Salutations and happy New Year! How are you? I hope that you are very well and staying warm. January 4th is a momentous occasion for us to celebrate here in the United States.
Not only is it my Dad’s birthday but it is also the day in which we as Catholic Christians give thanks to God for the life of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Though she only lived forty-six years here on earth she made the most of every moment.
Born in New York in 1774, little Elizabeth was raised in a well to do family that worshiped in what would come to be known as the Episcopal Church. At the age of nineteen she married a good-hearted fellow and had five children together.
Her husband suffered from tuberculosis and so the family traveled across the ocean to Italy seeking a warmer climate. Sadly, within three years her husband died from complications of his illness. In God’s Providential Plan the family of her late husband’s business partner cared for Elizabeth and helped her to learn about the Catholic faith.
Not long after moving back to New York, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism. She was a generous woman who cared for the well being of others. She founded the first Catholic grade school, paving the way for hundreds of years of Catholic education here in the United States. She also established the Daughters of Charity, herself professing vows at the age of thirty-four. Throughout the remainder of her earthly life she was known as Mother Seton.
On January 4th, 1821 at the age of forty-six she died due to complications from tuberculosis, the same illness that had claimed the life of her late husband and at least one of their children. She was a holy woman of fervent prayer, a loving wife, a tender mother of five, a faith-filled widow who also had to bury two of her children, a foundress of the first Catholic grade school, and the foundress of the first American congregation for religious sisters.
On this day we celebrate her feast day and ask for her intercession in our own vocational journeys: Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us!