A mother gives her children a school holiday to pray

NEW YORK, September 29, 1804 AD — On the afternoon of September 27, 1804 AD, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton sent her five children out to play. Then she went into her closet, a small private room in her house in New York. She knelt down to work out what she ought to do.

A letter had just come from Antonio Filicchi, the Italian merchant who had brought her home from the port of Leghorn. He was offering to send her and the children back to Italy. In the two hours since it arrived, she had read it “over many times.”

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was thirty. Her husband, William Magee Seton, had died in Italy nine months before. She spent that winter at Leghorn with Antonio’s family, whose business had worked with the Setons’ business for many years. In June she came home to New York with five children and no fortune. She also brought home a high opinion of the Catholic faith she had seen in Italy.

Since then two men had been pulling her in opposite directions. Her pastor, the Rev. John Henry Hobart, wanted her to stay in the Episcopal Church she had been raised in. Hobart made her promise to read a set of books arguing against Catholic teaching before she took any further step. Antonio wanted her to become a Catholic. Early in September Hobart came to see her, and he was out of patience with her. She wrote that the visit was short and painful for both of them.

But she could not become a Catholic yet. First she would have to say she believed everything the Council of Trent taught. On September 19 she wrote to Antonio that she could not say that yet, because God would know she was lying.

The step would cost her, too. Most of her friends and relatives were already turning away from her over it. Among the people she knew in New York, becoming a Catholic was thought shameful.

On her knees she weighed two ways of finding her answer. The first was to go back to Hobart’s books. She couldn’t face them again, because they held “all the black accusations” against the Catholic Church. The second was to read the Catholic books again, but she already knew every page. That left prayer. She told Antonio that her mind seemed to go on praying even through her short sleeps. Her eyes, she wrote, were “really almost blind with incessant tears.”

Her children had noticed. They were behaving better than before, so that they would not make her any sadder. She wrote to Antonio: “My children say, ‘Poor mamma,’ continually, and really are better than they were, that they may not add to my sorrow.”

Then she came to Antonio’s offer. He wanted to send her and the children back to Italy. There, he hoped, she could find again the peace of soul and mind she had lost. She wrote to him that she could not tell him yes or no. She wrote that her soul was more unsettled and confused every day, and that “like a bird struggling in a net, it cannot escape its fears and tremblings.”

No school on St. Michael’s day

She did not finish the letter that day. Two days later came September 29, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel. That day she added to the letter: “This day has been a feast-day to the children and a holiday from school, that I might give the greatest portion of the hours to God.”

She spent part of that day telling the children about the angels. She told them how St. Michael drove Lucifer out of heaven. After prayers, the children always stayed on their knees until she had blessed each one with the sign of the cross.

Antonio had told her not to forget to read the lives of the saints. What little time she had for reading went to those books. In one of them she read that St. Augustine had spent a long time torn between wrong beliefs and the truth. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote down what she told herself when she read it: “Be patient, God will bring you home at last.”