Official feasts used to be an important part of the human community. People would gather together to remember something sacred, express their faith and hope for the future, and / or just be together formally, recognizing each other as being part of a shared community. Few things express a desire for shared companionship and social intimacy more than dining together. Sadly, the gathering together for feasting is increasingly a relic of the past – at least here in the West.
It need not be so! Today we will remember the ancient feasts.
The Feast Day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
This is a Christian religious celebration of Elizabeth Ann Seton, a late 18th and early 19th century Catholic convert and educator. She founded the parochial school system in the United States and the first American congregation of religious sisters – The Sisters of Charity.
In 1975, she became the first person born in the United States to be canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church. Many U.S. schools are named after her, but probably the most well-known is Seton Hall University (home of the Pirates.)
Elizabeth Ann Bayley SetonSC (August 28, 1774 – January 4, 1821) was an American Catholic and educator, known as a founder of the country’s parochial school system. Born in New York and reared as an Episcopalian, she married and had five children with her husband William Seton. She converted to Catholicism in 1805 and established the first Catholic girls’ school in the nation in Emmitsburg, Maryland. There she also founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.
On September 14, 1975, Seton was the first person born in what would become the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church.
Biography
Early life
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born on August 28, 1774, the second child of a socially prominent couple, surgeon Richard Bayley and his wife Catherine Charlton of New York City. The Bayley and Charlton families were among the earliest European settlers in the New York area. Her father’s parents were of FrenchHuguenot and English descent and lived in New Rochelle, New York. Numerous Huguenots had emigrated to North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries at a time of religious persecution in France.
As Chief Health Officer for the Port of New York, her father attended to immigrants disembarking from ships at Staten Island. He also cared for New Yorkers when yellow fever swept through the city (in one outbreak, it killed 700 persons in four months). Bayley later served as the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College.
Her mother, Catherine, died in 1777 when Elizabeth was three years old, possibly due to complications from the birth of her namesake daughter Catherine. The infant died early the following year. Elizabeth’s father married Charlotte Amelia Barclay, a member of the Jacobus James Roosevelt family, to provide a mother for his two surviving daughters. The new Mrs. Bayley participated in her church’s social ministry and often took young Elizabeth with her on charitable rounds. They visited the poor in their homes to distribute food and needed items.
Elizabeth Ann Seton, from Appleton’s Cyclopaedia
The couple had five children, but the marriage ended in separation. During the breakup, their stepmother rejected Elizabeth and her older sister. When their father traveled to London for further medical studies, the sisters lived temporarily in New Rochelle with their paternal uncle, William Bayley, and his wife, Sarah (Pell) Bayley. Elizabeth endured a time of darkness, grieving the absence of a second mother, as she later reflected in her journals.
In these journals, Elizabeth showed her love for nature, poetry, and music, especially the piano. Other entries expressed her religious aspirations and favorite passages from her reading, showing her introspection and natural bent toward contemplation. Elizabeth was fluent in French and English, a fine musician, and an accomplished horsewoman.
Marriage and motherhood
On January 25, 1794, at age 19, Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, aged 25, a wealthy businessman in the import trade. Samuel Provoost, the first Episcopal bishop of New York, presided at their wedding. Her husband’s father, William Seton (1746–1798), belonged to an impoverished noble Scottish family. He had emigrated to New York in 1758, and became superintendent and part-owner of the iron-works of Ringwood, New Jersey. A loyalist, the senior William Seton was the last royal public notary for the city and province of New York.
He brought his sons William (Elizabeth’s future husband) and James into the import-export mercantile firm, the William Seton Company, which became Seton, Maitland, and Company in 1793. The younger William had visited important counting houses in Europe in 1788, was a friend of Filippo Filicchi (a renowned merchant in Leghorn, Italy, with whom his firm traded), and brought the first Stradivarius violin to America.
Marriage and family
Shortly after they married, Elizabeth and William Seton moved into a fashionable residence on Wall Street. Socially prominent in New York society, the Setons belonged to Trinity Episcopal Church, near Broadway and Wall streets. A devout communicant, Elizabeth took John Henry Hobart (later a bishop) as her spiritual director. Along with her sister-in-law Rebecca Mary Seton (1780–1804), who was also her friend and confidante, Elizabeth continued her former stepmother’s social ministry—nursing the sick and dying among family, friends, and needy neighbors. Influenced by her father, she became a charter member of The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797) and served as its treasurer.
When the elder William Seton died, the Seton family fortunes waned during the volatile economic climate preceding the War of 1812, when the US boycotted trade with Great Britain. The couple took in William’s six younger siblings, ages seventeen to seven.
The couple already had their own five children: Anna Maria (Annina) (1795–1812), William II (1796–1868), Richard Seton (1798–1823), Catherine (1800–1891) (who was to become the first American to join the Sisters of Mercy) and Rebecca Mary (1802–1816). The much expanded family required a move to the larger Seton family residence.
Widowhood and conversion to Catholicism
The Seton home in New York City was located at the site on which a church now stands in her honor, with the adjacent James Watson House serving as the rectory.
A dispute between the United States of America and the French Republic from 1798 to 1800 led to a series of attacks on American shipping. The United Kingdom‘s blockade of France, and the loss of several of Seton’s ships at sea, resulted in William having to declare bankruptcy. The Setons lost their home at 61 Stone Street in lower Manhattan.
The following summer, Elizabeth and the children stayed with her father, who was still the health officer for the Port of New York on Staten Island. From 1801 to 1803, they lived in a house at 8 State Street. This site is now occupied by the Church of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary (built in 1964).
Through most of their married life, William Seton suffered from tuberculosis. The stress worsened his illness; his doctors sent him to Italy for the warmer climate, with Elizabeth and their eldest daughter as his companions. Upon landing at the port of Leghorn, they were held in quarantine for a month, as authorities feared they might have brought yellow fever from New York. William died there on December 27, 1803. He was buried in the Old English Cemetery in Livorno/Leghorn. Elizabeth and her daughter Anna Maria were received by the families of her late husband’s Italian business partners, Filippo and Antonio Filicchi, who introduced her to Catholicism.
St. Peter’s, Barclay Street, 1785
After returning to New York as a widow, Seton was received into the Catholic Church on March 14, 1805, by Father Matthew O’Brien, pastor of St. Peter’s Church, then the city’s only Catholic church. (Anti-Catholic laws had been lifted just a few years before.) A year later, she received the sacrament of Confirmation from the Bishop of Baltimore, John Carroll, the only Catholic bishop in the nation.
To support herself and her children, Seton had started an academy for young ladies, as was common for widows of social standing in that period. After news of her conversion to Catholicism spread, most parents (who were Protestant) withdrew their daughters from her school. In 1807, students attending a local Protestant academy were boarded at her house on Stuyvesant Lane in the Bowery, near St. Mark’s Church.
Seton was about to move to Quebec, Canada, which had numerous French-speaking Catholics, when she met a visiting priest, Father Louis William Valentine Dubourg. He was a member of the French émigré community of Sulpician Fathers and then president of St. Mary’s College, Baltimore. The Sulpicians had taken refuge in the United States from the religious persecution of the Reign of Terror related to the revolution in France. They were in the process of establishing the first Catholic seminary for the United States, in keeping with the goals of their society. For several years, Dubourg had envisioned a religious school to meet the educational needs of the new nation’s small Catholic community.
Contribution to hymnody
Inspired by the words of the first stanza of a well-known hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home”, Seton, on her daughter Anna Marie’s deathbed, added original stanzas and wrote that she “turned a music of her own from them”.
The hymn was first published before 1820 and was thereafter published in several hymnals in which the tune name is “Jerusalem”. A facsimile of the earliest publication with transcriptions in modern notation is available.
Seton was possibly the first American-born woman to have an original hymn tune published and also the first to have a widely sung hymn text (stanzas 2-4) published.
Founder
In 1809, Seton accepted the Sulpicians’ invitation and moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where they had a mission. A year later, she established the Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School, a school dedicated to Catholic girls’ education. This effort was supported financially by Samuel Sutherland Cooper, a wealthy convert and seminarian at the newly established Mount Saint Mary’s University begun by John Dubois and the Sulpicians.
On July 31, 1809, Seton established a religious community in Emmitsburg dedicated to the care of children of the poor. This was the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States and its school was the first free Catholic school in the country. This modest beginning marked the start of the Catholic parochial school system in the United States. Seton’s congregation was initially called the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s. From that point on, she became known as “Mother Seton”. In 1811, the sisters adopted the rules of the Daughters of Charity, co-founded in France by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac.
Later life and death
Mother Seton’s tomb in Emmitsburg
The remainder of Seton’s life was spent leading and developing the new congregation of sisters. She was described as a charming and cultured person. Her connections to New York society and the accompanying social pressures to leave the new life she had created for herself did not deter her from embracing her religious vocation and charitable mission. The most significant difficulties she faced were internal, stemming from misunderstandings, interpersonal conflicts, and the deaths of two daughters, other loved ones, and young sisters in the community.
By 1830, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s were running orphanages and schools as far west as Cincinnati and New Orleans. They established the first hospital west of the Mississippi in St. Louis, Missouri.
Seton originally intended to join the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, but the embargo of France due to the Napoleonic Wars prevented this connection. Decades later, in 1850, the Emmitsburg community took steps to merge with the Daughters and become their first American branch, as their foundress had envisioned.
Theologians approved Seton’s spiritual writings on January 15, 1936, and her cause was formally opened on February 28, 1940, granting her the title of Servant of God. In 1952, a miracle involving the healing of 4-year-old Ann O’Neil from leukemia was attributed to the intercession of Seton after a nun sought Seton’s intercession for the girl. The miracle was a factor in the beatification of Seton and Seton was beatified by Pope John XXIII on March 17, 1963. The pope said on the occasion, “In a house that was very small, but with ample space for charity, she sowed a seed in America which by Divine Grace grew into a large tree.”
Pope Paul VIcanonized Seton on September 14, 1975, in a ceremony in St. Peter’s Square. In his words, “Elizabeth Ann Seton is a saint. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with special joy and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she sprang forth as the first flower in the calendar of the saints. Elizabeth Ann Seton was wholly American! Rejoice for your glorious daughter. Be proud of her. And know how to preserve her fruitful heritage.” The miracle which led to the canonization of Seton involved the healing of a man, Carl Kalin, in 1963, who was given hours to live after contracting meningitis and having encephalitis in his brain.
Seton High School is a parochial all-female, college-preparatory high school in the Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Seton was founded as Mount St. Vincent Academy in 1854. It was also known as Cedar Grove Academy. Cedar Grove was renamed in honor of Elizabeth Ann Seton on September 12, 1927.
Mother Seton School in Emmitsburg, Maryland, is a direct descendant of the Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School. It is located less than a mile from the site of the original school and is sponsored by the Daughters of Charity. Mother Seton School is a private elementary school located in Emmitsburg and enrolls 306 students from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade. Mother Seton School is the 84th-largest private school in Maryland and the 3,381st-largest nationally. It has 15 students to every teacher.
In the Philippines, the Elizabeth Seton School in BF Resort Village, Las Piñas was established in 1975, the year of Seton’s canonization. It is the largest Catholic school in the city in terms of population.
Elizabeth Seton College, located in Yonkers, New York, was a college opened to assist young struggling women and men in need of furthering their education, offering Associate of Science or Associate of Occupational Science degrees. It merged with Iona College in 1989.
Seton Home Study School (setonhome.org) (Front Royal, Virginia), a Catholic K-12 homeschool, founded in 1983, is named in honor of Seton. It now has over 15,500 students across 54 countries, especially in the Philippines, Canada, and middle east.
St. Elizabeth Seton is a K-9 school in Edmonton, Alberta
Seton Catholic College, a high school in Perth, Western Australia, was founded in 1990 upon the merging of De Vialar College and St Brendan’s College. With the merge, the school was placed under the patronage of Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Seton La-Salle Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, PA established in 1980 is named after her. Elizabeth Ann Seton, an all girls high school and South Hills Catholic, an all boys school merged together to form one co-ed Catholic high school in the South Hills of Pittsburgh
Churches
Several Catholic churches are named for Seton. The first parish named in her honor, Blessed Elizabeth Ann Seton, was established in 1963 in Shrub Oak, New York, with a school opening in 1966, staffed by the Sisters of Charity.
Upon her canonization in 1975, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church was established in Crofton, Maryland, in the same Archdiocese of Baltimore where she had founded Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School.
As of 2018, there are churches in her name in more than 40 states of the United States, plus Canada and Italy.
What is a food you might eat to celebrate the Feast Day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton?
What does one eat to celebrate the life of an American from the northeast? I will take my cue here from Feast With the Saints (picture and recipe are theirs and I encourage you to read more at the link) because this sounds delicious.
New England Crab Cakes
Ingredients:
1 pound Lump Crab Meat
1 large Egg
¼ cup Mayonnaise
1 teaspoon Dijon Mustard
1 medium Lemon, juiced
¼ cup Green Onion, thinly sliced
¼ cup Red Onion, finely diced
½ teaspoon Salt
½ teaspoon Pepper
1 teaspoon Old Bay Seasoning
1 cup Panko
Canola Oil, for frying
Tartar Sauce
½ cup Mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon Pickle Relish OR Pickle Juice
1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice
1 Tablespoon Red Onion, finely diced
¼ teaspoon Old Bay Seasoning
¼ teaspoon Garlic Powder
¼ teaspoon Salt
Preparation Instructions:
In a large bowl, pick through the crab meat to make sure it is free of shells.
In a separate medium bowl, whisk the eggs with the mayonnaise until fluffy.
Stir in the mustard, lemon juice, green onion, red onion, salt, pepper, and Old Bay seasoning.
Mix to combine.
Add the panko and egg mixture to the crab meat, folding in gently.
In a large skillet, heat canola oil to 350°F.
Form the crab mixture into patties and fry until golden brown, approximately 2 minutes per side.
Remove from the skillet and drain on a paper towel lined pan.
Keep warm in the oven until all cakes are fried.
For the tartar sauce, combine all ingredients in a small bowl.
Mix until well blended.
Serve with warm crab cakes.
What is a prayer you can say on the Feast Day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton?
Elizabeth, loving daughter Encourage in all children obedience and love Elizabeth, troubled teenager Speak to today’s confused, sometimes abused young people Elizabeth, Faithful wife, Grant gifts of love and generosity to all spouses Elizabeth, caring mother, Share your mother’s heart with all parents. Elizabeth, grieving widow, Look with compassion on all bereaved spouses Elizabeth, loyal friend, Teach us to share friendship generously. Elizabeth, heroic searcher of truth, Guide all who, with fear and doubt, seek the way. Elizabeth, courageous convert, Strengthen the newly baptized as they embrace the faith. Elizabeth, sorrowing mother: Console those parents suffering the loss of a child. Elizabeth, steadfast religious: Inspire young women to follow in your path. Elizabeth, inspired educator: Share your gifts with all teachers. Elizabeth, a woman for all women: Bestow your charism of love and service on all women today. M. Irene Fugaze, SC (New York)
When is the Feast Day of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton celebrated?
This feast is celebrated by Catholics on the 4th of January.
I hope that everyone who celebrates has a wonderful day!
