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Elizabeth Bayley Seton The Person Behind the Saint
(originally appeared in Seton weekly bulletin)
by Msgr. Thomas Sandi
(Click on a underlined category)
Among Elizabeth and William Seton’s neighbors at their first home, facing the battery, were the Alexander Hamiltons.
Elizabeth played the piano, spoke fluent French, and loved to skate on the Hudson and East Rivers, and to ride horses.
When Elizabeth was born August 28, 1774, only 30,000 people lived in New York.
Elizabeth’s maternal grandfather was an Episcopalian minister at St. Andrew’s Church on Staten Island.
When Elizabeth was only three, Catherine Bayley, her mother, died in childbirth.
An 18th century adult woman, Elizabeth stood only 4’ 10” tall.
Elizabeth’s favorite bible prayer was the Twenty-Third Psalm, which she had learned at the knee of her stepmother.
Elizabeth (19) and William Seton (25) were married by the Episcopal bishop of New York at the home of her sister on John Street.
Elizabeth and William entertained George Washington at a birthday ball in their New York home.
Elizabeth’s five children (“my darlings”) were all baptized at Trinity (Episcopal) Church: Ann Maria, William Jr., Richard, Catherine and Rebecca.
A photograph of Elizabeth Seton’s cameo portrait was used as a cover of the New York Times Magazine on Canonization Sunday, January 4, 1975. A copy of that cover is on display in the church vestibule.
The hand-carved, spiral staircase that once graced the first home of Elizabeth and William, facing Battery Park, is now in Gracie Mansion, official residence of the Mayor of New York City.
Elizabeth’s father, Dr. Richard Bayley, was a London-educated surgeon, the Professor of Anatomy at King’s College (present-day Columbia University), and the first Health Officer of the Port of New York.
Elizabeth’s baptismal certificate was destroyed in the fire that destroyed Trinity Church located at Broadway and Wall Street.
From age eleven to seventeen, Elizabeth lived in the nation’s capitol—New York City.
Elizabeth’s husband inherited a lucrative shipping business—Seton and Maitland—which had its sea lanes interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars. The Setons had to declare bankruptcy within ten years of their marriage.
Before Elizabeth Bayley married, she was so associated with caring for the poor, she was often called the “Protestant Sister of Charity” by her fellow parishioners at New York’s Trinity Church.
From a very early age, Elizabeth wore a crucifix around her neck, unlike other young Protestant women who might wear a simple cross.
Three prominent American churchmen profoundly influenced Elizabeth’s life before and after she founded the Sisters of Charity: Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, Bishop Jean-Louis Cheverus soon-to-be Boston’s archbishop and John Dubois, soon-to-be archbishop of New York.
Elizabeth became a wife at nineteen, a widow at 30, a Catholic at 31, and a founding head of the first women’s religious order in America—the Sisters of Charity.
William Seton, Elizabeth’s husband, was a prominent shipping businessman. A few masts from his ships were used as decoration at the boarding house next to the Seton home on State Street. They are still visible across the street fro the Staten Island ferry port.
Elizabeth Bayley was born in New York. The Bayleys had English roots; the Setons were Scots. You can see the family crests in the church vestibule above the literature racks.
Elizabeth was always concerned for the well being of the poor, especially children. As a twenty three year old wife, she joined the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Small Children in New York City.
As an adolescent Elizabeth admired the “pretty bonnets” of the Quakers. As a 29-year old widow, she would adopt the widow’s bonnet in Italy, and in 1808, it would become an integral part of the habit of the new Sisters of Charity she founded.
Elizabeth refers to herself in her letters as “Eliza”; she was called “Betsy” by close friends.
The personal bible Elizabeth treasured and in which she wrote many marginal notes was the second bible to be printed in the newly formed United States.
Four years after William Seton and Elizabeth Bayley were married, his father died, and the couple were forced to move into the his family residence to take care of William’s six, orphaned brothers and sisters—all under the age of eighteen.
Elizabeth and William Seton co-hosted a glittering ball for the sixty-fifth birthday of former president George Washington.
Elizabeth’s father, Dr. Richard Bayley, died of typhus in 1801, and was buried in the grave of her mother’s family [the Charltons] at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Churchyard on Staten Island.
William Seton’s Florentine business partners the Filicchis, were also friends, and would prove critical to Elizabeth’s conversion to Catholicism after William’s death of tuberculosis in 1803.
On his deathbed in Livorno Italy, Elizabeth’s husband, William, a nominal Christian, made an explicit act of faith because of Elizabeth’s Christian example and love.
At age 31 years of age, Elizabeth was received in to the Catholic Church by Father Matthew O’Brien in the sole Catholic Church in New York City, St. Peter’s, Barclay Street.
Elizabeth was confirmed by Bishop John Carroll, the former Jesuit and first American bishop. His cousin, Maryland politician, Charles Carroll, was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Anti-Catholicism was rampant in New York City at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and after Elizabeth became a Catholic (March 1805), her relatives and friends accused her of betraying her family, her five children, her class and her (Episcopal) religion. Rumors even spread about her “corrupting the young with Romanism.” A widow with five children, she was cut out of the family will and shunned.
In 1806, faced with ugly prejudice against Catholics, and abandoned by her family, Elizabeth accepted the invitation to open a school for girls near St. Mary’s College in Baltimore. Never returning to her native city, she would soon found the Sisters of Charity and profoundly change the Catholic Church in America.
Elizabeth’s sons were both American sailors: William, a USN Midshipman and eventually a Lieutenant; and Richard, a ship’s captain’s clerk.
Among the poor female pupils at Mother Seton’s St. Joseph Academy, the first American Catholic parochial school, were Protestants—a very innovative idea in the early 19th century.
Elizabeth had a very liberal education, counting among her favorite writers the likes of Francis Thompson, John Milton, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Elizabeth mother and father were of French- Irish (Charlton), and English ancestry (Bayley), respectively.
Far from considering herself the original Sister of Charity, Elizabeth often referred to her intimate friend, the Virgin Mary, as the “first Sister of Charity.”
Two of Elizabeth’s children predeceased her: Annina (16), and Rebecca (14)
As a young woman, Elizabeth used to go ice skating with her friends on the frozen Hudson River!
With virulent religious prejudice surrounding her on all sides, Elizabeth almost went to Canada, instead of Baltimore, to seek refuge as a new Catholic.
Elizabeth was a prodigious reader and writer. In addition to being a lifelong diarist, and an accomplished translator of French spiritual books, a composer of hymns, she famously adapted St. Ignatius Eucharistic prayer, Anima Christi and the biblical Magnificat.
The Emmitsburg, MD, farm land on which Mother Seton built the foundation of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph was donated to the Sisters by a wealthy, Philadelphia farmer and seminarian, Samuel Cooper. Mother Seton called the area “St. Joseph’s Valley.”
Elizabeth’s daughter, Catherine, who was the principal nurse to her dying mother, outlived all her siblings. Returning to New York City, she made peace with her Bayleys and Seton relatives, who had so scorned her mother, and became the first postulant of the Sister of Mercy. She died in 1891 just short of her 91st birthday.
The Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph, the first American Order of Women Religious was incorporated into Maryland in 1817, just four years before Mother Seton died.
The first American-born saint, and our patroness, Elizabeth Seton had only been a Catholic for the sixteen of her forty-six years of her life.
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