Published in the Westchester Guardian, August 2014
Sometimes you have to a suffer loss and defeat in order to gain what is largely desired. Mostly it’s God’s plan. Sometimes it’s our own doing either intentional or voluntary. It is only with hindsight can one clearly see the meaning of the trails and trials we have walked. Slowly stripped of much that makes a person whole, Elizabeth Bayley Seton was forced, mandated at times to suffer, enabling her to seek something deeper – faith on a path bordered by loses.
“Oh my God, forgive what I have been, correct what I am and direct what I shall be.” St. Elizabeth Seton.
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born two years prior to our Declaration of Independence into a socially prominent family. Died 1821. Brief, but full of changes, challenges and crosses. Her childhood was partially spent under the harsh rule of British military occupation in New York City. Dr. Richard Bayley, her father, was the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College and first Chief Health officer for the Port of New York, while her mother, Catherine Charlton, was the daughter of a minister serving as rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Staten Island for over 30 years. At age four, her mother’s death, possibly by childbirth (the daughter died shortly thereafter), left Elizabeth and her older sister with insufficient, incomplete remembrances and recollections of a mothers’ love. The father’s second marriage resulted in five more children, and estrangement. The marriage ended in separation.
Her stays in New Rochelle might have begun with childhood visits but definitely increased with the new step-mother difficulties. Disaffection brought a deeper search of the self – the beginnings of contemplation. Here her journals display a love for God, the joy of Westchester surroundings and deep melancholy with suicidal thoughts. Today, stands the house at 145 Pelham Road, Pelham, built by Joshua Pell, where her uncle William Bayley lived. Here she learned about her eleven family connections to the Huguenot Founding Fathers. Coutant Cemetery was named after relatives.
Their family connections did not shelter her from the realities of poverty. Her father’s idealism and other family member’s work with the poor began to develop the young soul. The poor were cared for and also largely ignored – it was not considered a responsibility of the government to aid the poor. Hard work made you rich and laziness was the cause of your ills.
The natural path of marriage to a socially connected family came one month short of her twentieth birthday. By that time she was fluent in French, read and translated some classics, was an accomplished musician, wrote some good poetry and was deeply interested in philosophical and religious subjects – beyond what was expected from an upper-class woman socialite.
Marriage (1794) to William Seton, however, was true love not just a ritual to build social standing. Initially, prosperous, not just in the number of children (five) but one with love. Her life’s path began to turn, again, six years into her marriage. The new century brought bankruptcy. Then her father died in 1801 while ministering to Irish immigrants during another yellow fever outbreak. Followed two years later by the slow death of her husband from tuberculosis, in Italy. They had sought a cure in the fresh Mediterranean air, but fate, through a yellow fever scare, had them quarantined in a port dungeon with their oldest daughter Anna. Faith, through prayer, contemplation enabled a remarkable endurance.
“The accidents of life separate us from our dearest friends, but let us not despair. God is like a looking glass in which souls see each other. The more we are united to Him by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to Him.” St. Seton.
These involuntary losses led to a deliberate, purposeful decision and a much greater loss that changed the course of her life and improved the lives of so many over countless generations. She must have known that her family would always, somehow, manage financially with family’s help. There would be a difficult road to travel but life would continue. However, while materially devastated, she made that conscience resolution, shedding the last vestiges of the old life. She choose a path unexpected, one that would create enormous stress, estrangement and poverty through conversion – to the Catholic faith. Consider her family motto from the twelfth century, “At whatever risk, go forward.”
Business relations to Mr. Seton, the Filicchi family, preaching the Gospel without words, would be the catalyst of Mother Seton’s devotion and conversion. In Italy, she witnessed a faith once outlawed in some states. But Catholicism was considered the next logical step, a leap of faith both literally and figuratively via a physical communion, through the Holy Eucharist and one of trust that God will provide on the new path ahead. Conversion forced her extended family to abandon Mrs. Seton and her children.
Upon her return back to New York, she started an academy for young ladies – a common task for widows of social standing to implement. She entered the Catholic Church on Ash Wednesday, March 14, 1805 at St. Peter’s Church, the only Catholic Church in New York City at the time. Confirmation was given one year later by the Bishop of Baltimore, the only Bishop in the United States. However, when word got out about this conversion, most parents withdrew their daughters. At one point the NYS legislature threatened to have her expelled. Thoughts of moving to Canada were planned, however, they accepted an offer from a religious acquaintance to establish a school.
In 1808, without a theology degree or formal training she was invited to start a school in Baltimore. In 1809 they moved to Emmitsburg, Md. On July 31, 1809 they dedicated that school to the care of the poor – the first free Catholic school in the U.S. and the first congregation of religious sisters to be founded in this country. From that point on she was known as Mother Seton. Against her will she was elected superior, then tuberculosis took her oldest daughter, Anna, whose death in 1812 led to depression and doubt of God’s existence. On July 19, 1813, they made their vows.
In 1814, the sisters were given charge of an orphan asylum in Philadelphia. An accident took the youngest daughter, Rebecca in 1816. In 1817, they went to work in NYC. Progress and suffering interwoven
She died, like so many, of tuberculosis on January 4, 1821, at the age of 46. By 1830 the Sisters were running orphanages and schools as far west as Cincinnati and New Orleans and established the first hospital west of the Mississippi in St. Louis.
Within fifty years of her death, her religious order grew into six communities with more than 6,000 members operating hospitals, nursing schools, homes for the elderly, child-care centers, colleges and hundreds of grade schools and high schools. Include St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison, where I receive my mental health care. Seton Hall College (now University) founded in 1856 was named after her by Bishop James Bayley a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt and her nephew. She was canonized as the First American born saint in 1975 and the patron saint of in-law problems; death of a child, loss of parents; people ridiculed for their piety and widows.
“The only American woman of her time who left a lasting imprint on this country’s history solely because of her own life and work, not because she was married to a prominent man.” Joan Barthel. Author, “An American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton”
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