She waited for an answer that was already written

She might have to start all over

EMMITSBURG, Maryland, September 11, 1811 AD — Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton sent a letter to New York today. She said she might have to begin her life over again, away from this valley. “All is suspense, and I am thinking of preparing myself to recommence life in the world,” she wrote to Eliza Sadler.

She is thirty-seven, and a widow of New York. She runs the school and the group of sisters at St. Joseph’s, half a mile from the village of Emmitsburg. She started that group of sisters. She has led it since the sisters came down into the valley two years ago. Her three daughters live in the house with her. Her two sons are at the college on the mountain above the valley.

The next thing she wrote to Eliza Sadler was this: “Whatever happens, we are always under the protection of the Most High, the All-powerful.”

The rule with a catch in it

The sisters are about to take up a rule from France. St. Vincent de Paul wrote it there for his Daughters of Charity. It says a widow who joins has to settle her children’s affairs first. After that she has no claim left on their keeping or their direction. And St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is the legal guardian of five living children. So Father John Dubois, the sisters’ superior, and the other Sulpician fathers began talking over whether she could join.

At first the fathers thought she could not do both. She could not take a permanent place among the sisters and govern them too. Her five children depend on her for everything. While the rules were still being talked over, the superiors weighed a different plan. She could keep to a school apart from the sisters instead. The men they asked did not agree with each other.

So on September 5 she handed the whole question to Archbishop John Carroll. She gave him her own place in the house, and the rules with it. In his diocese, groups of sisters like hers answer to the Archbishop. So his word would settle the rules, and whether she could go on leading. She told him she had never had “a thought discordant” with the new rules. She told him too that one person’s own case does not count for much when the good of many is at stake. Then she set her limit: “you know I would gladly make every sacrifice you think consistent with my first and inseparable obligations as a mother.”

The answer was already written

While she was writing that she did not know, the Archbishop was writing his answer at Baltimore. He headed it September 11, 1811 AD. It had not reached her.

He began by saying he was “deeply humiliated at being called on to give a final sanction to a rule of conduct and plan of religious government” for “many beloved spouses of Jesus Christ”. Then he approved the rules: “Under this impression, therefore, I shall and do now give my approbation to the constitutions exhibited to me by Father Dubois, after they shall receive the alterations suggested to and by him.”

And on her own question he wrote: “Your own peculiar situation required special consideration on account of your dear children. It seemed to me that only general principles for you and your family’s case, should be now established, grounded on justice and gratitude.”

Of the day the rules are adopted, he wrote: “It will be like freeing you from a state in which it was difficult to walk straight, as you had no certain way in which to proceed.”