Saint Who?
Saints Who Lost Loved Ones
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton
Widow and foundress († 1821)Feast: January 4
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born to a prosperous Episcopalian family in New York in 1774. Her mother died when she was three, and her father remarried. Elizabeth grew up with a sincere love for Christ. Sadly, her father’s second marriage crumbled, and Elizabeth’s stepmother rejected her.
At nineteen, Elizabeth married William Seton. For a time their large family lived with Elizabeth’s father, Doctor Bayley. When he fell ill, caring for poor immigrants and fever victims, Elizabeth stayed by his side, praying fervently.
Elizabeth’s sickly husband died while attempting to convalesce in Italy. The kindness and devotion of the Catholic friends with whom they stayed inspired her to consider entering the Church. When she became a Catholic, however, many relatives disowned her and the school she had started lost students. Then she was invited by a priest to start a girls’ school in Maryland, where she went on to establish a teaching community, the Sisters of Charity. She maintained her confidence in “the most amiable will of God,” even though many companions died in the rough conditions they lived in at first, including two of her own daughters. “The accidents of life separate us from our dearest friends,” she wrote, “but let us not despair…. The more we are united to [God] by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to him.”
Father of mercies, inspired by Saint Elizabeth
Ann Seton, help us to always love your most high,
most just, and most amiable will.
