Saint · Modern
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
1774–1821 · American Vincentian; Catholic schooling
Canonized 1975 by St. Paul VI, the first saint born in the United States; foundress of the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph's.
A New York Episcopalian, wife and mother of five, who nursed her husband through his death in quarantine at Leghorn in 1803 and there, among the Filicchi family, was drawn by the Real Presence and by the claim of the Church of the Apostles. She was received in 1805 against the protests of family and friends, and in 1809 founded at Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity on the rule of St. Vincent de Paul, with an academy and a free school that became the seed of American Catholic schooling. She buried two daughters and taught her sisters to do “the will of God, in the manner He wills it, and because it is His will.”
Why he matters: The mother of the American Catholic school and of a family of congregations of Sisters of Charity; her conversion letters are a clear account of why an educated Protestant came to the Catholic Church.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.