Too many people came, so the Mass moved outdoors

VATICAN CITY, September 14, 1975 AD — So many Americans and Canadians had come that the Mass was moved out of St. Peter’s Basilica and into the square. The crowd there was put at between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand people. Pope Paul VI told them: “Elizabeth Ann Seton is a Saint!”

Then he said it again with her whole name. “Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton is a Saint! She is the first daughter of the United States of America to be glorified with this incomparable attribute!”

A ship nobody would let in

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York and brought up in the Episcopalian Church, not the Catholic Church. At nineteen she married a New York merchant, William Magee Seton. They had five children.

In 1798 AD business went bad all over America, and his firm was ruined. Then his health broke down. In October 1803 AD he sailed for Italy, hoping the mild weather at Pisa would help him. His wife and their eldest daughter, Anna Maria, went with him, and the four younger children stayed in New York.

They were going to the house of the Filicchi brothers, merchants at Livorno who did business with the family. But the three of them were not allowed to land. Yellow fever had broken out in New York, and their ship was the first to bring the news. On November 19 they were shut into the quarantine station.

On December 19 William Seton was carried out to Pisa. He died on the morning of December 27, 1803 AD. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was twenty-nine. She wrote to her friend Julia Scott in Philadelphia that he had left the five children to live on the kindness of people who had loved and respected him.

The price of one decision

In Italy, Philip Filicchi gave her books about what Catholics believe. He took her through it point by point, until she was sure it was true. In March 1805 AD she became a Catholic at the church of St. Peter on Barclay Street in New York. She was thirty.

It cost her nearly everything she had left. Her relatives had been ready to look after her and the children, but only if she stayed in the Episcopal Church. When she became a Catholic instead, her relatives treated it as a disgrace to the family and cut her off. They would not give her money for the children. The Filicchi brothers sent her six hundred dollars a year.

In 1809 AD she started a group of sisters at Emmitsburg, in Maryland, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s. It was the first group of religious women in the United States.

Sisters from that group were in the square this morning, and Pope Paul VI sent them a special greeting. He said that the work of helping the poor and running parish schools in America “had this humble, poor, courageous and glorious beginning.”

At the end he gave the sisters one sentence of hers to keep. On January 2, 1821 AD, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had said to them: “Be children of the Church.” She died at Emmitsburg two days later. The Pope added two words of his own: “for ever.”