Saint Elizabeth Bayley Seton

ELIZABETH was born in New York of a very distinguished family on August 28, 1774.

Her mother Catherine Charlton was the daughter of the Episcopalian Rector of St Andrew's church, Staten Island, while her father Dr Richard Bayley was not only a noted physician, but also professor of anatomy at King's College, an institution later to develop into Columbia University.

It was her father who undertook in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, though with remarkable success, Elizabeth's education, for her mother died when she was only three years old. In 1794 Elizabeth married a young merchant of ample means, William Magee Seton, and she bore him two sons and three daughters. But their happiness was short-lived.

William Seton lost his fortune, and with it his health, and though they went to Italy in an attempt to effect a cure, William died there in December 1803. His widow remained on in Italy, staying with friends, until the May of the following year, and during that time her natural piety was strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism.

When, upon her return to the United States, this attraction became apparent, she met a good deal of opposition from her family and her friends. Nonetheless she persevered, and on March 14, 1805 she was received into the Catholic Church. This step, which estranged her from her family, left her in some financial difficulty. She therefore welcomed the invitation from a priest to establish a school for girls in Baltimore.

The school opened in June 1808. Even while her husband had been alive, Elizabeth had devoted much time to the care of the poor in New York, and had founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. So active had she and her friends been, that Elizabeth became known in the city as 'the Protestant Sister of Charity'.

Now in Baltimore she again gathered around her a group of like-minded women, and there was the possibility of establishing formally a congregation of nuns. In the Spring of 1809 the community based on the school in Baltimore formed a community, the Sisters of St Joseph, and from that time onwards Elizabeth, as their superior, was known as Mother Seton.

In the June of that same year Mother Seton and her community moved to the town of Emmitsburg in north-west Maryland and there, with some modifications and adaptations, the Sisters took over the rule of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. The congregation from 1812 onwards was therefore known as the Daughters of Charity of St Joseph. It spread rapidly. The sisters established orphanages and hospitals, but they gained most renown for their commitment to the then burgeoning parochial school system, which became one of the glories of the Catholic Church in the United States.

In moments caught from running her congregation, Mother Seton not only herself worked with the poor and with the sick, but found time to compose music, write hymns and prepare spiritual discourses, many of which have since been published.

It was at Emmitsburg that Elizabeth died, on January 4, 1821, by which date her congregation, the first to be founded in America, numbered some twenty communities spread right across the United States. Her cause was introduced in 1907 by Cardinal Gibbons, himself the successor in the see of Baltimore of Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley, a nephew of Mother Seton, and she was canonized in 1975. She is the first native-born North American to be raised to the altars.