Pope Paul VI declares Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton a saint

VATICAN CITY, September 14, 1975 AD — Pope Paul VI canonized Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in St. Peter’s Square today. “Elizabeth Ann Seton is a Saint!” he told the crowd. His apostolic ministry authorized him to make the declaration, he said, “before all of you here present, before the holy Catholic Church, before our other Christian brethren in the world, before the entire American people, and before all humanity.”

He said it again with her full name. “Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton is a Saint! She is the first daughter of the United States of America to be glorified with this incomparable attribute!” So many Americans and Canadians had come that the Mass was moved out of St. Peter’s Basilica and into the square, where the crowd was put at between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty thousand. Episcopalian dignitaries were among those present. Four of her Sisters of Charity came forward to ask the Pope for the canonization, and Sister Kathleen O’Toole made the petition in English.

When the Pope canonizes someone he orders the whole Church to honour that person publicly as a saint. Before that, the Church has to find that the candidate practised virtue to a heroic degree. Miracles worked through the candidate’s prayers have to be proved too: one set for a beatification, and two more before a canonization can be taken up at all. Pope John XXIII beatified her on March 17, 1963 AD.

In giving her the greatest honour it can give, the Pope said, the Church was praising what she had done “as a woman — a wife, a mother, a widow, and a religious.”

He would not narrate her life. “We shall not now give a panegyric, that is, the narrative which glorifies the new Saint,” he said. “You already know her life and you will certainly study it further.”

The Episcopalian Communion of New York had awakened and fostered her religious sense, the Pope said, and he willingly recognized that merit. “Knowing well how much it cost Elizabeth to pass over to the Catholic Church, we admire her courage for adhering to the religious truth and divine reality which were manifested to her therein,” he said. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton “was always faithful in her esteem and affection for those from whom her Catholic profession had sadly separated her,” the Pope said. He called the Episcopalians’ presence a sign of better ecumenical relations to come.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York in 1774 AD and brought up in the Episcopalian Communion. At nineteen she married a merchant of the city, William Magee Seton, and had five children by him. The commercial crisis of 1798 AD ruined his firm, and his health broke down. In October 1803 AD he sailed for Italy with her and their eldest daughter, Anna Maria, hoping the mild climate at Pisa would help; the four younger children stayed in New York.

They were bound for the house of the Filicchi brothers, the Livorno merchants who were the family’s correspondents. Instead the three of them were refused landing and shut into the quarantine station on November 19, because yellow fever had broken out in New York and theirs was the first ship to bring word of it. William Seton was carried out to Pisa on December 19 and died on the morning of December 27, 1803 AD. He had left the five children, his widow wrote to her friend Julia Scott in Philadelphia, “wholly dependent on the bounty of those who have loved and respected him.” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was twenty-nine.

Philip Filicchi gave her books and a summary of Catholic doctrine and took her through it point by point until she was convinced it was true. She was received at the Catholic church of St. Peter on Barclay Street in New York in March 1805 AD, at thirty.

It cost her nearly everything she had left. Her relatives had been ready to support her and the children, but only if she stayed in the Episcopal Church. When she did not, they treated it as a disgrace to the family and cut her off, refusing money for her and the children. The Filicchi brothers settled an annuity of six hundred dollars a year on her.

At the close of the homily the Pope turned to Italian, and to Livorno. A deep interior struggle began in her there, he said, after William Seton died. The Spirit moved her, and her contact with the Filicchi family drew her on, until that struggle carried her to the Catholic faith. Her stay in Italy was her ora di Dio (hour of God).

The congregation she founded at Emmitsburg in 1809 AD, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, was the first religious congregation of women in the United States. The work of helping the poor and running parochial schools in America, the Pope said, “had this humble, poor, courageous and glorious beginning.” He sent her Sisters in the square a special greeting, and hoped their numbers and their fervor would increase.

And he told the Sisters to keep one sentence in mind. On January 2, 1821 AD, two days before she died at Emmitsburg, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had said to them: “Be children of the Church.” The Pope gave the Sisters those words as her heavenly testament. To them he added a phrase of his own: “for ever.”