St. Elizabeth Ann Seton lets the Archbishop decide if she may lead

EMMITSBURG, Maryland, September 5, 1811 AD — Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton sent a letter down to Baltimore this week, asking Archbishop John Carroll to decide whether she may belong to the community of sisters she founded in this valley, and whether she may go on leading it. She is the legal guardian of five living children, and the rule her sisters are about to take up was framed in France for women who have none. She did not press her own claim.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is thirty-seven, a widow of New York, and the head of the school and the sisterhood at St. Joseph’s, half a mile from the village of Emmitsburg. The rule is the one Saint Vincent de Paul framed in France in the seventeenth century for his Daughters of Charity, who had no monastery and no cloister but obedience. It requires a widow who enters to have settled her children’s affairs first, so that she has no further claim on their keeping or their direction. She has five children, and she has said she will take on nothing that cuts across what she owes them.

Father John Dubois, the community’s superior, and the other Sulpician fathers have been going over her eligibility along with the constitutions, and what is in question is her place among her own sisters. A second arrangement is under discussion: that she confine herself to a school independent of the community. Those consulted differ.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was married in New York to William Magee Seton. William Magee Seton died in Italy on December 27, 1803 AD. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was twenty-nine, a widow with five children and no money, three thousand miles of sea from home. She was received into the Catholic Church at St. Peter’s in Barclay Street on March 14, 1805 AD. Her relatives in New York had offered to go on supporting her on one condition: that she stay in the Episcopal Church. When St. Elizabeth Ann Seton became a Catholic, her relatives cut her off. The Filicchi brothers of Leghorn, Filippo and Antonio, who had taken her family in when her husband died in Italy, paid to school her two sons. She sailed for Baltimore with her children in June 1808 AD, made her vows the following March 25 and has been called Mother since, and on July 31, 1809 AD she and the first sisters came down into this valley. She still wears the black she put on for her husband at Livorno.

Her three daughters — Anna Maria, Catherine and Rebecca — are here at St. Joseph’s. Her two sons, William and Richard, are at the college Father Dubois founded on the mountain above the valley. Anna Maria, the eldest of the five, turned sixteen in May and lives in the house with her mother. Harriet and Cecilia Seton, her husband’s sisters, followed her into the Church and died within four months of each other. Their graves are in a wood near the house, the ground the sisters have chosen for their burying place. “I have them both lying close by our dwelling, and there say my Te Deum every evening,” she wrote to Antonio Filicchi in June.

Parents have put about fifty children into the sisters’ charge, besides poor children whose families cannot pay for schooling. The board and tuition support the house, but they do not pay off what was borrowed to improve the property. In June, with the money almost a matter of life or death here, she turned to Antonio Filicchi again. The Rev. Nicholas Zocchi was leaving for Italy, so she raised a thousand dollars from him and gave him in exchange a draft for that sum on Filicchi’s bank at Leghorn.

The clause about widows touches no one else in the house. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote of it, while the question was being argued: “By the law of the Church I so much love, I could never take an obligation which interfered with my duties to my children, except I had an independent guardian and provision for them, which the whole world could not supply…” To another friend, in the same months, she wrote: “To think of living away from this valley would seem to me impossible if I belonged to myself. But my dear children have the first right which must ever remain inviolable.”

She wrote to Archbishop Carroll: “…now I cast all at the feet of the Adored, placing every consideration, and all my concerns, in your hands, as His representative, to decide my fate… an individual is not to be considered where a public good is in question.” In the same letter she asked that Father Dubois “hide nothing” from the Archbishop of her circumstances.

Without her constant care, she is convinced, her sons and daughters would be drawn away by their Protestant relatives, who are numerous and wealthy. She wrote to Antonio Filicchi in June: “in the weak and decaying state of my health, which is almost broken down, can I look at the five without the fears and forebodings of a mother, whose only thought or desire is for their eternity?” In the first year after her conversion, with her support cut off, she had written to Amabilia Filicchi: “At all events, happen now what will, I rest in God.”

Archbishop Carroll has her letter and the constitutions now, and the decision is his.