Elizabeth Seton

American educator

• Born: August 28, 1774
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 4, 1821
• Place of death: Emmitsburg, Maryland

Through her resourceful, independent, and pioneering spirit, Elizabeth Seton had a profound influence on nineteenth century American education, laying the foundations of the Roman Catholic Church’s parochial school system.

Early Life

Elizabeth Bayley Seton (SEE-t-n) was the daughter of Dr. Richard Bayley, an eminent surgeon and professor of anatomy at King’s College (later Columbia University). Her mother, Catherine Charlton Bayley, was the daughter of the rector of an Episcopalian church in New York. Little else is known of her, and she died when Elizabeth was three. Bayley remarried, but Elizabeth never formed a close bond with her stepmother. As a child, Elizabeth was a lively, exuberant girl. She was educated at a private school, excelling in French and enjoying dancing and music. She also had a strong introspective tendency and a profoundly religious temperament. Her early upbringing was unsettled; her father was dedicated to his work and gave her little close attention (although there is no doubt of his love for her), and she and her seven half brothers and half sisters were frequently sent to stay with relatives in New Rochelle.

As a young woman, Elizabeth was under medium height, but she was well proportioned and graceful; her features had a pleasing symmetry, and her dark, lively eyes attracted attention. She radiated intelligence and charm. In 1794, at the age of nineteen, she married William Magee Seton, the son of a prominent New York businessperson. It was by all accounts a successful and happy marriage, and between 1795 and 1802, Elizabeth Seton gave birth to two sons and three daughters.

Seton was not to have a conventionally serene and prosperous life. Forced by circumstances to mature early, responsibility for the welfare of others became a constant feature of her life. The death of her father-in-law in 1798 left her in charge of six more young children, and the death of her own father in 1801 was another severe blow. In the meantime, William Seton’s business affairs had foundered, and the family was faced with a financial crisis, which was complicated by a steady deterioration in her husband’s health. Doctors recommended a sea voyage, and in 1803 William, Elizabeth, and their eldest daughter, Anna, sailed for Italy. William survived the voyage but died in Pisa, Italy, just after the family had been released from quarantine at Leghorn.

It was while in Italy, where Seton stayed for three months following her husband’s death, that she first came into contact with Roman Catholicism. This contact was through her friendship with the Filicchi family, particularly the two brothers, Philip and Antonio. Her interest in religion, which had never been far from the surface, had earlier been stimulated by Henry Hobart, the gifted Episcopalian minister who preached at Trinity Church in New York. Now she felt the attraction of Catholicism, and her stay in Italy initiated a period of intense inner turbulence, the issue of which was to have momentous consequences.

Life’s Work

On her return to New York in 1804, Seton was torn between the Catholic faith that she now wished to embrace and the innumerable ties that held her to the Protestant religion into which she had been born. For a year, she struggled to make a decision, corresponding with the Filicchis, John Carroll, the bishop of Baltimore, and Bishop John Cheverus of Boston, while also receiving the opposite counsel of Henry Hobart. Finally, on March 14, 1805, she publicly professed her allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith and began to attend St. Peter’s Church, the only Roman Catholic Church in New York City. Thus began a period of three years in which her new faith was tested to its utmost. She had exchanged social position and respectability, the security of being in the majority, for a minority faith composed mainly of poor immigrants. Her family and friends reacted with coolness to her decision, turning to dismay when Seton’s sister-in-law, Cecilia Seton, became a convert to Catholicism in 1806.

Seton’s most pressing need at this time was to establish a secure home for her young family. She took part in a scheme to establish a small school at which she would be an assistant teacher, but the enterprise failed. Following this failure, with financial support from her friend John Wilkes, Seton established a boardinghouse for boys. This, however, was also a short-lived venture.

By 1808, at the instigation of Father William Dubourg, the president of St. Mary’s College at Baltimore, she had left New York for Baltimore to take charge of a boarding school for girls located in Paca Street, next to St. Mary’s Chapel. The school got off to a slow start, with only two pupils, rising to ten by the end of the year. During this period of one year, Elizabeth’s vocation was becoming clear to her; she wanted to form a religious community. By March of the following year, in consultation with her friends and advisers, she had agreed to move to the village of Emmitsburg, about fifty miles from Baltimore. The new settlement was to be financed by Samuel Cooper, a Catholic convert. Seton took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was adopted as the head of the community, and became known as Mother Seton.

On June 21, 1809, accompanied by her eldest daughter and three other women, Seton traveled to Emmitsburg. The Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph had been formed. Father Dubourg became the first superior, and the new community adopted a slightly modified version of the constitution and rules of the French community, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. By December, sixteen women were living in a simple cottage known as the Stone House, which was the community’s first home. There were only five rooms, one of which was set aside as a temporary chapel, and it was with some relief that the sisters moved into their more spacious permanent home, known as the White House, in February, 1810.

From this point onward, growth was rapid. By the summer, there were forty pupils at the school, many from well-to-do families, and by 1813, the number of sisters had increased to eighteen. The curriculum consisted mainly of reading, writing, spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic. Music, language, and needlework were also taught. Mother Seton played some part in teaching, but as the school became established, she spent more time in administration and supervision. The success of the school was a result of the effective inculcation of piety and strict morality, reinforced by firm but compassionate discipline. It is through her work at Emmitsburg that Mother Seton is rightly known as the founder of the Catholic parochial school system in the United States. She worked indefatigably—encouraging, consoling, admonishing, mothering, and organizing. She translated religious texts from the French, prepared meditations, gave spiritual instruction, kept a journal, and still had time to carry on a lively correspondence.

Mother Seton continued to be surrounded by the illnesses and deaths of those she loved. Her half sister Harriet died in 1809, and Cecilia Seton followed four months later. The death of her eldest daughter, Anna Maria, in 1812, affected her more deeply than any other. However, her strength of character, serenity, and resilience were never more apparent than in adversity. Her ability to rise above sorrows and maintain her devotion to her calling ensured the survival and growth of the community in the difficult early years.

Within a short period, the community was expanding. By 1814, the St. Joseph orphanage in Philadelphia had applied to the Sisters of Charity for the services of a matron and two sisters, and in the following year, four other sisters were sent to Mount Saint Mary’s College in Emmitsburg. In 1817, the first establishment of the Sisters of Charity was founded in New York City, originally as an orphanage, but like the earlier community in Philadelphia, quickly expanding into a school. Plans were made for schools in Baltimore, and the first of these was established in 1821. Mother Seton, however, did not live to see it. After several years of declining health, she died on January 4, 1821, at the age of forty-six.

Significance

Born two years before the declaration of the republic, Elizabeth Seton grew up in a land that was alive with a newfound sense of freedom, of its own vast potential. She, too, was an American pioneer, although her expertise was not in the claiming and cultivation of land but in the edification and training of the young and in the schooling of souls. In addition to her profound contribution to nineteenth century education, she offered comfort, support, and hope to an untold number of people who came under her care. She combined the American virtues of innovation, self-sufficiency, and independence with the spiritual values of humility and service. Neither mystic nor theologian, she was a practical woman who emphasized simplicity and efficiency in daily affairs, both spiritual and material.

It had always been clear to those who came into contact with Seton that she was a woman of exceptional spiritual stature. Some recognized, with prophetic accuracy, that she would make her mark on history. As early as 1809, before Seton had even moved to Baltimore, Bishop John Cheverus envisaged “numerous choirs” of her order spreading throughout the United States, and she herself expected “to be the mother of many daughters.” At her death, her confessor, Father Simon Bruté, instructed the Sisters of Charity to preserve every scrap of her writing for posterity. After her death, her communities quickly spread across the land: to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1849. By 1859, a community had been formed in Newark, New Jersey, and by 1870, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, had been added to the list.

It was not until 1907, however, that the cause for Seton’s canonization was introduced. In 1959, her life was declared heroic, and she received the title of Venerable. Two miraculous cures, which had taken place in 1935 and 1952, were attributed to her intercession, and beatification followed in 1963. In 1975, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a saint. The poor widow who had endured many trials, the convert who had founded a holy order, had become, 154 years after her death, the first American-born saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

Bibliography

Celeste, Marie, ed. Elizabeth Ann Seton: A Woman of Prayer. Meditations, Reflections, Prayers, and Poems Taken from Her Writings. New York: Alba House, 1993. Reprint. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Contains some of Seton’s prayers, poems, and other writings that express her religious beliefs and her personal relationship with God.

Dirvin, Joseph I. Mrs. Seton: Foundress of the American Sisters of Charity. Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. One of the three biographies that were reissued to mark the occasion of Mother Seton’s canonization. Strongly Catholic in tone yet also scholarly and well documented, it presents a warm, sympathetic portrait that captures the essential, simple goodness of the woman as she went about her daily affairs.

Feeney, Leonard. Mother Seton: Saint Elizabeth of New York. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Ravengate Press, 1975. Concise biography that will appeal to Catholic readers. Others may find themselves alienated by the author’s stylistic eccentricities and his conservative religious point of view, which tends to intrude upon his subject.

Heidish, Marcy. Miracles: A Novel About Mother Seton, the First American Saint. New York: New American Library, 1984. Notable for the ingenious device of using as narrator a fictionalized version of a priest who sat on the tribunal investigating one of the miraculous cures attributed to Mother Seton. His job is to be devil’s advocate. The flaw in the novel is that the down-to-earth, skeptical priest, full of doubt and wry humor, becomes far more interesting than the heroine.

Hoare, Mary Regis. Virgin Soil. Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1942. Detailed examination of the American Catholic parochial school system, and convincing argument for Elizabeth Seton as its founder.

Kelly, Ellin M., ed. The Seton Years, 1774-1821. Vol. 1 in Numerous Choirs: A Chronicle of Elizabeth Bayley Seton and Her Spiritual Daughters. Evansville, Ind.: Mater Dei Provincialate, 1981. Useful primarily for the long extracts from Seton’s letters and journals, which form the core of the narrative and give vivid insight into her mind. Arranged in strict chronological order, with as little editorial comment as clarity permits.

McCann, Mary Agnes. The History of Mother Seton’s Daughters: The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1809-1917. 3 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1917. The story of the first ninety years of the Cincinnati community. The chief interest centers on the stormy episode in 1850, when the Cincinnati Sisters refused to join the other communities in affiliating themselves to the French Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (see volume 2).

Melville, Annabelle M. Elizabeth Bayley Seton: 1774-1821. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. Definitive biography, scholarly and objective, free of the hagiographic tone of many other biographies.