Elizabeth Seton
Subtitle
American Saint
In 1975, two centuries after her birth, Pope Paul VI canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton, making her the first saint to be a native-born citizen of the United States in the Roman Catholic Church. Seton came of age in Manhattan as the city and her family struggled to rebuild themselves after the Revolution, explored both contemporary philosophy and Christianity, converted to Catholicism from her native Episcopalian faith and built the St. Joseph’s Academy and Free School in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Her story was an exemplary early American life of struggle, ambition, questioning and faith, and in this flowing biography, Catherine O’Donnell has given Seton her due.
O’Donnell places Seton squarely in the context of the dynamic and risky years of the American and French Revolutions and their aftermath. Just as Seton’s dramatic life was studded with hardship, achievement and grief, so were the social, economic, political and religious scenes of the early American Republic in which she lived. O’Donnell provides the reader with a strong sense of this remarkable woman’s intelligence and compassion as she withstood her husband’s financial failures and untimely death, undertook a slow conversion to Catholicism and struggled to reconcile her single-minded faith with her respect for others’ different choices. The fruit of her labors were the creation of a spirituality that embraced human connections as well as divine love and the American Sisters of Charity, part of an enduring global community with a specific apostolate for teaching.
Bio
Catherine O'Donnell is associate professor of history at Arizona State University's School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and she writes about religion, culture and politics in early America and the Atlantic World.
Praise for this book
Elizabeth Seton" is a thrilling achievement. Beginning in late eighteenth-century New York, O'Donnell makes superb use of an extraordinary archive to trace Seton's journey as a young woman in an affluent merchant family, a mother, a widow, a convert, a founder of a religious order, an institution builder and, eventually, a saint. The result is a compelling portrait of an American coming-of-age in the first decades after independence and a major contribution to our understanding of Catholicism during an enlightened age.
John T. McGreevy, author American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global
The manifest appeal of "Elizabeth Seton" stems not only from Catherine O’Donnell’s beautifully crafted narrative with its poetic diction, but also the display of the exuberance of Elizabeth’s temperament, talents, holiness, and the intensity of her love of God.
Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., editor Friendship of My Soul: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Ann Seton
