival in New York, after a sea voyage of two months and an absence of eight, was a mixture of joy and sorrow: joy at the reunion with her four younger children, her "darlings"; but sorrow at the news that her "soul's sister," Rebecca, was dying. This would be a grievous loss, for only Rebecca really understood her; and this understanding would be especially important now in this new crisis of faith. Forced to accept the charity of friends and relatives, the widowed Elizabeth Seton had at the same time to tell them that she was considering becoming a Catholic. One can only imagine the impact of this news on such people in such a place and time. To become a Catholic (especially for an Episcopalian) was to abandon an entire way of life, and to become identified with the "offscoured, redfaced" riffraff of immigrants huddled around their shabby little church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street. Rebecca's dying promise that "your people are my people, your God, my God" steeled Elizabeth in her piteous prayers for light, her furtive visits to St. Peter's, her wearying dialogues with Rev. Hobart and in one way or another with all the people she ever knew.

God has given me a great deal to do, and I have always [preferred] and hope always to prefer His Will to every wish of my own.

It was with this prayer--and with the Hail Marys that little Anna had taught her brothers and sisters--that Elizabeth slowly but surely reached the safe harbor at last. On March 4, 1805, she was received into the Catholic Church, and on Annunciation Day she made her First Holy Communion. "Now let all go its round--I have received Him!"

In the eyes of almost all her acquaintances, little Mrs. Seton, with her widow's weeds and young brood, was "poor and deluded." Indeed, in her own eyes she must have wondered just what kind of life remained for her. She would have to work for a living, that much she knew. The only thing she could do was, fortunately, the one thing she wanted to do: teach children. She had some experience with this already, with her own children and with the young half-brothers and sisters of her husband. She was essentially a mother, and in a sense this was reinforced by her widowhood. She seems never to have considered the prospect of remarriage. All the resources of her heart, then, were reserved for her "darlings" --reserved for them, that is, only after and within the one new and totally consuming love of her life: the dear God and Savior whom she now held within her, in some way as the Mother of God once held Him.

Through the years 1805 to 1807 she tried to secure, by a kind of partnership in two successive small academies, both her livelihood and her children's education. But she found it was not only precarious but pointless. Precarious, for the suspicion and outright hostility caused by her conversation kept away the only possible clientele who could pay tuition. And pointless, for the teaching of the usual three R's with music and sewing on the side was now hardly her idea of what real education should be. Without religion there was no ultimate, enduring meaning to anything else. She had said, toward the end of 1805, to her still generous and faithful friend, Antonio Filicchi, "They do not know what to do with me, but God does; and when His blessed time is come, we shall know."

That "blessed time" was long in coming, but Elizabeth had by now well learned the schooling of the Cross. How often she looked upon and loved the image of the Crucified above the altar at St. Peter's (where it still is today). How it epitomized the silence, the darkness, the longing of her soul. Not that she had no spiritual counsel, no one in whom she could confide. Already her character and situation had attracted the notice of several excellent priests: Fr. John Cheverus of Boston, Fr. William Dubourg of Baltimore, Fr. Michael Hurley, lately of Philadelphia and now at St. Peter's. They all seemed to sense something indefinably extraordinary in this young widow.

But it was only the conjunction of two events that finally made God's will clear to her. The first was the definitive rejection of her by practically all her relatives and former friends. They blamed her for the conversion to Catholicism of younger sisters-in-law, Cecilia and Harriet Seton. This meant that Elizabeth could never hope to work effectively in New York. She must leave the city where she had lived almost her whole life. But where should she go? Here the second event pointed the way. To provide proper education for her two sons and to remove them from the Protestant influences on their relatives, Elizabeth had already sent them to Baltimore, where Bishop John Carroll promptly enrolled them in the college he had recently founded at Georgetown near the Federal City of Washington. Baltimore thus loomed larger in her consciousness than the other proposed alternative: Montreal.

Thus was slowly revealed the divine providence that brought Elizabeth Seton to her real life's work. On June 9, 1808, she left New York for Baltimore with her three daughters, there to fulfill her vocation as mother and a teacher--and even, in some way as yet not clear in its realization, but utterly clear in its intent, as someone totally consecrated to God.

From the very first day of their arrival (it was the feast of Corpus Christi, June 16), Baltimore, faithful to the colonial heritage of Catholic Maryland, took Mrs. Seton and her little family to its heart. What a welcome it was! Archbishop John Carroll (Jesuit until the suppression of the order, then the first bishop of the United States, and now since April the first archbishop, with suffragans in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Kentucky) and Fr. William Dubourg (Sulpician and superior of the first and, at that time, only seminary in the United States) were both there that day, dedicating the new seminary chapel. Enthusiastically they escorted her to her own newly-built house next door. Here Mrs. Seton would have her home and her school--mother and teacher; and on both she would have the full blessing of the Church, Mother and Teacher. Fr. Dubourg summed up her past experience and her present purpose with these words to her:

There are in the country, and perhaps too many, mixed schools, in which ornamental accomplishments are the only object of education; we have none that I know where their acquisition is connected with, and made subservient to, pious instruction--and such a one you certainly wish yours to be.

Clearly there was a need for this Catholic education, religious in its orientation and spirit. And if it was to become an institution, a permanent thing in the Church, it must likewise become somehow religious in its orientation and body. The mother and teacher must become somehow a "religious" as well. Imperceptibly, there emerged in that summer and fall of 1808 the idea of a religious community to staff the school. And when, in fact, the first two recruits for this community were at hand in October (Cecilia O'Conway and Maria Murphy, both of Philadelphia), Elizabeth's joyful response was prophetic: "It is expected that I shall be the mother of many daughters." Nourished by prayer and the daily reception of Holy Communion (an extraordinary privilege for the day, accorded by her confessor), her moment of Magnificat had come, as she entered upon her new and eternal vocation as "Mother Seton."

To further her plans for an expanded school, with a growing number of children to teach and of religious women to help her, Mother Seton turned--as she had always turned since her conversion--to her dear Filicchis. If they could but provide her with the means to purchase some larger property there in Baltimore. . . .

At this point occurred another significant intervention of providence. Her letters did not reach the Filicchis until much later, due to the troubled condition of Napoleonic Europe and President Jefferson's Embargo Act. In the meantime, another benefactor appeared. Samuel Cooper offered ten thousand dollars to buy land, and he was very specific about where it should be:

This establishment will be made at Emmitsburg, a village eighteen leagues from Baltimore, and thence it will extend throughout the United States.

Thus with Carroll's permission, her vision turned westward--away from Europe and the Atlantic seaboard to the great frontier. The new year 1809 marked the effective beginnings of the "establishment." Having on March 25 pronounced her first vows of religion in the presence of the archbishop, and on June 1 having assumed for the first time a formal religious habit (a simple modification of her habitual Italian widow's weeds with a Rosary added), Mother Seton left Baltimore with her first companions on June 21 for the West. It was not very far west--only some fifty miles, but far enough to be among the first mountains of the Appalachian chain. Emmitsburg was then primitive enough, certainly, to qualify as western: a valley crossroads just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and about ten miles from another crossroads village north of the Line, called Gettysburg. Her community, pupils, and family--eighteen altogether--were finally reassembled; and on July 31 this little sisterhood, destined for such great good for Church and country, began its life.

After such beginnings, such providential counsels and benefactions, and with such auguries for glorious expansion on the moving edge of a dynamic young country, it would have seemed that Mother Seton's essential task was now over, and that she had but to preside over an establishment whose future was assured. The truth, however, was just the opposite; her most important work was reserved till now. The wise septuagenarian John Carroll, true Father of the Church in the United States and godfather of Mother Seton's apostolate, reminded her--and us--of the truth behind all apostolates and all real success:

Let it be your only concern to progress more and more towards the union of your soul with God, and an entire disengagement from the things of the earth. It would be a triumph for heterodoxy and irreligion, and--what is of much more consequence--the disappointment of pious and admiring Catholics, should anything happen to shake the stability of your holy establishment. It is not to flatter or nourish pride, the seeds of which are sown in every heart, that I declare an opinion and belief that its ultimate success under God depends on your sacrificing yourself, notwithstanding all the uneasiness and disgust you may experience, and continuing in your place of Superior.

This was written in March of 1810, and in a profound sense it can be said to be the best commentary on the last and fullest decade of Mother Seton's life.

"Uneasiness and disgust": these two feelings well summarize the years 1810 to 1812, the years of greater suffering for her than ever before. "Uneasiness" at the alarming decline of her own family: the premature deaths of her dear sisters-in-law Harriet and Cecilia, who had followed her into the Church and even to Emmitsburg. It was "the Seton sickness" once more, the dread consumption, the seeds of which seemed to lurk in them all. They were followed to the grave by her first-born child "Annina," frail flower of loveliness, dead at seventeen. As for her living children, young Dick and Will both gave signs of shallow character; they would be a worry to their mother to the very end. And parallel to this uneasy, silent grief was a "disgust," a feeling of hurt and indignation that was all the worse for its not allowing her as a Superior to be wholly silent about it. This concerned the government of her community, and the unjust interference in it by a Fr. John Baptist David, who had succeeded Fr. Dubourg as their official Sulpician director, and who thought he was thereby entitled to pronounce unilaterally on all matters concerning the Sisters. There was even talk for a time of her being replaced as Superior. But sustained by the wisdom of the old archbishop and the loyalty of her young Sisters, Elizabeth Seton proved to be yet more the Mother than in all her life before. We now know that these sufferings had been sent to effect her final purification, and to pay the price for the permanence of her work.

Some signs of this permanence became more evident after 1812. In that year, through the joint approval of Archbishop Carroll, Mother Seton and Fr. John Dubois (who, happily, had succeeded Fr. David), the community finally had its official Rule. It was adaptation of the Rule given the Daughters of Charity by St. Vincent de Paul. This connection with the great Vincentian family in France followed naturally from the common objectives of both communities: teaching children and caring for the sick and poor. But more specifically, it seems to have been first suggested by the Sulpicians, St. Vincent's early admirers in Paris and Mother Seton's first patrons in Baltimore. However, the new community was not formally affiliated with the Daughters of Charity until 1850, long after Mother Seton's death. This is how she described her own community:

If you recollect the system of the Sisters (sic) of Charity before and since the Revolution in France, you will know the rule of our community in a word, which amounts only to that regularity necessary for order and no more. . . . Our community increases very fast and no doubt will do a great deal of good in the care of the sick and instruction of children, which is our chief business. The rule is so easy that it is scarcely more than any regular religious person would do, even in the world.

The permanent title, "Sisters of Charity," which became attached to Mother Seton's work, was at first used interchangeably with another title, "Sisters of St. Joseph," perhaps after the name of the parish church in Emmitsburg. Their school, after all, was its parish school--the first such parochial school in America. It still stands, together with the original chapel and convent rooms, in the so-called "white house" where Mother Seton lived out these last years.

A sense of permanence, quiet and serene, more and more evidently pervaded her soul. It was not the permanence of this world but that of eternity. It was remarked at the time how differently she experienced the death in 1816 of her youngest daughter, as compared with the less tragic death of Annina in 1812. She summarized this in a brief note about herself to a friend:

Faith lifts the staggering soul on one side, Hope supports it on the other. Experience says it must be, and Love says--let it be. And so goes your friend through her passing career. It will not last long, that is all she is sure of.

There is evidence that she felt the perennial quandary of the saints: whether to be done with the world and to be with Christ, or to continue on in the world doing the work for which she was needed (cf. Phil. 1:21–24). That she should have felt both inclinations--and that she should have expressed them--is something we should expect from the open, spontaneous nature that was always hers. But what might disappoint us is the all-too-little evidence of anything seemingly "heroic" here. These last years were relatively uneventful. We can only guess at the deeper currents of grace in her soul. The same depreciation with which she spoke of her community's rule--as being "so easy"--she implies of herself. There was no particular charism nor any enduring feeling of fervor. There was only the way God's will--the way for everyone to follow--which would at a later date be called by a later Saint "the little way."

However one interprets the "easiness" of the life she lived and prescribed, there was a clarity and strength in its spirit. It is the true spirit of a foundress. Yet the true foundress here, Mother Seton would always maintain, was none other than the Mother of God. As she exhorted her sisters:

We honor her continually with Our Jesus. His nine months within her--what passed between them--she alone knowing Him--He her only tabernacle, . . . Oh, we love and honor Our Jesus when we love and honor her!--a true proof of our blessed Church being the one Jesus best loves, . . . Mary is the first Sister of Charity on earth.

In the very image of Our Lady, then, were her last years of life. She too taught her "darlings," comforted her community, administered her household, and confided all to prayer--and even has as another St. John a priest who was a kind of son. This was Fr. Simon Gabriel Bruté, her "blessed G.," who of all priests was her dearest, heaven-sent confessor, the one to guide her through the last stages of her exile on earth. To him, with gentle whimsy but with simplest truth, she once described how she lived through these last years:

In the meantime, that kingdom come! Every day I ask my bęte-soul what I do for it in my little part assigned, and can see nothing but smile, caress, be patient, write, pray, and WAIT before him.

Her final illness began in 1818, shortly after she had sent out from St. Joseph's the first sisters to found orphanages and schools in Philadelphia and New York. There were now some fifty sisters in the community, and they were on their way to extend their creation--the parochial school--to all the United States. So the mother and teacher and foundress could at last take her leave for heaven. Heaven had been, of course, anticipated in every Holy Communion--the one great consuming center of her life. And now, all consumed, she died--on Thursday morning January 4, 1821, in her forty-seventh year. Her last words were to her sisters: "Be children of the Church, be children of the Church."

The canonization of a saint is essentially a judgment--God's judgment, declared through His Church, as to what values are alone the ultimate and eternal ones. God has now declared judgment on what has been the greatest achievement yet in our American history. It is not a matter of politics or production, not of culture or community, not even of the establishment of a religious community and its growth. More important than all these things is a person. And that person, Elizabeth Ann Seton, is a saint.

She is, moreover, our saint. She is a perfect embodiment of our people: a native American of deepest and broadest roots, at once affluent and deprived, of the urban East and the rural West. As a woman, she combined with sweetness and strength all womanly vocations: marriage, motherhood, widowhood, consecrated celibacy. And as successively a convert, a member of the laity, and a religious, she fulfilled all the roles, under the Apostles, of the People of God.

If this is God's judgment as to the best we have given Him, so too it is His judgment as to what He has given us: the perfect intercessor and exemplar for our country and our time. Her shrine in the Motherhouse at Emmitsburg (not far from her beloved "white house" and her original grave) perfectly symbolizes this intersession and example. Her body is humbly enshrined at a side altar, and eclipsing her--enveloping her--are the three objects of her love and life: the great body of the convent chapel, the sanctuary image of the Mother of God, and the Most Blessed Sacrament on the high altar. For these three she lived: the holy Church (not the "American Church" --she never knew the term--but the one Catholic Church), Our Blessed Lady, and the Eucharistic Christ. Here too--by God's judgment--must we with our countrymen find our life.

All the quotations cited in the text are taken from the most recent biography of Mother Seton by Rev. Joseph I. Dirvin, C.M., Mrs. Seton: Foundress of the American Sisters of Charity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962). Fr. Dirvin does not give explicit reference to any of his sources.