Elizabeth Ann Seton
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was an American Catholic 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 French Huguenot 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. Bayley later served as the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College.
Elizabeth's mother Catherine was the daughter of a Church of England priest who was rector for 30 years of St. Andrew's Church on Staten Island. Elizabeth was raised in what would eventually become, in the years after the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church.
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.
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 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, 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 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, 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 as her spiritual director. Along with her sister-in-law Rebecca Mary Seton, 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 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 , William II, Richard Seton, Catherine and Rebecca Mary. The much expanded family required a move to the larger Seton family residence.
Widowhood and conversion to Catholicism
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.
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.
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. 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 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 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
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.Seton died on January 4, 1821, at the age of 46. Her remains are now interred at the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.