Archbishop of Baltimore is buried in his aunt St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's vault

EMMITSBURG, Maryland, October 9, 1877 AD — A special train from Baltimore stopped in front of St. Joseph’s in the valley below Emmitsburg at twenty past four this afternoon, carrying the body of Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley of Baltimore. As the sun went down, bishops, priests and members of the religious orders carried him in procession to the Sisters’ graveyard and laid him in the vault of his aunt, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. It was the burial he had asked for.

Archbishop Bayley was the son of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s half-brother, Guy Carleton Bayley, a child of her father’s second marriage. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was received into the Catholic Church in New York in March 1805 AD. Her relatives felt disgraced by her conversion and deserted her, refusing to support her or her children.

As a young man Archbishop Bayley was an Episcopal minister, the rector of a church in Harlem, New York. In 1841 AD he gave up the post and went to Rome. He was received into the Catholic Church there in April 1842 AD and ordained a priest in 1844 AD. He became the first Bishop of Newark in 1853 AD and Archbishop of Baltimore in 1872 AD. Illness forced him this year to ask for an assistant bishop, and he went abroad hoping to be cured. He was not, and in August he came home to Newark. He died there in his old room on October 3, at sixty-three.

Archbishop Bayley had often said he wanted to be buried near his aunt at St. Joseph’s, and he asked for it formally. Mother Euphemia Blenkinsop, the superior of the Sisters of Charity at Emmitsburg, had the small monument over St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s grave enlarged and rebuilt, so that the vault beneath it would be ready for his coffin.

Sixty-eight years earlier, on July 31, 1809 AD, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had brought her small community down into this valley, onto land a benefactor had given her. The Sisters made their graveyard in a little wood a few hundred yards from their house. Her sister-in-law Harriet Seton was buried there under an oak. When a second sister-in-law, Cecilia Seton, was buried there in 1810 AD, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to a friend that the children and the Sisters had planted the graves with wild flowers. She told the friend that “the little enclosure which contains them is the dearest spot to me on earth.” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton died at St. Joseph’s on January 4, 1821 AD. She was buried in that wood beside her sisters-in-law, her daughters and the first Sisters to die.

When the train arrived this afternoon, the Sisters of Charity, in their white headdresses, and the pupils of St. Joseph’s, in long white veils, stood in line along the south side of the avenue. The professors and students of Mount St. Mary’s College stood along the north side. A seminarian carrying the cross and the censer led the coffin up the avenue, followed by clergy in the vestments of their orders and seminarians in black cassocks and white surplices. Cardinal John McCloskey, the Archbishop of New York, walked among the mourners. Hundreds of mourners sang the Miserere (Have mercy on me, O God) as they walked.

The procession entered the graveyard, still full of autumn flowers, in the haze of the setting sun. It went on to the memorial chapel over St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s grave. The chapel stands in a grove of oaks behind the White House, the house at St. Joseph’s where she had lived. The Miserere ended at the monument. Cardinal McCloskey said the Church’s final prayers of absolution over the coffin. Then the coffin was lowered, and Archbishop Bayley was laid in the same vault as his aunt.