St. Elizabeth Ann Seton likens her soul to a bird in a net

NEW YORK, September 29, 1804 AD — On the afternoon of September 27, 1804 AD, at her house in New York, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton sent her five children out to play. Then she went into her little closet, a small private room, and knelt to work out what she ought to do. A letter had just come from Antonio Filicchi, the Italian merchant who had brought her home from the port of Leghorn, offering to send her and the children back to Italy. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote back to Antonio that day. She thanked him and said she could not give an answer yet.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was thirty, and nine months a widow. Her husband, William Magee Seton, a New York merchant, had died in Italy at the end of December. She spent the winter at Leghorn with Antonio’s family, whose firm had done business with the Setons for a generation. She reached New York in June with five children, no fortune, and a high opinion of the Catholic faith she had seen in Italy.

Since then two men had been pulling her in opposite directions. Her pastor, the Rev. John Henry Hobart of the Episcopal Church, wanted her to stay in the church she had been raised in. Hobart had made St. Elizabeth Ann Seton promise to read a set of books arguing against Catholic teaching, under his guidance, before she took any further step. Antonio wanted her in the Catholic Church. He had sent her questions to Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, and the bishop’s answer had reached her through Antonio in August. But she could not yet take the first step. On September 19 she had written to Antonio that to be received she would have to declare she believed everything the Council of Trent taught, and that if she said it now, God would know she was lying. Becoming a Catholic would also cost her. Most of her friends and relatives were already turning away from her over it, and in the New York society she moved in, becoming a “Papist” meant moral and social disgrace.

Early in September Hobart came to see her. He was so out of patience that St. Elizabeth Ann Seton did not show him Bishop Carroll’s letter. She wrote that the visit was short and painful for both of them.

In the two hours since Antonio’s letter of September 20 arrived, she had read it “over many times.” She described the afternoon to Antonio in her reply: “This afternoon, after dismissing the children to play, I went to my knees in my little closet, to consider what I should do and how my sacred duty would direct.”

On her knees she weighed two courses. The first was to go back to Hobart’s books. She wrote that she could not face those books again, because they held “all the black accusations” against the Catholic Church. The second was to go over the Catholic books again, but she already knew every page. That left prayer. She wrote to Antonio that her mind seemed to go on praying through her short sleeps, and that her eyes were “really almost blind with incessant tears.” She wrote that the children had noticed: “My children say, ‘Poor mamma,’ continually, and really are better than they were, that they may not add to my sorrow.”

Then she came to Antonio’s offer. He had proposed sending her and the children back to Italy so that she might find again the peace of soul and mind she had lost. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote that she could say neither yes nor no: “To answer you fully now would not be proper in any way, especially as you see my poor soul is still more unsettled and perplexed from day to day, not from any failure in its prayers or entreaties to God, which are rather redoubled than neglected, but, like a bird struggling in a net, it cannot escape its fears and tremblings.”

Two days later, on September 29, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, she added to the same letter: “This day has been a feast-day to the children and a holiday from school, that I might give the greatest portion of the hours to God.” She spent part of the day telling the children about the angels and about St. Michael driving Lucifer out of heaven. After prayers the children always stayed on their knees until she had blessed each of them with the sign of the cross.

Her husband, William, used to call out Antonio’s name. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote in the same letter: “I could cry out now as my poor Seton used to do, Antonio, Antonio, Antonio; but call back the thought, and my soul cries out, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Antonio had told her not to neglect the lives of the saints, and she wrote back that what little time she had for reading went to them. In one of them she read that St. Augustine had spent a long time wavering between error and truth. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote down what she said to herself when she read it: “Be patient, God will bring you home at last.”