Elizabeth Ann Seton

Elizabeth Ann Seton was a New York Episcopalian, married with five children. In 1803 she sailed to Italy with her husband, William, who was gravely ill; he died at Livorno soon after they arrived. She remained some months with the Catholic family of the Filicchis, who introduced her to their faith, and she kept a journal for a friend at home. This account, with her journals, is drawn from Charles I. White’s Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton (1879). Of a visit to a church in Florence she wrote:

Passing through a curtain, my eye was struck with hundreds of persons … that kind of soft and distant music which lifts the mind to a foretaste of heavenly pleasures called up in an instant every dear and tender idea of my soul … I sank on my knees in the first place I found vacant, and shed a torrent of tearsElizabeth Ann Seton, journal, in C. I. White, Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton (1879)

I need not tell you that I said our dear service with my whole soul, as far as in its agitation I could recollect.Elizabeth Ann Seton, journal, in White (1879)

She returned to New York in 1804. After a period of study and difficulty she was received into the Catholic Church at St Peter’s Church, Barclay Street, on 14 March 1805. She later founded the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph at Emmitsburg, Maryland, and is counted among the founders of Catholic parochial schooling in the United States. She was born in New York in 1774 and died at Emmitsburg in 1821; she was canonized in 1975, the first native-born citizen of the United States to be so honored.