St Elizabeth Seton

[Rob2]

St Elizabeth Seton

Celebrated on January 4th

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Wife and foundress. She was the first native-born American woman to be canonised. Born in New York in 1774 to a prominent Episcopalian family, at 20 she married a professor of anatomy, Richard Seton. Their marriage was a happy one and they had five children, but in 1803, Richard died.

Elizabeth became a Catholic in 1805 and founded a religious order, the American Sisters of Charity, based on the rule of St Vincent de Paul, devoted to the relief of the poor and school teaching. She spent the rest of her life to leading and caring for her community.

She has been described as a ‘charming and cultivated woman of determined character’. Elizabeth died near Baltimore in 1821 and was canonised in 1975 by Pope Paul VI.

During the canonization service, which was attended by more than 1,000 sisters from north and south America, the Pope stressed her extraordinary contribution as wife, mother, widow and consecrated nun, the example of her dynamic and authentic witness for future generations and the affirmation of that ’ religious spirituality which your (i.e. America’s) temporal prosperity seemed to obscure and almost make impossible.’
(from ICN)

 

[Irishmom2]

St. Elizabeth Seton, pray for us!

 

[TK421]

I liked her biography, when she traveled to Italy and learned about the faith. It’s a sad story though. Husband died. Kids died.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I’m sorry if I barged on your St. Rigobert thread with Mother Seton. I didn’t know she was on the ICN calendar too as she’s primarily a US saint. I will delete her there and repost her over here.

Here she is! She lived a hard life. I have been to her shrine at Emmitsburg a couple of times and it blows my mind that she and the other women and children who started a religious community there apparently walked something like 50 miles to get there, at a time when there weren’t good roads. If she’d grown up working on a farm or something I wouldn’t be so impressed, but she had lived an easy wealthy life.

There’s an old graveyard at the shrine where the early members of her religious community are all buried. One day all the sisters from her religious community were sitting under the trees resting and the conversation somehow turned to death. One young girl was eating an apple and she finished it, tossed the core and said, “When I die, you can just bury me where that landed.” She died within a couple years and they did bury her right on that spot.

There was a good made-for-TV movie about her when she was canonized called “A Time for Miracles” that I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it. (It’s on youtube.) It shows all the hardships she went through living in rickety buildings at Emmitsburg with very little to eat. One interesting thing about the movie is it actually shows how Catholics were discriminated against and even physically attacked in riots during the late 1700s/ early 1800s in USA. Most people in USA either aren’t aware of that or choose to turn a blind eye to it. I doubt the networks in the US would air such a movie today.

Memorial of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, religious - January 04, 2020 - Liturgical Calendar

Born in New York, Elizabeth Seton married and became a mother of five children. After her husband's death, she converted to Catholicism and founded the American Sisters of Charity, a community of teaching sisters which began Catholic schools throughout the United States, especially helping with

www.catholicculture.org

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I would also add one more thing - the ICN blurb in the first post contains a small error. Elizabeth’s husband was actually named William Magee Seton and he was not a professor of anatomy, he was in the import-export business started by his father. This is fairly important because due to tensions and blockades in Europe in the early 1800s, the shipping business suffered a downturn and the Setons went bankrupt about the same time as William developed the TB that would kill him. At that time, not only were William and Elizabeth parenting five kids of their own, but they had taken in six of William’s younger siblings aged 7 to 17 that had been orphaned when William’s father died. So Elizabeth at age 25 had 11 kids, no money, lost their house, and a terminally ill husband who then died within a couple years. She did have a little bit of extended family support, which she pretty much lost when she converted to Catholicism. She really went through a lot.