Companions for the Journey: Elizabeth Ann Seton
Imagine that you are happily married at age twenty. What would you do if, by age thirty, you became widowed and penniless, and a parent to a dozen children? As it happens, a follower of Christ named Elizabeth Ann Seton lived that very story.
On August 28, 1774, a little girl was born to the Bayley family in New York City. Her family was a prominent and generous one, with her physician father serving as a state medical officer and also offering medical care amidst an epidemic of yellow fever. Even after his wife died when Elizabeth was only three, the family continued their humanitarian work and participation in their church’s ministry to the needy. Young Elizabeth reportedly traveled with her stepmother around the city, visiting the poor and taking people food.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s father and stepmother separated during her early adolescence, thus creating a second “mother loss” in her young life. However, by the end of her teenage years, Elizabeth had lived a fairly typical life of privilege in her day, crowned with a marriage to William Seton, a successful businessman and son of a similarly-respected family. At age 20, Elizabeth wrote with apparent rapture, “My own home at twenty—the world! And heaven, too—quite impossible!”
Alas, Elizabeth’s bliss was not to last. Within just a few years of her marriage, her father-in-law died, and she and her husband took in several of his younger siblings in addition to their five biological children. Then, her husband’s business failed, and the family lost their home. Her husband developed tuberculosis, and, as was typical for the time, his doctors recommended a change of climate. Since he had business contacts in Italy and had visited there, he moved to Italy with his wife and oldest daughter. Unfortunately, the Italians quarantined the three Setons upon their landing, and William died while in quarantine.
To recap: at 20, Elizabeth had her own home, significant wealth, a successful and loving husband… and at 30, she was a widow with no home of her own, with about a dozen children to care for, and lived an ocean away from her own family and most of her children. Obviously, she could not have foreseen this tragedy, and she could not foresee what was to come. So what was she to do?
Her answer seems to have been simple: stay faithful. First, she was cared for by her husband’s business associates. She was already a devout Christian, and of course, the dominant expression of Christianity in Italy was Roman Catholicism. Her involvement with the church there, as well as the kindness of her husband’s friends, apparently drew her to that fellowship.
She returned to New York in 1805, and, having educated her children as a young mother, she decided to open a school for girls in her home. But shortly thereafter, she was officially received into the Catholic Church, and her family and students rejected her. Eventually, a priest from Baltimore learned of her work and invited her to start a school in Maryland. She packed up the children, moved there, put the boys in boarding school, and opened a school for girls; in fact, as it turned out, it became the first free Catholic school in the United States!
She also at this time began to feel a calling into an even more dedicated life, and in 1809, she established a religious community focused on caring for poor children. She lived the last 12 years of her life as the leader of the group until she died in 1821 of tuberculosis herself. During that time, she had also endured the death of two of her own children from the same respiratory disease.
So, why is Elizabeth Ann Seton important? Well, her school was the beginning of the Catholic school movement in the United States, a movement that now boasts approximately 7,000 schools and over 2 million students. For our Catholic brothers and sisters, Seton is a saint, having been canonized in 1975.
But for all of us, regardless of our Christian fellowship, she is an excellent example of persistence and devotion. It’s not merely that she stayed devoted to God and pursued a spiritual life even in the midst of difficult circumstances, as admirable as that is. It’s that she consistently used what she had for the sake of others. From her girlhood years working in New York City to relieve the plight of the poor, to her married years ministering to the vulnerable, to her widowed years teaching school to others, to her years as “Mother Seton,” leading a spiritual community of other women and teaching the poor girls of Maryland, we see a woman who loved God, was devoted to Jesus, and used what she had for others.
In other words, she imitated Jesus as he described himself in Mark 10: as one who came not to be served but to serve. She must have been discouraged quite often, but she gave to others what she had: her experience, her energy, and her resources. Whatever we have, we can do the same.
I will close with a quote from Seton herself, in one of over one thousand of her letters that still survive: “God has given me a great deal to do, and I have always and hope always to prefer his will to every wish of my own.”
