January 4 | Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

Born: August 28, 1774, New York City

Died: January 4, 1821, Emmitsburg Maryland

Nationality: American

Vocation: wife, mother, founder of a religious community

Attributes: Black cap and gown, often accompanied by a child

Patronage: Catholic schools, those rejected/persecuted for their faith, orphans, and widows.

Canonization: September 14, 1975 by Pope Paul VI

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born to an Episcopal family in New York City. She was an accomplished musician, fluent in French, a talented horseback rider and the belle of the ball at local parties. She married William Seton, and lived on Wall Street with him and their budding family.

The couple went bankrupt before they had been married three years, and Elizabeth went with her children to live with her father, who was health officer for the Port of New York on Staten Island. In the process of weaning her fourth child, Elizabeth begged to be allowed to help nurse the starving children who arrived on the Island, but her father refused. The yellow-fever sweeping the city ended his life not long after. Elizabeth’s husband William’s health was deteriorating, and a Doctor recommended a sea journey - Elizabeth sold the last of her valuables to make it happen. 

Upon arrival in port, the entire ship was quarantined in terrible conditions due to the yellow-fever ravaging the city from which they had come. Elizabeth cared for William, and tried to keep her daughter, Anne-Maria happy and occupied. William died of tuberculosis in Italy at the age of 37. 

While waiting to return home, Elizabeth befriended an Italian Catholic family and was deeply impressed by the Eucharist. The true-presence of Christ was at the center of her conversion from a faithful Episcopal to a saintly Catholic. After returning to New York in poverty, she made the difficult decision to convert. 

The next year she pronounced her vows to the Bishop of Baltimore, was given a property in Maryland, and began what was to become the American foundation of the Sisters of Charity. The beginnings of the community were humble, but it grew with Elizabeth adopting the rule and constitutions of St. Vincent de Paul (with some modification) and the fledgling community became official in 1811. 

The community cared for the uneducated, the sick and the orphaned. By her death, there were more than twenty communities of Sisters of Charity, conducting free schools, orphanages, boarding-schools, and hospitals, in the states of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Delaware, Massachusetts, Virginia, Missouri, and Louisiana, and in the District of Columbia.

She died slowly and painfully of tuberculosis, only able to stomach port-wine towards the end. She jokingly wrote to a friend: “I’ll be wild Betsy to the last.” She died surrounded by her sisters in 1821.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.