Seton, Elizabeth Ann Bayley (1774-1821)

views updated

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774-1821)

Catholic educator and saint

A Charitable Woman . Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton is well known today as the first Roman Catholic saint born in the United States. Her pioneering career in Catholic education and her role in founding the Sisters of Charity, as well as her own spiritual life, are the achievements behind this singular honor. Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in New York City on 25 January 1774. Bayley’s mother died soon after, and she was raised by her father, Richard Bayley, a prominent physician and later the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College. Bayley gave his daughter a broader education than most early American girls received, one that encouraged a sense of moral responsibility toward society. In 1794 she married William Seton, a businessman, and began a family that would eventually include five children. Despite her domestic duties, her earlier education prompted Seton to pursue many charitable activities. She helped to found the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in 1797, the first charitable society in New York.

Conversion to Rome . Seton was widowed in 1803, her husband dying from tuberculosis in Italy, where the family had traveled hoping that country’s climate would cure him. While there Seton was drawn to the Roman Catholic Church and began her education in that faith. She returned to the United States and formally converted on 14 March 1805. This shocked her New York friends and family, and many abandoned her. Others, like John Hobart, later the Episcopalian bishop of New York, began a long but fruitless effort to bring her back to Protestantism. Seton started a school and struggled to support her children by teaching.

Catholic Educator . In 1808 she moved to Baltimore and started a girls’ boarding school with the help of Roman Catholic archbishop John Carroll. The success of this venture encouraged a further one: the establishment of a new religious community. In March 1809 Seton and four companions took vows and formed the Sisters of Charity, the first American order of nuns, devoting themselves to assisting the sick and poor and to education. The sisters established a center in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and there set up a new boarding school, as well as a free school for poor children. These educational ventures were among the first of many Catholic schools, and Seton in time came to be considered the founder of the American parochial school system.

American Saint . Seton led the Sisters of Charity for the rest of her life as they spread throughout the northeastern United States, founding schools, hospitals, and orphanages. She died on 4 January 1821, survived by two sons with naval careers and one daughter who later became a Sister of Mercy. Seton also left a growing group to carry on her work. These women kept her memory alive, as did others. Her half nephew, James Roosevelt Bayley, the first bishop of Newark, New Jersey, founded a college in her honor, today’s Seton Hall University. Between 1935 and 1963 three people recovered from apparently fatal illnesses, and the church investigators attributed these cures to the miraculous intercession of Seton. Accordingly, in September 1975 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Mother Seton the first native-born American saint.