Two of America’s Best
As Americans, we love to watch the underdog raise himself up by his bootstraps and flourish: here are two American saints born into wealth who enabled this idea in paradoxical ways that only believers of the invisible world can understand. The heroines in our media and entertainment have always reached for more; these two heroines have done just that—and lived happily ever after.
(So many saintly men and women made America. The author hopes that the reader will understand that the heroines shared here are not so much a sign of preference, but rather a sign of great constraint. The venerated related here are those that bring a unique story and considerations to this day and age.)
St. Elizabeth Anne Seton: Wife, Mother, Foundress Immolated by Frequent Holocausts
An accomplished equestrian, writer of poetry, mother and wife,1 Elizabeth Ann Bailey Seton was born into the highest levels of colonial New York society. Her formation from her Episcopalian well-connected family made Elizabeth Ann an extremely well-rounded valiant woman. But when her spouse died, a business friend and a trip abroad changed her life. That life change would shape America in the 19th century.Elizabeth’s protestant
Elizabeth was born in New York City on August 28, 1774, in the era of the American Revolution. Her age witnessed the redcoats leaving and the Stars and Stripes newly flying amid fifes and drums. Loss marked life from an early age: she lost her mother and little sister at age three, but her father’s spiritual life gave the family much stability. A college professor of renown at Columbia University, he was also deeply religious. From him, Elizabeth learned to love the scriptures, especially the psalms, examined her conscience daily, and developed a deep love for humanitarian work. Her father would later remarry a lady whose family was connected to the Roosevelts. The deep affection within the family, combined with her strong father, kept Elizabeth anchored in the midst of her wealthy upbringing within the first families of America.
On January 25, 1794, Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, whom she loved dearly. A happy marriage led to a strong bond between her and her sister-in-law, Rebecca Seton. In her Elizabeth found the “friend of her soul,” and as they went about on missions of mercy they were called the “Protestant Sisters of Charity.”2
Waves of deep sorrow soon enveloped those sweet times. William developed tuberculosis while sorting out his father’s financial affairs, experiencing his sudden death and orphaned siblings. Elizabeth’s own dear father passed away. Stretched too thin, William’s own health wore down and doctors recommended a trip to Europe. In 1803, while dear Rebecca kept the Seton’s four younger children, William, Elizabeth, and their eldest daughter journeyed across the Atlantic to Tuscany, where the Filicchis, business friends, lived. William’s spirits waned, however, and despite Elizabeth’s heroic efforts to rally and encourage him, he passed away in Pisa within weeks of arriving in Italy. The Filicchis took Elizabeth and her daughter under their wing, befriending them during their time of grief. Old friends of late William, they offered the Catholic Faith as a consolation to the grieving widow’s heart.
During the time with this Catholic family “and in the churches of Italy Mrs. Seton first began to see the beauty of the Catholic Faith.” The convent life especially attracted her.3Accompanied by Mr. Antonio Filicchi, they returned in June 1804, to the fatherless family. Sorrowfully, Rebecca died a month later. This time of great suffering for Elizabeth and her children coupled with her time in Europe caused a “great spiritual perplexity.” She prayed constantly for light: “If I am right Thy grace impart still in the right to stay. If I am wrong Oh, teach my heart to find the better way.”4
Elizabeth’s Protestant spiritual leader tried to dissuade her from entertaining ideas of converting to Catholicism, while Filicchi presented the claims of the Faith. He also arranged a correspondence between Elizabeth and both Bishop Cheverus, the first Bishop of Boston, a survivor of the horrors of the French Revolution, and Bishop Carroll, the first Catholic Bishop of the United State of America. Filicchi’s true friendship and the religious correspondence clarified Elizabeth’s perplexities. She was baptized into the Catholic Church on Ash Wednesday, March 15, 1805, and received her first Holy Communion on March 25.
Elizabeth and her children hailed from prominent first families in the New York area, (she even knew Alexander Hamilton,5 one of the Founding Fathers of the United States). Yet in spite of these connections, Elizabeth’s conversion cut her off from any financial or social advantages since English-turned-American Colonial United States was deeply anti-Catholic. In addition to the heartbreak of the death of her dearest friends, husband William and sister-in-law Rebecca, Elizabeth’s own family tried to enact state legislation to drive her from New York because she sparked the conversion of her younger sister-in-law Cecilia Seton.
To make ends meet for her children, Elizabeth had started a school, but false rumors about her work circulated and resulted in its closure. Everywhere she turned seemed to be a closed door, with the exception of Filicchi sending her sons to college. At the suggestion of Bishop Dubourg (the same who asked Mother Barat’s Sisters to come to the Great Plains and St. Louis), Elizabeth founded a school for girls in Emmitsburg, Maryland, near Baltimore. Her sons went to college nearby, and her girls were able to go through the education she was making possible for other Catholic girls. For herself, the spiritual life that she longed for was more easily accessible.
She was drawn to religious life. Dedicated to the education of young souls, starting with her own children, Elizabeth soon began dressing in simple black clothes like some of the nuns she had seen in Italy. Others began joining her work. Her two sisters-in-law, Cecilia and Harriet Seton joined; soon the school was not only full of pupils but postulants seeking formation from their schoolmistress. In 1809 Mrs. Seton took her vows privately before both Archbishop Carroll and her daughter Anna. This began a new religious order: “Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, the first community for religious women established in the United States.”6 Modeled after the rules of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, it was approved by Archbishop Carroll in January 1812.
She was first a mother though, and her own warm words, backed up by her superior, sound even a little indulgent:
“[T]he dear ones have their first claim which must ever remain inviolate. Consequently, if at any period, the duties I am engaged in should interfere with those I owe to them, I have solemnly engaged with our good Bishop John Carroll, as well as my own conscience, to give the darlings their right, and to prefer their advantage in everything.”7
The growth of order began with two “holocausts,” that of her dear sisters-in-law: Harriet died in late 1809 and Cecilia in 1810.
Against her will, and despite the fact that she still had to care for her children, Elizabeth Anne Seton was elected as superior. The community grew, and further holocausts were asked. Mother Seton’s elder daughter Anne, a postulant, grew sick and after three months died, receiving her final vows on her death bed in 1812. Elizabeth conveyed her grief in these words:
“For three months after Nina [Anna] was taken, I was so often expecting to lose my senses and my head was so disordered that unless for the daily duties always before me I did not know much of what I did or what I left undone.”8
In 1813 Mother Seton and 17 other women made their vows and received the Sulpicians as the fathers of their communities. As their school for the well-to-do girls flourished, their work for the poor and orphans also prospered. The Sisters of Charity spread to Philadelphia. The order came full circle in New York and from then on spread, via near 10 mph bumpy horse-drawn carriage rides, to more than 30 dioceses across the country. By founding these schools Mother Seton was a pioneer of Catholic education in America.9
In the midst of her travel and formation work, Mother Seton was busy with her creative intellect. She found time to translate spiritual books from French. She wrote copiously in diaries and correspondence which reveal that during much of her religious life she was afflicted with a desolation of soul.10 Yet all accounts show that she accepted this purification and chose the road of the “cheerful man.”
One more holocaust, her youngest, Rebecca, would be asked of her before she herself died. “For nine weeks, Elizabeth held Rebecca day and night, ‘even eating my meal with one hand often behind her pillow while she rested on my knees—her pains could find no relief or solace but in her own poor Mother so happy to bear them with her.’ ”11 After much long-suffering, her youngest daughter Rebecca died of tuberculosis.12
Elizabeth was elected, against her will, for two more terms as mother superior. Then, afflicted with pulmonary affection, she died on January 4, 1821. She was survived by a daughter who would later become a remarkable religious, and two sons, one of whom would become a fine husband and father impactful children.13 Mother Seton became the first American-born citizen to be beatified (1963) and then canonized (1975).
From a wealthy socialite to nearly a beggar, she suffered heartbreak after heartbreak as she strove to care for her soul and the spiritual and temporal welfare of her children. Through this suffering, Elizabeth, in her docility to the will of God, achieved a type of immortality as a mother and an educator. Author Carrie Gress writes “Mother Seton never lost sight of her role as a true mother to all who came to her in need.”14 In the spirit of a mother, as an educator, Elizabeth planted the seeds of Catholic education in the United States, and founded the first congregation for women in the United State. Now “her legacy now includes religious congregations in the United States and Canada, whose members work on the unmet needs of people living in poverty in North America and beyond.”15 Elizabeth Ann Seton left all worldly possessions in converting to Catholicism, and yet she helped enable “a whole new world” in hearts and souls.
St. Katharine Drexel: Millionaire Servant to African Americans and Native Americans
St. Katharine Drexel was an heiress of great fortune, an American princess (complete with a stepmother), who learned at a young age how to show compassion and use her wealth as a tool. She gave it all up to pursue a new ideal and let her love encircle the African Americans and Native Americans in spite of degrading segregation and Protestant white supremacy.
Katharine’s life was similar to Elizabeth Anne Seton’s. Both grew up in wealthy families. Both lost their mothers. Both witnessed their fathers spending time in prayer, and their parents giving aid to others. Whereas Elizabeth was born into Protestantism, the Drexel family was one of the pillars of Catholicism in Philadelphia.
Katharine was the second child, born on November 26, 1858 to a wealthy Philadelphia family, Francis Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Katharine’s mother died 5 weeks after her birth. She and her older sister lived with family while her father grieved. He later remarried in 1860 to Emma Bouvier, who became a loving mother to the two girls and their new little sister. Together the family of five had a tight-knit but fruitful life. Francis looked at his money as a way of helping the common good and he quietly did much in Philadelphia to that end. Emma showed her daughters how to do the same, making visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and opening their house up regularly to aid the poor and needy. Katharine had the best of everything, including a religious education, travel, and a grand debut into society.
“But when she nursed her stepmother through a three-year terminal illness, she saw that all the Drexel money could not buy safety from pain or death, and her life took a profound turn.”16 Katharine wondered if Christ was calling her to the religious life. After her stepmother’s death, Katharine wrote to her old parish priest and spiritual director, Bishop O’Connor about it. “He advised her to “Think, pray and wait.”17
In 1885 her father suddenly died. The sisters inherited the family fortune, each of them coming into $7 million dollars. During this time, on “a trip to the Western part of the United States, Katharine, as a young woman, saw the plight and destitution of the native Indian-Americans.”18 In Protestant America, any person of color was commonly treated as inferior to the white man, regardless of metaphysical equality. To deny the metaphysical equality of another human is to break up the bonds of a loving society geared towards the common good. “This experience aroused her desire to do something specific to help alleviate their condition”19 and those of the African Americans as well.
In 1887 (St. Thérèse of Liseux would have been a young child in France at this time), her two sisters and she went to Rome on pilgrimage. There, Katharine and her sisters had a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. Katharine, kneeling at his feet, pleaded for a missionary priest to be sent to the Indians of the United States. The Pope responded: “Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?” Later, Katharine told her sisters “she did not know what the Pope meant and she was very frightened and sick.”20 What the pope was proposing was very different from the contemplative life she had begun to imagine.
During this period of discernment, Katharine began to give, as a layperson, in the area that pained her heart. With her sisters, she visited remote reservations with Msgr. Joseph Stephan, Director of the Catholic Bureau of Indian Missions and Bishop O’Connor. She “began building schools on the reservations, providing food, clothing and financial support.” Aware also of the suffering of the black people, she began to extend the same love to them.21 Bishop O’Connor finally agreed Katharine had a religious vocation, and almost commanded her to found a new order serving the Indians and Colored People. She was appalled at the thought. She did not think herself virtuous enough.
Her correspondence with Bishop O’Connor shows the struggle: “I know the privations, the trials, the temptations, and I ask myself, could I go through all these things in a manner suitable for edifying the religious of my order?” she asked. He replied, “I was never so sure of any vocation, not even my own, as I am of yours. If you do not establish the order in question, you will allow to pass an opportunity of doing immense service to the Church which may not occur again.” Towards the end of his letter, her director writes, “Even as a foundress, you will have your faults, but God not you will do the work. He often makes use of very weak instruments. The question is not will you be all you should be, but does God will you to be his instrument.”22
To aid in discernment, Katharine made a retreat which ended on the feast of St. Joseph. On March 19, 1889, she wrote: “It was only this morning that I could promise Our Lord to please Him by entering fully into your plan of founding an order. As long as I look on self, I cannot. Our Lord gives and will give me the grace always to look at Him.”23 To Bishop O’Connor she wrote, “The feast of Saint Joseph brought me the grace to give the remainder of my life to the Indians and the Colored.”24
On February 12, 1891, Katharine began a novitiate with the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh, with the understanding that in two years she would found her own order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. She would, she vowed, “be the mother and servant of these races.”25 Two years later, she received the religious habit and the name of Sister Mary Katharine. Others joined her; the motherhouse was established at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, Cornwell’s Height, Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Here St. Frances Cabrini would discuss with her friend, Sr. Mary Katharine, the need for her to travel to Rome in order to get her Order’s Rule approved.26
Sr. Katharine’s first two schools were in Virginia, one for black girls, and the other for black boys. Both were vocational schools to enable the children to become financially independent by the time they graduated. A school for Pueblo Children in New Mexico was next on the list followed by Xavier College (later Xavier University) in Louisiana in 1915. This Catholic University was the first and only all-black college and a pioneer first in co-education. The focus of this college was to train lay teachers to staff schools for black children in Louisiana.
Some met her work with hate. One of many warnings from the KKK threatened to harm those carrying out her mission:
“We want an end to services here,” read the sign nailed on a Catholic Church in Beaumont, Texas, in 1922 “We will not stand by while white priests consort with n—— wenches in the face of our families. Suppress it in one week or flogging with tar and feathers will follow.”27
In this era, which witnessed the Great War, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and is era that some of our grandparents can still recall, not all agreed with or understood Katharine’s work. These women in habits withstood the fearful, angry pressure of the American “caste system.” Outside of the South, Segregationists harassed her work, burning a school in Pennsylvania.28
Prudence was needed. Mother Katharine, seeing the dominating habit of segregation, made the decision not to admit black women to her convents “in part because laws in some Southern states would force them to house black and white nuns in segregated convents, and in part to avoid drawing worthy candidates away from two all-black religious orders already established.”29
For the daughter of a millionaire, she was an example of minimalism and fortitude. She traveled by train, tirelessly. Though her personal income through her father’s trust was $1000 a day, she lived most simply. She possessed the same pair of shoes for ten years and used items, such as pencils, down the erasers.
Mother Katharine remained vigilant yet realistic and detached. She was against segregation and yet accepted that things would probably not change within her time: she focused on the good she and her order could do instead of being derailed by perfection. Every request for money, she personally read, “often writing her decision on a note on the letter of inquiry.”30 Squabbles over details of management with the local priests and bishops were avoided because she kept to the order’s apostolate. By 1942 she had established a system of 40 mission centers and 23 rural schools in 13 states.
Sr. Katharine lived through three of America’s greatest wars: the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. She lived through times of great change: from horse and buggy and kerosene lamps to cars, planes, electricity, telephones, and television.
In 1935 Sister suffered a severe heart attack. She survived it, yet it forced her to slow down and become a powerful tool of prayer. The next 20 years became a passive time for her, dedicated to prayer at St. Elizabeth’s Convent. “Quiet, intense prayer from a small room overlooking the sanctuary” filled her days. “Small notebooks and slips of paper record her various prayers, ceaseless aspirations, and meditations.”31
She died there peacefully on March 3, 1955, at the age of 96. “At the time of her death, 501 members of her order were teaching in 63 schools and missions in 21 states.”32 Sr. Katharine outlived her two sisters, and per their father’s will, the remaining fortune was then distributed to the charities he had listed in the will. Sister Katharine’s cause for canonization was taken up less than 10 years after her death, and she was canonized on October 1, 2000, as the second American-born saint. “Today, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament remains a religious order devoted to the education and care of Native Americans and African Americans.”33
A parting word
St. Elizabeth Anne Seton and St. Katerina Drexel followed their hearts for the sake of the Greatest Good. Each bequeathed to their children a legacy of love and eternal glory. These heroic women did more than dream of a better world, a world without end: they believed in it, hoped in it, and gave it to others. Each lay down her life in the pursuit of making that world possible for others.
Endnotes:
1 “Biography of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton,” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church.
2 Bartholomew Randolph, “St. Elizabeth Ann Seton,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 13, published 1912.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Mary Farrow, “The ‘Hamilton’ Saint: Elizabeth Seton and the Ten-Dollar Founding Father,” The Pillar, published March 1, 2021.
6 “The Life of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton.” Seton Shrine.
7 Carrie Gress, “The Power of Motherhood in the Mission of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton,” Seton Shrine, May 8, 2021.
8 Ibid.
9 Betty Ann McNeil, “Historical Perspectives on Elizabeth Seton and Education: School is My Chief Business,” Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 2006.
10 Bartholomew Randolph, “St. Elizabeth Ann Seton,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 13, published 1912.
11 Carrie Gress, “The Power of Motherhood in the Mission of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton,” Seton Shrine, May 8, 2021.
12 “Full biography of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton,” Seton Shrine.
13 Ibid., Pat McNamara, “The Setons, the Bayleys, and the Roosevelts,” McNamara’s Blog, January 7, 2011.
14 Carrie Gress, “The Power of Motherhood in the Mission of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton,” Seton Shrine, May 8, 2021.
15 “The Life of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton,” Seton Shrine.
16 Franciscan Media, “Saint Katharine Drexel,” Franciscan Media, March 3, 2021.
17 “St. Katharine Drexel, Lay Apostolate,” Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul.
18 “Katherine Drexel (1858-1955),” Vatican News.
19 Ibid.
20 “Lay Apostolate,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
21 Ibid., “St. Katherine Drexel,” National Women’s Hall of Fame.
22 “St. Katherine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed April 27, 2022.
23 Ibid.
24 Franciscan Media, “Saint Katharine Drexel,” Franciscan Media, March 3, 2021.
25 “Katherine Drexel,” Your Dictionary.
26 “Feast Day of St. Katharine Drexel, Friend of Mother Cabrini,” Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, March 3, 2015.
27 Thomas Olmstead, “Overturning Racial Prejudice: Mother Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament,” March 3, 2015.
28 Franciscan Media, “Saint Katharine Drexel,” Franciscan Media, March 3, 2021.
29 “Our Patron Saint – St. Katharine Drexel,” St. Katherine Drexel Mission.
30 “Katherine Drexel,” Your Dictionary.
31 Franciscan Media, “Saint Katharine Drexel,” Franciscan Media.
32 “Katherine Drexel,” Your Dictionary.
33 “St. Katherine Drexel,” National Women’s Hall of Fame.
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