Sitting in one church, she prayed toward another

NEW YORK, September 1804 AD — In September 1804 AD, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton went to the service at St. Paul’s, her own Episcopal church in New York. She spent the service turned toward another church, praying toward it. That church was St. Peter’s in Barclay Street. It was the Catholic church in the next street, and the only one in New York.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was a widow of thirty with five children. Her husband, William Magee Seton, had died in Italy on December 27, 1803 AD. He left her without money. In Italy, her friend Amabilia Filicchi had taken her into a Catholic church in Florence. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton came home to New York in June, and she had to decide which church was true.

Her relatives were ready to support her and the children, but only if she stayed an Episcopalian. Among the people she knew, becoming a “Papist,” as they called a Catholic, meant being shamed and looked down on.

Her pastor, the Rev. John Henry Hobart, worked harder than anyone to keep her from becoming a Catholic. In July he sent her a note. It asked how she could ever think of leaving the church she was baptized in. That night she wrote to Amabilia, back in Italy. She said the question made her smile, “for it is like saying that wherever a child is born, and wherever its parents place it, it will find the truth.”

Mr. Hobart kept bringing her books. She told Amabilia the books left her with “a sad weariness over life.” Early in September Mr. Hobart came to see her, and by then he had lost all patience. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton called the visit “short and painful on both sides.”

Twenty times in one service

She went to St. Paul’s anyway, to keep the peace and do what was expected of her. But Catholics believe that God is present in the consecrated host. She wrote to Amabilia about her side pew: “Yet I got into a side pew which turned my face towards the Catholic church in the next street, and twenty times found myself speaking to the blessed sacrament there, instead of looking at the naked altar before me, or minding the routine of prayers.”

She cried in the pew, the way she had cried in Florence: “Tears plenty, and sighs as silent and as deep as when I first entered your blessed church of the Annunciation in Florence.” She wrote that she had one wish: “the one only desire to see the way most pleasing to my God, whichever that way is.”

Mr. Hobart argued against that belief. In the same letter, she told Amabilia the question he had put to her: “How can you believe that there are as many gods as there are millions of altars and tens of millions of sacred hosts all over the world?” She thought of the miracle in the Gospel of the loaves and fishes and asked who was acting there: “The same God who fed so many thousands with the little barley loaves and fishes, multiplying them of course in the hands that distributed them?” Then she answered her own question: “The thought leads me to look straight at my God, and I see that nothing in it is so very hard to believe, since it is He who does it.”

A bird in a net

On September 27 she sent the children out to play. She knelt in a small room of the house to pray over what she ought to do. She could not face Mr. Hobart’s books again. She knew every page of her books of Catholic teaching, so she turned to prayer. That day she wrote to Amabilia’s husband, Antonio Filicchi. She told him her soul was “like a bird struggling in a net, it cannot escape its fears and tremblings.”

On March 14, 1805 AD, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was received into the Catholic Church. It happened in a small room beside the sanctuary of St. Peter’s in Barclay Street.