Feast day: January 4
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
A New York socialite, wife, and mother of five who, after being widowed and bankrupted, converted to Catholicism and founded the American Catholic school system.
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in New York City in 1774, two years before American independence, into a prominent and well-to-do Episcopalian family. Devout, charitable, and happily married young to the merchant William Seton, she bore five children and moved in the city's high society, while quietly giving herself to prayer and to founding a society to relieve poor widows.
Her comfortable world collapsed. Her husband's business failed, and then his health; in a desperate attempt to save him, the family sailed to Italy, where William died, leaving Elizabeth a widow at twenty-eight, far from home. In her grief she was taken in by Catholic friends, and there, moved by their faith and especially by their belief in Christ's presence in the Eucharist, she felt drawn toward the Catholic Church.
Returning to America, she became a Catholic in 1805 — a step that cost her dearly, alienating many of her Protestant family and friends in a society deeply suspicious of Catholics. To support her children she opened a school, and at the invitation of the Church she moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where in 1809 she founded the Sisters of Charity, the first religious community for women established in the United States.
There she opened a free school for poor children — laying the cornerstone of the entire American Catholic parochial school system — while raising her own children and guiding her growing community, all in just a few short years before tuberculosis took her in 1821. She was canonized in 1975, the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint, and is honored as a patron of Catholic schools.
She was the first native-born citizen of the United States to be canonized a saint.
“We must pray without ceasing, in every occurrence and employment of our lives.”
— St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Image: Amabilia Filicchi (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Get a story like this every Sunday.