The Mystery of Saintliness
When I incautiously allow my mind to loiter on the frontiers beyond which human knowledge is barred entry, the origin of sin sometimes perplexes me. The phrase “mystery of iniquity” appears to represent the limit of what can be said of this terrible attraction that encompasses all our miseries yet eludes our understanding. But there is another and perhaps greater mystery: saintliness.
It has not been given us to know what prompted the first sin, and to assign its impetus to pride appears to beg the question: from whence came pride? Nor is it given us to know why certain people appear to have been largely preserved from moral corruption from baptism until death. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” Moses was told (Ex. 33:19), and there the matter rests.
This is not to deny the role of human liberty, but rather to acknowledge that its admixture with grace is woven into the human personality in ineffably beautiful and often inextricable patterns. Such is the case with the first American-born saint: Elizabeth Ann Seton.
My ideas about people I have never met and about whom I know nothing are often formed by the sound of their names. “Mother Seton” always evoked in my imagination the image of a stout matron wrapped in the ample folds of black cloth and the bowed bonnet that used to distinguish a Daughter of Charity. Then there came into my possession a biography titled An American Woman, by the late Leonard Feeney, S.J. It is a remarkable book about a most remarkable soul, and the late Fr. Feeney diligently exercises his estimable literary powers in bringing us into the presence of this one-time belle of New York society who became a wife, a mother, the foundress of a religious order, and a saint. He manages to communicate to us a quality Elizabeth possessed so pre-eminently and that might be described as the charm of holiness.
Had Elizabeth’s story been invented as the plot of a novel, it would have been dismissed as implausible. That the mother of five children should have become a convert to the Catholic Faith after three quarters of her short life were spent and that she should have then devoted the remaining 12 years of failing health to laying the foundation of the parochial school system in the United States seems incredible, but it happened.
Far from being the corpulent yet kindly matron of my imagination, Elizabeth was slightly built, with large, dark eyes, delicate features and an ethereal beauty enhanced by a refinement of mind and manners that made her the prize jewel among the debutantes of the 1790s.
Her father was an eminent physician. Dr. Richard Bayley was the first professor of anatomy at what was to become Columbia University and a health officer for the city of New York. Her mother died when she was three years old. Dr. Bayley remarried and Elizabeth enjoyed an affectionate relationship with her stepmother, but her heart belonged to her father and her two sisters.
Dr. Bayley was Episcopalian, and there was an Anglican minister in the family, so Elizabeth was raised in an atmosphere of Protestant proprieties in which manners often take the place of morals and where to be good, it is essential to be well born. This is not to deny that Dr. Bayley was a man of strong natural virtue, which he transmitted to Elizabeth; but it is to say that her hunger for genuine holiness could not be satisfied with the abstractions and imprecisions of her family’s faith. This was evident from an early age.
Fr. Feeney, who lamentably is most noted now for his denial of Baptism of Desire and for the often bitter zeal of his latter-day disciples, wrote his biography in 1938, and there is no adumbration in the work of his later views. He even speculates that before her conversion, Elizabeth, due to her ardent desire, may have received the grace of Holy Communion in some extra-sacramental way that lies beyond our comprehension.
Feeney also observes that the saints are given us not primarily for our imitation, but rather for our admiration and delight. We may imitate them in some manner, but it will have to be after our own manner. In this, he agrees with the great Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, who in his introduction to Helena notes that we cannot get into heaven in fancy dress, decked out as St. Augustine or Joan of Arc. If I am to be saved, it must be as St. Edwin Faust, a daunting and fantastic thought, but one that the Catholic Faith compels me to accept. And so it is with all of us. Sanctity is an individual matter.
This is abundantly evident in the case of Elizabeth Ann Seton, for her life is so unlike any other. From her childhood, she shows marks of divine election, if such can be understood in a Catholic sense. Feeney describes her as having a “sense of sacrament.” This phenomenon is not uncommon among those destined to convert to the faith. The Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor uses it as a leitmotif in many of her stories. Her Protestant characters often find themselves confessing their sins and performing penances, despite the disavowal of such practices in their professed creeds.
Young Elizabeth wore a crucifix around her neck–not a plain cross, but one with a corpus. She also bowed her head at the name of Jesus, even though no one had ever taught her the practice, and she longed to receive communion and did so with a reverence that belied the merely symbolic significance attached to the rite by her sect. She would sometimes attend more than one communion service on a Sunday and it pained her to see the sacristan toss the remnants to the birds, so she begged for the leftover bread and consumed it herself.
She “married well,” as the phrase has it, and on January 25, 1794, at the age of 19, she exchanged vows at Trinity Church with William Seton, a cosmopolitan young man of 26 and the son of a then wealthy investor. Like her father, he was a good man who gave little thought to the supernatural, and like her father, he cherished Elizabeth, as she did him, whom she always called, “My William.”
Elizabeth had five children in eight years. In 1801, her father, while tending the quarantined yellow fever victims among the Irish immigrants at the port of New York, contracted the disease himself. That he had, through the years, repeatedly exposed himself to these dangers is a measure of his natural virtue and his rejection of prevailing prejudice. Elizabeth was often moved by the plight of the Irish and once offered to wean one of her own children so that she might save the life of one of the starving infants of the sickly immigrants, but this her father would not allow.
The unaffected way in which the afflicted Irish Catholics prayed deeply impressed Elizabeth. They appeared to have that divine intimacy she so longed for. She once wrote to her soul’s confidante, her sister-in-law Rebecca Seton: “The first thing these poor people did when they got their tents was to assemble on the grass and all kneeling adore their Maker for His mercy, and every morning’s sun finds them repeating His praise.”
Elizabeth’s grandson, Archbishop Robert Seton, in his edition of Elizabeth’s writings published in 1870, notes that when his grandmother was returned the above letter after Rebecca’s death, she crossed out “their Maker” and wrote “our Maker,” instead. Whatever division of class or creed had once separated her from these humble people had been erased.
That Elizabeth was more frightened for her father’s soul than for his life is dramatically illustrated in a prayer she records having made in her diary as his death approached. She took her infant daughter Catherine, held her up to Heaven, and said: “O Jesus, my merciful Father and God! Take this little innocent Offering; I give it to Thee with all my heart; take it, my Lord, but save my father’s soul.” A softer, modern sensibility may shrink back at such a prayer as a shocking one for a mother to make, but Elizabeth was certain of her baptized daughter’s salvation; she was unsure of the condition of her father’s soul. And for Elizabeth, then as always, life was about one thing: salvation.
Her father died holding her hand, calling out, “My Christ Jesus, have mercy on me!” This mention of Jesus was uncharacteristic of the impersonal, almost deist attitude toward religion exhibited by her father throughout his life, but it was a comfort to his daughter and, we may hope, an aid to his salvation. Catherine, by the way, was spared and became a Sister of Mercy. She died at the age of 91.
During the years of her child-bearing, Elizabeth had a very full life, surrounded by family and friends and almost constantly occupied with domestic duties, yet she was ever searching for her God; ever looking for that window into eternity that would allow her to see Him, not as a concept to be honored, but as a Person to be loved. She thought she had found that window in the form of a celebrated Episcopalian preacher, the Rev. J. H. Hobart.
That she became enthralled by his eloquence is plain from her correspondence, and her grandson (the archbishop) remarks that since Protestants lack the Sacrifice, the entire effect of their service depends upon the sermon and, therefore, the oratorical skills of the minister. Fr. Feeney is inclined to be kinder in his judgment of Hobart than is Archbishop Seton, but I think Elizabeth’s blood descendant had the more accurate appreciation: he sees Hobart as something of a sanctimonious windbag who tried to exercise a spiritual despotism over the then-vulnerable soul of his saintly grandmother and who later worked to ruin her fortunes and reputation when she had become a poor Catholic widow.
In any event, Hobart was destined to lose his most prized congregant due to circumstances that must be assigned to Providence, for human prudence cannot adequately account for a decision made by her husband in 1803, shortly after the birth of Rebecca, their last child. He arranged to take Elizabeth and their eldest daughter Anna on a trip to Italy.
William’s health, never robust, had grown worse with each passing year of their marriage. His financial condition had sadly kept pace with his physical decline. It became apparent that his father, who died in 1798, had not been worthy of his reputation as a sagacious money manager. The family fortune was largely gone. William suffered from tuberculosis and some complications that brought on frequent bouts of dysentery, nausea, and depression. So, with his life in the balance, his business affairs in disarray, and a wife and five children in his charge, he set sail in September 1803 for Livorno, Italy, where he ostensibly believed he might recover his health and improve his finances. The four younger Setons were left with his sister, Rebecca.
The voyage aboard the Shepherdess took 56 days. Livorno was known to the English and Americans as Leghorn. It was at the dawn of the 19th century a prosperous port on the west coast of Tuscany and a center of international banking and trade. William had apprenticed there in the house of the Filicchi brothers, Filippo and Antonio, and it was to their house he proposed to return. They happily agreed to receive their old friend and his wife and child. And I think there may have been this in William’s decision to go to Leghorn: he had been happy there in his youth, in the warmth and affection that pervaded the Filicchi household, and he longed at the end of his life to revisit that place of faith and promise.
But it was not to be. At least not for William.
He was seriously ill most of the voyage, and little Anna contracted the whooping cough. So, as the winds and high waves of the North Atlantic buffeted the ship, Elizabeth acted as nurse to her husband and daughter. She had the help of Capt. O’Brien and his wife, who befriended her from the first. Elizabeth had a way of inspiring an immediate and lasting affection in most everyone she met. She possessed such a ready sympathy and gentility of manner that people of all stations in life felt both comforted and honored to be in her company and receive her attention.
When the Shepherdess arrived at Leghorn, the Filicchis were there to greet their friend, but so was the Capitano of the guard, who demanded to see health certificates from the ship’s only passengers, the Setons, before he would allow them to disembark. There had been yellow fever in New York when they had left and Italian law required that they present either health certificates or be quarantined before stepping onto Italian soil. The Setons had no papers and Capt. O’Brien was compelled to delay docking until his passengers were transported five miles up the coast and interred in a stone prison called the Lazaretto. There, in a barred cell, with an armed guard patrolling the perimeter of the building, they were to remain for 30 days.
There, with the seas raging against the rocks and the wind cutting through every crevice in the prison walls, William lay atop a thin mattress on a brick floor with his wife and child kneeling beside him. The scene was pitiful and the heart of the capitano was moved. He apologized, explaining he was bound by the law but that he would do all he could to make them comfortable. The O’Briens came and looked and wept. The Filicchis took immediate steps to alleviate their sufferings, providing bedding and furnishings and food and something else: Luigi.
The old family servant of the Filicchis offered to enter the Lazaretto and remain there in quarantine, exposing himself to whatever deadly germs were supposed to lurk in the place, so that he might help tend to the needs of the poverino. He not only brought them practical help but something perhaps no less valuable in their circumstances: irrepressible good humor.
When their time of detention came to its end, the whole town had learned of the beautiful young wife and her brave little daughter keeping watch over the dying father and husband. Dr. Tutilli, who had taken charge of William, recommended that he be removed to Pisa, where the climate would prove more comfortable for one in his condition, which he diagnosed as hopeless. The Filicchis made the arrangements, and eight days after his release from the Lazaretto, on December 27, 1803, William Seton, holding his wife’s hand, gave it a gentle squeeze and breathed his last.
This pressure of the hand was a signal between them: If William was unable to speak at the end, he was to let Elizabeth know that his faith in Christ remained by a squeeze of the hand.
William was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Leghorn. Luigi came and wept. The capitano came and wept. As William’s body was lowered into the grave, Elizabeth was heard to say, “O my Father and my God.” The locals also gathered at the cemetery, at a distance from the grave site, to see the young widow whose beauty and virtue had been much talked about. As she was led away after the burial, she heard someone in the crowd say, “If she were not a heretic, she would be a saint.”
The phrase resonated in her thoughts. She wrote it in her diary, and no doubt she pondered its meaning. A heretic? Was she a heretic? Was there only one true church founded by Christ, as these good people believed? Before she had left for Italy, the Rev. Hobart had warned her against the allurements of “the sumptuous worship of Italy,” meaning, of course, the Catholic Mass. But he was helpless now to prevent her from being exposed to that worship. And how would his finely wrought phrases retain their resonance for her in the prayer-filled home of the Filicchis, to which she was now brought?
The Rev. Hobart’s rhetoric may have echoed impressively in the recesses of the mostly empty Trinity Church, where Elizabeth was one of only a handful of regular congregants, but it was drowned out in the beautiful cadences of the Missa de Angelis and amid the crowded pews where she now sat with the Filicchis, her heart stirring to a new, exciting and frightening possibility: the truth of the Catholic Faith.
Before William had died, he extracted a promise from Capt. O’Brien that he would see to the safe return of Elizabeth and Anna, and so mother and daughter soon boarded the Shepherdess for its return to New York, but a storm drove the ship back to shore and Anna became seriously ill with a fever. When Capt. O’Brien was compelled to embark a second time, the doctors warned Elizabeth that to move the child would be fatal. So, the Setons remained with the Filicchis for some months more. Elizabeth was to contract the same fever that had attacked Anna, and the two of them were at times close to death. The Filicchis prayed and fasted for their recovery.
Filippo was the elder of the two brothers, who both traveled frequently on business to the United States. Filippo was so well known and regarded in America that President George Washington named him consul-general of the United States at Leghorn–a rare, if not unique, honor for an Italian national. And although Filippo had a great affection for Elizabeth, it was his younger brother Antonio who became her guide and mentor as she made her way to the Catholic Church.
When Elizabeth and Anna had recovered their health, the Filicchis took them to see some of the rich treasures of Italy. They visited the Uffizi and Pitti palaces in Florence. They saw more of the “sumptuous worship” they had been warned against. And they came to know of two aspects of the Catholic Faith that came to obsess Elizabeth in her search for truth: the doctrine of the Real Presence and devotion to the Blessed Mother.
It is, of course, these very aspects of the Faith that Protestants have come to abhor, yet Elizabeth found herself powerfully drawn to this forbidden country. However close she may have been to conversion, she resisted it while she was abroad. She returned to New York in spring 1804, accompanied by Antonio, for the Filicchis did not like the look of Capt. Blagg, commander of the Flamingo, and chivalrously insisted upon providing the young widow and child with their protection.
After being reunited with the four children she had left in the care of Rebecca Seton, Elizabeth had to appraise her new situation: she had no husband and, she soon discovered, almost no money. William had not been entirely aware of the extent of his financial losses and spent the last weeks of his life bequeathing property and investments he no longer owned. Elizabeth had family and friends, not the least important of which were the Filicchis, who served as her benefactors, financially as well as spiritually.
Aside from all her observable difficulties, however, she had a secretly kept one that was soon to be revealed: Elizabeth was suffering an intense spiritual ordeal. Her children sensed her suffering and would often talk about “poor Mama,” whose health had also suffered greatly during her sickness and trials. She felt compelled to confide in her old friend and mentor, the Rev. Hobart, that she was considering converting to the Catholic Faith. He, in turn, expressed disbelief, disappointment and, of course, deep disapproval. He cast the situation much in personal terms, as though she were considering some betrayal of him and her friends and family.
He sent her tracts detailing the corruptions of the Roman Church. The Filicchis responded in kind, providing her with answers to all the charges. And thus, the battle for the soul of Elizabeth Ann Seton broke with full fury.
Relatives and friends would visit her with admonitions about deserting them to embrace popish superstitions. She would receive recommendations to attend this service or listen to that preacher. She would be asked how she could possibly consider participating in a form of worship indulged in by the servant class? The Catholic Mass was attended by chamber maids and stable hands; by people who cleaned out rubbish bins and blacked shoes. How could she ever think of debasing herself by sharing a pew with unwashed Irish laborers?
And there were the children to consider. She was reminded by her relations that the five souls in her charge would follow her to perdition if she made the wrong choice and joined the forces of the anti-Christ. She was even given Newton’s book of prophecies in which he proclaims the eternal damnation of Catholics.
The Rev. Hobart appealed strongly to her loyalties: how could she leave the church in which she had been baptized? The church of her fathers? But he had no answers to the doctrinal questions she asked. He spoke of everything except the one thing that mattered to her: the truth.
This torment could not go on endlessly. She must decide. On Ash Wednesday, February 27, 1805, Elizabeth Ann Seton entered St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church and declared to a Fr. O’Brien her intention of becoming a Catholic. This was a momentous decision, not just for Elizabeth and her children, but for a nation and its children for generations to come.
She was received into the Church on March 14, presented to the priest to make her profession by her spiritual brother, Antonio Filicchi. On March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, she experienced her greatest joy: her first Holy Communion. She wrote to Antonio’s wife, Amabilia: “At last, Amabilia, at last, God is mine. Now let all earthly things go as they will. I have received Him.”
Earthly things did not go well, at least by our often shallow and imprecise reckoning. The one-time belle of New York society now became its chief scandal. Her defection to Rome was accounted for in various ways. The prevalent theory was that she was mentally unbalanced. The death of husband, her own and her child’s illnesses, the collapse of her finances–all had conspired to deprive her of reason. And, of course, there were dark influences at work to take advantage of her mental incapacities.
Elizabeth’s children did follow her into the Church, and did so quite happily, even exultantly, especially Anna, who had asked sadly as they were leaving Italy: “Ma, are there no Catholics in America? Will we never go to the Catholic Church there?” It was on her children’s account that Elizabeth felt the social ostracism of their accustomed society so keenly.
Still, Elizabeth had mouths to feed and, despite the generosity of some loyal friends, such as the Filicchis, she felt a responsibility to exert herself to provide a livelihood for her family. She tried her hand twice in New York at being a school teacher, but neither enterprise succeeded for long. One of them was sabotaged by the Rev. Hobart, who joined another Protestant minister in warning the good people of New York that they could not trust their children to the perverse influence of Mrs. Seton.
Her situation in New York became increasingly difficult to sustain. When her sister-in-law, Cecilia Seton, became seriously ill at the age of 15, she insisted on having Elizabeth by her side. The family yielded. She confided to Elizabeth that she intended to become a Catholic, too. When Cecilia recovered and told her family of her decision, Elizabeth was practically declared a public menace. Incredible as it seems, the Setons considered having the legislature expel Elizabeth from New York City. Cecilia’s sister, a Mrs. Ogden, was married to the governor, so it was within the realm of the possible.
Cecilia was locked in her room. She was threatened with being deported to the West Indies and told that her passage was being purchased. But nothing could daunt her spirit or weaken her resolve. In June, she left the house of Mrs. Ogden, where she had been living, and made her profession of faith.
With Cecilia’s conversion, the ostracism of Elizabeth and her children was consummated. The Filicchis proposed that she come to Italy and live with them permanently. There were plans to relocate to Canada. Finally, in the summer of 1807, Fr. DuBourg, the president of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, visited New York City and met the infamous Mrs. Seton while she was visiting the pastor at St. Peter’s. He was impressed by her faith and her learning and asked if she would be willing to help him realize a long-held dream of opening a children’s school in Baltimore, should he be able to obtain the funds. “Would you come?” he asked. “Oh, I would come and beg,” she answered.
Archbishop Carroll, of Baltimore, and Bishop Cheverus, of Boston, were consulted and both, knowing something of Mrs. Seton, endorsed the project. It took another year, but in June 1808, Elizabeth Ann Seton left New York City, much to her own and the city’s relief, and sailed to Baltimore with her children.
Fr. DuBourg had rented a house for her in Paca Street. Her sons were boarded at Georgetown. And soon, the first Catholic elementary school was under way. Elizabeth was happy, and so were the Catholics of Baltimore, who sent their daughters to her in ever growing numbers. Soon, Elizabeth was joined in her work by a young woman from Philadelphia, Cecilia O’Conway, who wanted to become a nun. She and Elizabeth formed a regimen. Other young women wanted to join them. They became provisionally a community known as the Sisters of St. Joseph. The school was overflowing. It became plain to all involved, to Archbishop Carroll and Fr. DuBourg, that something large and important had begun and that it must be allowed to grow.
About this time, a wealthy convert, Mr. Samuel Cooper, was studying for the priesthood at St. Mary’s. He decided to help and used a large part of his fortune to buy a piece of property for Elizabeth at Emmitsburg, about 50 miles west of Baltimore and two miles from a seminary called Mount St. Mary’s headed by a devout priest named Fr. DuBois. There was as yet no proper building at Emmitsburg, but a motherhouse was envisioned for a new religious order of teaching sisters to be headed by Elizabeth. On the feast of Corpus Christi 1809, five ladies boarded a covered wagon and began plodding their way from Baltimore to the mountainous country in the west.
Among the small band was Cecilia Seton, who had come to live with Elizabeth but who was in very poor health. Also arrived at Paca Street and now part of the Westward migration was Harriet Seton, not yet a Catholic but very attached to Elizabeth and Cecilia. Harriet was considered the most beautiful girl in New York and was engaged when she left to be with her sister and sister-in-law. It must have seemed to New York society that Elizabeth was draining the town of its debutantes and hoarding them in her convent.
When the small band arrived at Emmitsburg, they found no suitable place to live. The house on Mr. Cooper’s property was very much a work in progress and Fr. DuBourg gave them his house to live in and moved to the seminary. It was a generous gesture, but the crude, two-room structure was hardly adequate for five women, one of whom was very ill. Yet it is the nature of sanctity that it thrives on privations. It is as though the saints hunger for hardship and sacrifice like the rest of us hunger for comforts and ease.
It was a hard winter in Emmitsburg, with little warmth and less food, but I don’t think a happier group of people could have been found in the finest mansions in the world. “All hearts,” wrote Mother Seton, “applied themselves to mortification with such good will that they found the carrot coffee, the buttermilk soup, and the stale lard, too delicate food.”
In February 1810, the motherhouse was completed. It was necessary, however, for the community to be established in a regular canonical way. After some discussion, it was agreed that a modified rule based on that of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul would be most suitable. Their dress would be that adopted by Elizabeth since she had become a widow in Italy: a black dress with a muslin bonnet. There remained, however, one large and unique problem: the first putative head of this new order had five children. There were no suitable homes in which they could be placed and Elizabeth thought it her duty to continue their care and education herself.
She acknowledged to Archbishop Carroll that she could wish for nothing better than to be a teaching sister in a Catholic school, but her own happiness must be subordinated to the needs of her children. Rather than surrender her responsibilities to them, she would have to withdraw from her position at Emmitsburg.
But the archbishop realized that Elizabeth was as much a mother to the new community as she was to her own children. She was, in every sense, Mother Seton. So, he managed a special permission to allow her to remain the legal and maternal guardian of her two boys and three girls.
Life at Emmitsburg was far from easy, yet to judge by the number of young women wishing to join the new order, you might think it a new Eden. Mother answered all inquiries with frank descriptions of the austere living conditions and great demands that postulants would face, but still they came, and the order grew, and the convents and schools and orphanages multiplied. Soon, the Daughters of Charity were recognizable on the streets of Philadelphia and New York as well as in Baltimore and Emmitsburg. It was as though there were great pressure building behind a dam of vocations and that Mother Seton opened the dam.
The parochial school system in the United States was certainly among the most astounding achievements of the Catholic Church. How many generations were formed in the Faith by the religious who staffed its classrooms and maintained its buildings? I am a product of this system, as was my mother and her parents and her parents’ parents.
The Protestant luminaries of New York City were right to fear Elizabeth Ann Seton. She almost succeeded in making America a Catholic country.
But the system of parochial education depended on vocations, and the reform of the religious orders following Vatican II, along with other changes in the Church, has succeeded in destroying the religious orders, most of which can now be described as moribund. And with the death of the religious orders has come the imminent death of the parochial school system. Who would have thought that the flood of vocations Elizabeth released would have been damned up by those charged with propagating the Faith?
Still, who can gauge the amount of good Elizabeth and her Daughters of Charity have accomplished? I count myself among those in their debt, and how can one repay the gift of faith? And I am but one of millions of the parochial school children of Mother Seton.
On January 2, 1821, at the age of 47, surrounded by her spiritual daughters, among whom was her child Catherine, the one whose life she once offered for her father’s soul, Mother Seton, long weakened by tuberculosis and worn out by ceaseless labors, breathed her last. Her final request to her sisters was that they recite with her the Anima Christi of St. Ignatius. She had asked that they repeat each line after she had pronounced it, but they faltered near the end, when all that could be heard was weeping and Mother Seton’s soft voice intoning: “At the hour of my death, call to me, and bid me come to Thee, that with Thy saints I may praise Thee, forever and ever. Amen.”
And then, with her last breath, she said, “Jesus.”
A beautiful woman. A beautiful life. A beautiful death.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Mother Seton, pray for us and for our children.
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