The Archbishop decides whether St. Elizabeth Ann Seton may lead her sisters

EMMITSBURG, Maryland, September 11, 1811 AD — Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton sent a letter to New York today saying she may have to begin her life over again outside this valley. “All is suspense, and I am thinking of preparing myself to recommence life in the world,” she wrote to Eliza Sadler. Archbishop John Carroll wrote his reply at Baltimore the same day and headed it September 11, 1811 AD, so it had not reached her when she wrote.

She is thirty-seven, a widow of New York, and the head of the school and the community of sisters at St. Joseph’s, half a mile from the village of Emmitsburg. She founded that community and has led it since the sisters came down into the valley two years ago. Her three daughters live here in the house with her, and her two sons are at the college on the mountain above the valley.

The sisters are about to take up the rule St. Vincent de Paul framed in France for his Daughters of Charity. It requires a widow who enters to have settled her children’s affairs first, so that she has no claim left on their keeping or their direction. She is the legal guardian of five living children, so Father John Dubois, the community’s superior, and the other Sulpician fathers made her eligibility a matter for discussion. On September 5 she handed the whole question to Archbishop Carroll — her own place in the house, and the constitutions with it. Every community in the diocese is under the Archbishop’s oversight, so his word settles both the rule and whether she may hold office under it.

Eliza Sadler is the wife of an English merchant in New York and one of the three friends who stayed close to her after she became a Catholic; they have been writing to each other since the 1790s.

What did she tell Mrs. Sadler today, with the answer still to come?

Her next sentence to Mrs. Sadler was this: “Whatever happens, we are always under the protection of the Most High, the All-powerful.”

The sisters here take vows for a year at a time, not for life. What was it in her case that the fathers could not settle?

That is how St. Vincent framed the institute: his Daughters of Charity were allowed no solemn vows and no vows for life, and their vows bound them a year and were renewed with their superiors’ permission. The doubt was over the other half of it. The fathers thought at first that she could not both take a permanent place in the company and govern it, with five children who depend entirely on her care. While the constitutions were being discussed the superiors weighed whether she should instead keep to a school separate from the community. Those consulted differed.

When she wrote to the Archbishop six days ago, what did she tell him she would and would not give up?

She told him the proposed rules were nearly the ones the French sisters had in their original manuscript, that she had never had “a thought discordant” with them, and that an individual is not to be considered where a public good is in question. Then she set the limit: “you know I would gladly make every sacrifice you think consistent with my first and inseparable obligations as a mother.”

The decision is being made by other men in another city, and nothing she does now can change it. What is she asking God for while she waits?

In the same letter she wrote: “Truly, I would be happy if I could inspire your dear soul with as much indifference as exists in mine, so long as I know that during the few days that remain of this earthly pilgrimage, the Adorable Will of God is accomplished in me.”

The answer she has not read yet was written at Baltimore today. Archbishop Carroll began by saying he was “deeply humiliated at being called on to give a final sanction to a rule of conduct and plan of religious government” for “many beloved spouses of Jesus Christ”. Then he approved it: “Under this impression, therefore, I shall and do now give my approbation to the constitutions exhibited to me by Father Dubois, after they shall receive the alterations suggested to and by him.” On the question she had put to him, he wrote: “Your own peculiar situation required special consideration on account of your dear children. It seemed to me that only general principles for you and your family’s case, should be now established, grounded on justice and gratitude.” And of the day the constitutions are adopted: “It will be like freeing you from a state in which it was difficult to walk straight, as you had no certain way in which to proceed.”