Five children — and a rule made for women with none

EMMITSBURG, Maryland, September 5, 1811 AD — Five children. One mother. And a rule written in France for women who have none.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton started the house of sisters in this valley. This week she sent a letter down to Baltimore, to Archbishop John Carroll. She asked him to decide two things: whether she may belong to the sisters at all, and whether she may go on leading them. She did not argue her own side. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is thirty-seven, and a widow of New York. She heads the school and the sisterhood at St. Joseph’s, half a mile from the village of Emmitsburg.

The rule came from France

St. Vincent de Paul wrote the rule in France, in the seventeenth century, for his Daughters of Charity. It says that a widow who joins must settle her children’s affairs first. After that she has no further claim on looking after them. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton has five children, and she is their guardian in law. She has said she will take on nothing that cuts across what she owes them.

Cut off, and three thousand miles from home

Her husband, William Magee Seton, died in Italy on December 27, 1803 AD. She was twenty-nine. She had five children, no money, and three thousand miles of sea between her and home. On March 14, 1805 AD she was received into the Catholic Church. It happened at St. Peter’s in Barclay Street, in New York. Her family back in New York had offered to go on supporting her, on one condition: that she stay in the Episcopal Church. When she became a Catholic, they cut her off.

The Filicchi brothers of Leghorn, Filippo and Antonio, paid to school her two sons. They had taken her family in when her husband died in Italy. She sailed for Baltimore with her children in June 1808 AD. She made her vows the following March 25, and she has been called Mother ever since. On July 31, 1809 AD she and the first sisters came down into this valley. She still wears the black she put on for her husband at Livorno.

Three daughters here, two sons on the mountain

Her three daughters are here at St. Joseph’s: Anna Maria, Catherine and Rebecca. Her two sons, William and Richard, are at the college on the mountain above the valley. Father Dubois founded it. Anna Maria is the eldest of the five. She turned sixteen in May, and she lives in the house with her mother.

Parents have put about fifty children into the sisters’ charge. The sisters also teach poor children whose families cannot pay for schooling.

The rule fits everyone here but her

The part about widows touches no one else in the house. Father John Dubois, who is in charge of the sisters, and the other Sulpician fathers have been going over whether she may belong. They have been going through the constitutions too. Another plan is being talked about: that she keep to a school separate from the sisters. The people who have been asked do not agree with each other.

She wrote to Archbishop Carroll: “…now I cast all at the feet of the Adored, placing every consideration, and all my concerns, in your hands, as His representative, to decide my fate… an individual is not to be considered where a public good is in question.” In the same letter she asked that Father Dubois “hide nothing” from the Archbishop.

About her children she had written to a friend that year: “But my dear children have the first right which must ever remain inviolable.”

Archbishop Carroll has her letter and the constitutions now. The decision is his.