St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, in her pew, prays toward the Catholic church

NEW YORK, September 1804 AD — This month Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widow of thirty with five children, went to the service at her own Episcopal church, St. Paul’s. She spent it turned toward St. Peter’s in Barclay Street, the Catholic church in the next street and the only one in New York. She described the day in a letter to Amabilia Filicchi, the Italian friend at Leghorn (Livorno) who had taken her into a Catholic church in Florence in January. In the same letter she answered her pastor’s argument against the Catholic belief that God is present in the consecrated host.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had come home to New York in June. Her husband, William Magee Seton, had died in Italy on December 27, 1803 AD, and left her without money. Now she had to decide which church was true, and the people she depended on had already decided for her. Her Episcopal pastor, the Rev. John Henry Hobart, worked harder than anyone to keep her from becoming a Catholic. Her relatives were ready to support her and the children, but only if she remained an Episcopalian. In the society she moved in, becoming a “Papist” meant moral and social disgrace.

The Filicchis were the Catholic family at Leghorn who had looked after her through her months in Italy. On a visit to Florence, on Sunday, January 8, Amabilia, the wife of Antonio Filicchi, took her into the chapel of the Santissima Annunziata. On April 8 Antonio sailed with her for America. Amabilia stayed behind at Leghorn.

On July 19 Mr. Hobart sent her a note asking how she could ever think of leaving the church in which she was baptized. That night St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to Amabilia that the question made her smile, “for it is like saying that wherever a child is born, and wherever its parents place it, it will find the truth.” Mr. Hobart kept bringing her books. On August 28 she told Amabilia that the books had left her with “a sad weariness over life.” Early this month Mr. Hobart came to see her for the first time since Antonio had left for Boston. The pastor had lost all patience with her, and she called the visit “short and painful on both sides.”

In her September pages to Amabilia, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton said a kind letter had just come from Antonio in Boston. She wrote that Antonio “would not have been well pleased to see me in St. Paul’s church to-day.” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton went to St. Paul’s anyway, to keep the peace and do what was expected of her: “peace and persuasion about proprieties, etc., prevailed.” She told Amabilia where she sat: “Yet I got into a side pew which turned my face towards the Catholic church in the next street, and twenty times found myself speaking to the blessed sacrament there, instead of looking at the naked altar before me, or minding the routine of prayers.” She cried in the pew as she had at the Annunziata in Florence: “Tears plenty, and sighs as silent and as deep as when I first entered your blessed church of the Annunciation in Florence.” She wrote that behind the tears was a single wish: “the one only desire to see the way most pleasing to my God, whichever that way is.”

Then she gave Amabilia the argument Mr. Hobart had put to her: “How can you believe that there are as many gods as there are millions of altars and tens of millions of sacred hosts all over the world?” She turned to the Gospel miracle of the loaves and asked who was acting there: “The same God who fed so many thousands with the little barley loaves and fishes, multiplying them of course in the hands that distributed them?” And she answered her own question: “The thought leads me to look straight at my God, and I see that nothing in it is so very hard to believe, since it is He who does it.”

She told Amabilia what the worship of her own church left her with: “They tell me I must worship Him now in spirit and truth; but my poor spirit very often goes to sleep or roves about like an idler for want of some thing to fix its attention.”

On September 27 St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to Antonio. That afternoon she had sent the children out to play and knelt in a small room of the house to pray over what she ought to do. She could not face Mr. Hobart’s books again, and she had read her books of Catholic teaching so often that she knew every page, so she turned to prayer. She told Antonio that her soul was “like a bird struggling in a net, it cannot escape its fears and tremblings.”

On All Saints’ Day she wrote to Amabilia again: “I do not get on, Amabilia,—can not cast the balance for the peace of this poor soul.” On March 14, 1805 AD, in a small room beside the sanctuary of St. Peter’s in Barclay Street, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton made her profession of faith and was received into the Catholic Church.