Transcript: "The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 4" with Catherine O’Donnell
Interviewer: The Catholic Church is the United States' second-largest religious grouping after Protestantism and the country's largest church or religious denomination. As of 2018, 23% of Americans are Catholic. This is startling when you realize that at the beginning of the American experiment in self-government, religions and their adherence were almost completely Protestant and vehemently and even violently sometimes - anti-Catholic. The story of this transformation is critical to understanding the American religious landscape, which is another way of saying, "It is critical to understanding America." And often the best way to understand a historical movement or an event is to learn about individual actors on history's stage. Importantly, as historian Ann Braude of Harvard Divinity School wrote, "Women's history is American religious history." One prominent female Catholic in American history is Elizabeth Ann Seton who began the Sisters of Charity, the first religious community of women founded in the United States, and who was the aunt of Seton Hall University's founder, Bishop James Roosevelt Bailey.
Today, to help us understand the life and times of Elizabeth Ann Seton in our quest to comprehend America is Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint which was awarded the Distinguished Book Award by the Conference on the History of Women Religious, as well as the Biography Prize from the Catholic Press Association. Her primary research interests include early American history, culture, and religion. She is also the author of Men of Letters in The Early Republic and many articles appearing in venues including the William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of The Early Republic, Early American Literature, and The US Catholic Historian. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early American history and the Atlantic World.
It is hoped that our time together today will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will come to better understand how revolutionary and indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its future. Join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words – “Almighty God hath created the mind free”, by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, after that lengthy monologue, thank you for being with us today.
Catherine: Thank you.
Interviewer: First, Catherine, tell us how you became interested in Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Catherine: I think there are two paths to that. So I did-- I did grow up Catholic. I always loved the stories of the saints. But I like the medieval ones, you know, the ones that smelled like roses after they died, the sort of thing. And it was when I was actually teaching, university, this was at William and Mary and I was teaching a course on Early American Biography and I let students choose their person. And I was teaching in Virginia, so, you know, there were five James Madisons and Jeffersons, and one young woman said she wanted to write about Mother Seton. And I just thought, "Wait a minute. She's filed in my head with the Catholic Saints, not with Early American History." But, of course, she was both and I was startled to discover there was not a lot of modern scholarship on her and that's where the journey began.
Interviewer: Okay, fair enough. Now, Catherine, for our listeners, many of whom are not Catholic, why should understanding Elizabeth Seton be of interest to them or stated differently - why would it make them better citizens of the United States to learn about the life and times of Elizabeth Ann Seton?
Catherine: Interesting. So I confess that I think that learning about anyone deeply is a good step toward being a better citizen, in that it helps to build community to understand other people's perspectives and experiences. Seeing in particular, I would make two, kind of, maybe almost competing claims for her. So, first, she was an adventurer. She was willing to change her mind, to try new things, to irritate people that she knew by thinking very differently from them and that's kind of admirable and necessary. At the same time, she took very seriously the need to live in harmony with others and she constantly thought about how to reconcile her single-minded pursuit of truth with her really sincere wish to be compassionate and gentle with other people. So if we could kind of do both of those things, I feel that that would be useful as citizens.
Interviewer: Sure. That's, that's a great-- that's a great answer. Now the final question to frame our discussion before we get into the nitty-gritty. You write that during the last half of the 18th-century, "The rhetoric and pageantry of New York's anti-popery [or anti-Catholicism] outstripped true persecution." Catherine, can you describe for us the religious and religious freedom landscapes of New York City during this time, which I think is essential for us to understand Elizabeth Seton?
Catherine: I agree. It is essential. So, New York has this fascinating history. It's first a Dutch colony and the Dutch Reformed Church is in power than it's an English colony and Anglicanism, what would become Episcopalianism is powerful. And Anglicanism was officially the established religion during Seton's childhood, early childhood, and just before. But, New York was always this sort of quilt and you very early begin to have Methodists and Baptists there as those denominations and Evangelicalism begins to flourish. You have Quakers whom Seton admired when she was young because she liked their plain clothes. You have Jews in New York City and a synagogue as well. You have enslaved people who have brought African religions and-- and syncretistic religions to New York. And you also have this kind of mix of vitriol, ill-feeling, sometimes directed against Catholics as sort of soldiers of the pope and disloyal people and a lot of tolerance because New Yorkers wanted to get along, they wanted to go along, and often it made more sense just not to ask questions. So it's a really fascinating kind of stew of different religions and different approaches to religion.
Interviewer: Okay, great. That's helpful. Now, let's get to Elizabeth Seton herself. Can you just give us a brief biographical sketch of her taking us from her birth in 1774 to when she set sail for Livorno, Italy at age 29 in 1803?
Catherine: Yes. She was born as you hear from that date, right, as revolution creeps toward the colonies and she's born in New York to a very ambitious doctor father who actually sails away to England to continue his medical education as the colonies are in peril. He does come back as essentially a medic in the British army but Seton's mother dies during the revolution shortly after giving birth to the couple's third child. And Seton grows up in a family and a city that is recovering from this terrible war. Her father remarries but Elizabeth's stepmother is cold and awkward. Her father has to, sort of, wangle his way back in because he was a loyalist to the city's good graces. She's conscious of all of this. She's intellectually ambitious. Not particularly interested in organized Christianity, but she did enjoy nature and kind of clearly felt a craving for Divine presence. She felt that more on her own than through, than through services. And her family was Episcopal, she had no connection with Catholicism at this point.
So she thinks of herself as melancholy, it's clear she was kind of, a beauty, kind of a flirt. And she attracts her husband, William McGee Seton who's a tall, handsome, transatlantic merchant, six or seven years older than she is. And they marry and she's just thrilled, from her letters it's clear that after this kind of unsettled, somewhat unhappy childhood, she has a husband she loves. She begins bearing children, she eventually has five children. But her husband is coughing and weakening and it turns out he has tuberculosis - consumption, they would have called it. At the same time, the family's merchant business is at risk because of the Napoleonic Wars and her husband's not the best businessman. So Seton then is faced with a frail, truly frail husband and a husband who has gone bankrupt. She's recently given birth to her fifth child, and the question is what to do? And what they come up with is this kind of cockamamie plan to go to Italy where William has business associates and the hope is that those associates, the Filicchi family, will help William build his business back and the lovely Italian climate will somehow save him from tuberculosis.
Interviewer: Okay. So they set sail. By the way, I also found it interesting that they were protected by the nation's first bankruptcy law because if that-- because otherwise the horrible debtor's prison loom.
Catherine: Yeah.
Interviewer: Right? And that created great stress, I think. That's what I read, correct? That that was a real stress.
Catherine: Absolutely. I thought that detail might be too, sort of, historian nerdy but it's important, right? So prior to the bankruptcy law, you could be put in debtor's prison until you could pay off your creditors as if being in debt was criminal, right? In a way that seems very foreign to us. And, William, Elizabeth's husband, had seen this happen to people close to him throughout his life and he was terrified of it and it was just really in the months before he used this bankruptcy law that the first law was passed and it did mean they weren't spared humiliation, right? They were not spared financial risk, but they were spared his imprisonment.
Interviewer: You write that during this time period you just described, "Amid calamities, large and small, Elizabeth drained her mind of words and images until she felt only God." What is going on here with Elizabeth and her religious views?
Catherine: Yeah. So as I mentioned, she had always wanted to feel close to God but had not found a church that spoke to her, really. And so, including when she was a young mother she would read sermons, she would read the Bible, she would walk in nature, as she began to be more and more fearful for her husband and her family, she did turn more toward a communal religion, right? To shared religion rather than just individual. There's a minister, an Episcopal minister, at Trinity Church - John Henry Hobart, who became a kind of spiritual guide. But it was still the case is clear in that passage, that specific doctrine is not what is moving her, right? It's a kind of imminence. It's just as a sense of closeness to God that in some sense, some people who read these passages feel it-- feels more Eastern than Western, but there's also this tradition of prayer within Christianity. And-- and that is what she found solace in and what began to make Christianity and worship really central to her life so that it wasn't just that Christianity created an ethical person, which she also found important. It was that the worship itself was sustaining to her.
Interviewer: Okay. And she also believed at this time you write, "She considered her choice of religion a matter of taste, not virtue." And you also quoted as saying, "I think the first point of religion is cheerfulness and harmony." How does that fit into your understanding of Elizabeth's religious persona at that time, before she set sail?
Catherine: Yeah. I love how you're specifying at that time she right because this is something that changes throughout her life in a fascinating way. So religion was like cuisine or like fashion, right? It came in different forms and people enjoy different variants of it and that was-- that was fine. Right? One can get one's calories from curry, from beef stew, and one is still getting the job done. That's kind of how she thought about religion, throughout her young life. When she became more interested in Episcopalianism, Hobart, this minister, did begin to get her thinking that the Episcopal communion had some kind of distinctive claim perhaps, some particular relationship back to, Christ's Apostles. But that was sort of just an overlay over what we would call ecumenicism, right? Or it just a sense that the differences among the denominations were not so important.
Interviewer: Okay. Fair enough. Good. Now she's going to set sail with her husband and one of her children on the Shepherdess to Italy, and when she does that, as you described it, Elizabeth was, "Trying to strike an ambitious bargain. She would give up everything else if God allowed her the only thing she truly wanted - her family's reunions after death." What does this-- this is a very deep sentiment. What-- and very, very, very religious in its own right, not attached to a particular church or faith. What does this represent in her life story?
Catherine: Yeah. So she-- she had become more and more drawn to-- to the idea, sort of, summed up in scripture, "This world is not my home," that this is a temporary passage and her life had been marked by loss, as I mentioned the-- the death of her mother and of her infant sister, it's really her first memory. She fears the death of her husband, her children because this is the 18th century, you know, she'd seen her children ill and not known whether they would survive, and so she's accepted that she can't control what happens in this world. What she wants is a reunion after death, right? In some kind of non-doctrinal Christian afterlife. And she will do anything. Right? There is, no possession, no ambition that she holds, that she places above that hope of reunion in a-- in a Christian afterlife. And it goes beyond lip service, right? I mean, she does, sort of, sail through this bankruptcy and this calamity, without really being that upset that she has to write down every single possession that her family owns and hand the list over to people, right? She-- she really has begun to-- to set aside the things of this world, in her hope for a future, but there is an element of barter here, right? She wants something from-- from this God that she believes in so passionately and what she wants is her family's safety after death.
Interviewer: Okay. So, they arrived in Italy, several things happen, which are quite intense. Tell us what happened to her in Italy, give us a brief sketch of sort of her trip there, what happened? What happened religiously?
Catherine: Yeah. There's so much drama in her life.
Interviewer: There is a lot of drama.
Catherine: So, you know, her father had actually died as a doctor serving ill people in New York, then she gets to Italy with her ill husband and there was really no such doctor to help them. And her husband dies shortly after this little group - Elizabeth, her husband, and her oldest daughter are released from a cold, damp quarantine. So there she is, the plan has failed, right? William actually dies dreaming that he's won the lottery, but he has not, he's still bankrupt, and she's a widow. She's an impoverished widow now in Italy with her-- with her oldest daughter and she's got these sermons that her Episcopal minister has sent with her and the family that she's staying with, the Filicchi, have always thought of the United States as maybe a home for Catholicism, which they see as endangered by Napoleonic Europe. And they think it's providential, it's God's grace that this pious widow has landed in their home and they immediately, kind of, unabashedly begin to try to convert her to Catholicism and I'm laughing because Elizabeth Seton laughed. She like, she could not believe, that they were doing this and she wrote, you know, "These charitable Romans. They didn't waste a minute," and she's polite and she reverts to this ecumenicism that she's always held, right? "They're Catholic, I'm Protestant, everybody's doing their best. I'm a kind of a good New Yorker. I'll be a tourist. I'll go around. I'll see what these people do," but she expected it to be almost like visiting a museum, you know what I mean? Watching somebody else's festival and she found herself moved by Catholic masses, by this beautiful art. The Filicchi, kind of, cheated and they took her to Florence. So she saw this beautiful Catholic art. She's very moved by the figure of the Virgin Mary which was not at all prominent in the Protestantism that she knew but which is prominent in Italian Catholic devotion.
And, little by little, she becomes aware that this is not a religion she's watching. This is a religion that speaks-- speaks to her in its beauty, in the Catholic teaching that Christ is present in the Eucharist, right? Which gave her the sense of presence that she'd always wanted and she's amazed. She kind of doesn't know what to do with that. At first, and resist she knows this will not go over well at home, but she does decide to convert to Catholicism while in Italy.
Interviewer: Right. And you mentioned this briefly but I'm going to ask you to elaborate a little bit more, uh, the Filicchis and some, I think Bishop Carroll in Baltimore because, of course, perhaps, they all felt like, "God had given Filippo Filicchi the chance to plant Catholicism in the United States."
Interviewer: Does this have significant ramifications?
Catherine: That's a-- that's a wonderful question, and that is a part of her life or a part of the book that people read very differently. So there are some who see this as Filippo did, right? And Antonio, these Italian brothers as a moment in which kind of human intentions were less-- it was less important than Divine intention and there Elizabeth was and she was there for a Divine reason. You know, as a-- as a historian, I follow the earthly evidence and it's clear that so Filippo had earlier travel to the United States. He'd written to the pope suggesting that, "This freedom of religion in the US, this is not actually dangerous to Catholicism. This is good. We can work with this." So he had a very kind of forward-looking view, and certainly, I think without this family actively exposing her to Catholic writing, taking her to mass, it's unlikely that Seton would have taken it upon herself to experience religion in this way.
That said, she also was a woman not to be trifled with. And, in fact, if Filippo had understood her a little bit better, he might not have dared to try. It was almost his ignorance that made this work because he thought she was malleable. Well, she was not malleable, she was polite and she was determined to make her own decision about whether this religion spoke to her. And, in fact, it did. It touched her, it moved her, it gave her the sense of divine presence. It was as if, kind of, heaven reached down to earth as she saw it. And there is a way in which there's a certain amount of Eat, Pray, Love here, I was thinking. Like, this is a tourist and you go to somewhere else and you think, "Oh, these happy-- these happy people, right? They-- they've got it all figured out." Tourists can feel this, right? You go somewhere else and everything seems simpler and the colors seem brighter. And in fact, Northern Italy during this period is incredibly complicated. There's religious diversity but what she saw was a, sort of, unified Catholic belief and beauty, that she wanted to live within. So she'd always lived amongst choices in New York and here she saw unity and that's what she wanted.
Interviewer: Okay. So once-- when she gets back to New York City, she does leave her Episcopal faith and join St. Peter's Catholic Church in New York. And I like how you wrote about it that she liked, "the Church of St. Peter with a cross on the top instead of a weathercock." She seemed most convinced of Catholicism being the true way because of her singular experience with the Eucharist. You mentioned that briefly. Can you explain that? It's-- what it did to her exactly, and why that was such a powerful and almost a singular reason it seemed that she--
Catherine: Yeah.
Interviewer: Came to the Catholic Church.
Catherine: Yeah. So as she understood and was taught Episcopal teachings, the communion in her Episcopal Church was an honoring of the Last Supper, right? It referred to the Last Supper. It was an act of communion amongst the congregation but Catholic teaching offered her something else. And that was that Christ was, in a real way, present in this bread or this wafer that she's going to consume and her minister, her former minister, as were many Protestants were apoplectic at this, right? Like, to them, this was the heart of Catholic absurdity and barbarism and they're just very straightforward about it. So there's hundreds of thousands of little Christs and you're crunching into them when you eat the bread. I mean, it's-- it's completely disrespectful, I suppose, if one believes, right? But they're just sort of trying to jar her out of believing this. It's a fantasy for them. It's little green men. To her, she comes to the view that, "Well, you believe in all these other miracles? Right? How much of life do you actually understand? Why is it that this one part of faith you decide to be completely rational about and disdainful of?" To her, it's the greatest gift because since childhood, what she has wanted like craved is a feeling that she is near God and God is near her and so to be told that in communion, she's-- she's one, right? She's consuming divinity in a real way is just so fulfilling and gorgeous to her. And this is something we see throughout Catholic history and interestingly, often with women. It's a-- it's a thread through the history of female saints in particular and Seton takes her part in that-- in that tradition and just the joy she feels throughout her life. I mean, communion is the last meal she will have right before she dies that that never leaves her, this-- this deep satisfaction in taking Catholic communion.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. We are talking with Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, as part of “Religion in the American Experience”, a podcast series of the National Museum of American Religion, which tells the profound story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion which includes the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle. Join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words, "Almighty God hath created the mind free," by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, we read of two interesting things during Elizabeth's Catholic time in New York. One, that her Catholic Priest wanted to get rid of New York's requirement for office holders to force-swear allegiance to foreign powers including the ecclesiastical ones, and a sexual abuse scandal. Can you talk a little bit about these two events and how Elizabeth fits into them?
Catherine: Yeah. So the first is an effort to rid the new United States of this legacy of formal anti-Catholicism that was part of the English tradition. And the rule that you had to force-swear allegiance to the pope is a holdover from the idea that Catholics could not be good British subjects and then could not be American citizens because their loyalties lay in Rome. And so the effort to get rid of that was an effort to defend Catholic liberty, but it was also part of this larger decision that religion could be private, right? That Americans could have relationships through business, through politics, through walking down the street together, and the god that they believed in, the way that they worshipped would not interfere with those relationships. So that's an incredibly important idea in American history and you see it flowering at this period.
At this moment in her life, Seton has doubts about it, I have to say because she's just risked everything to convert. She's converted because she thinks that Catholicism is a uniquely safe and sure path toward this afterlife that she wants for herself and for everyone and she's honestly kind of thinking like, "I don't know. This is not a dinner party. Should I be polite and keep things to myself? What if doing that prevents others from finding this important truth?" So she will change her mind again about this. But at this point, she wants to proselytize or convince others of this truth that she thinks she's found. So that's the first piece. The second piece is part of this long tragic story of the Catholic church and sexual abuse which is we know is an issue-- still an issue, still being uncovered and you see it, it comes out in documents early in the church. And in this-- in these early days, it tends to be a priest in a relationship with a woman, usually an adult woman. And what's happened in New York here is that it looks as if a priest had approached inappropriately a young Irish woman and interestingly, another priest in the parish was outraged by this and helped the young woman bring it to the attention of Bishop Carroll who was then the nation's only bishop. And Bishop Carroll actually takes it seriously. It's a dark story. The brighter thread in it is the efforts, awkward though they were of these clergy to respond, in the end, some of these priests are removed from their-- their duties.
And Seton clearly knows about this. Her response is not to involve herself at all, but it's clear that the Catholicism she understands herself to join is a-- is a broader world than this little tangled Parish in New York. So she's reading Thomas à Kempis, she's reading Aquinas, she's seeking guidance from clergy in Boston and elsewhere, I think, trying to draw on the-- the deeper and more sincere parts of the Catholic church and separate herself a bit from this troubled parish.
Interviewer: Right. Okay. Well, let's see.
After finally leaving New York, so Elizabeth does and her family does leave New York and they first go to Baltimore, and then they go on to found the Sisters of Charity in-- in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where, as you movingly write, "The landscape felt sacred for these Catholic women as for Evangelical Protestants gathering for revivals in the fields and clearings across the new nation, God filled the raw American air." Can you tell us briefly the story of her from New York to Emmitsburg and what she founded?
Catherine: Yeah. She, she is impatient with New York. She wants to live a more fully devotional life. And as you-- as you note, some of these priests - many of whom were refugees from the French Revolution and who kind of like these Italians I was talking about, saw the United States as a place where a different kind of Catholicism could thrive. They see her as a respectable face for this church that a lot of Americans mistrust. She first was brought to Baltimore, she's a school teacher there. It's okay, but she has bigger dreams, the priests have bigger dreams for her, and she is able to found, with their help, this Sisterhood in Emmitsburg near the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is gorgeous, which remains gorgeous. It's just a shockingly lovely part of the country, and she had always, throughout her life, kind of, felt God in nature, um, and she does there. And that, as well as her desire for intense religious experience, and her willing to experiment, actually makes her a companion of a lot of other Americans who were becoming Baptists and Methodists during this time, right? Their-- the doctrines they were choosing are quite different and they might even have mistrusted each other's doctrines. But this desire for a more intense experience of religion and a willingness to, you know, upset your uncle [laughs] and an eagerness to feel God in the air around you, all of that unites Seton's Catholicism with these other Protestant experiences.
So, but the community she founds is very much within the Catholic - we might say, monastic tradition or tradition of convents and monasteries and so forth. The-- the key piece of it is that it's not cloister, right? The women, Seton, and the women who quickly begin to join her don't have to stay inside and pray with their contribution being prayer. They do pray but their contribution is also taking care of others and this is drawing on a French tradition of Daughters of Charity, and that's particularly useful in the United States because there are very few priests, the country is enormous, and there are a lot of Catholics who have no contact with clergy, very little contact with clergy, children who will grow up what-- what would have been called unchurched without perhaps the help of these women these Sisters of Charity, who could tend to people's bodies and their minds and also bring the Catholic Church into people's lives in a way that clergy could not do.
Interviewer: Okay. And so Elizabeth was the mother - capital M, there at Sisters of Charity, as well as mother - small, lowercase M for her-- for her children, and we'll get into some of that a little bit later. Um, I noted that-- and we won't talk about this but I did note that, um, just as Elizabeth stayed away from the sexual abuse scandal and that-- that the-- you write, "She prepared girls to enter society, not upended." So she-- she did certain things, but she didn't do other things. Uh, something also you've mentioned was tuberculosis. Now, tuberculosis plagued Elizabeth and her family as it did society and, in fact, I don't think I've ever read about a biography where sickness and death were so vividly and frequently described in great and moving detail as yours did, Catherine. And I'm guessing this was also not foreign to many Americans at that time. Sickness always stalked and there was little knowledge of how to prevent death, but it was a profound experience to feel in some small way what they felt and especially Elizabeth. I read when Anna died, you wrote of a painful procedure that they suggested to her. That was suggested to Anna that would allow her to-- and Anna thought of this. She said, she decided to go along with it because, "It would pay my penance for so often drawing in my waist to look small and imitate the looks of my companions, let the ribs now draw with pain for having drawn with vanity." So she was but dying and she knew it. This is representative of what, Catherine? For Anna and her sister, Beck, who later dies as well, you know, heart-rending. What is this representative of? This approach to sickness and death that was all around Elizabeth and her family?
Catherine: Yeah. There's-- there's a radical acceptance of pain and loss throughout Seton's life and it is the-- the challenge of her life, right? The heroics of her life, the way a ship's captain's heroics come from the sea and storms and maybe battles, right? This is where her-- her story and it's drama lies and she originally, you know, had even tried to train herself to love people less, in the hopes that it would hurt less when they died and she forced herself not to do that. She forced herself to love fully and yet to love with the acceptance that people might be taken away and might be taken away in these kind of brutal ways. I'll say sort of on-- I'm not sure this is appropriate but on a personal level, like I'm a mother and it was not just painful to read about the loss of her children, but unsettling, it was unsettling to see the-- her acceptance of it. There's just a radical rejection of any claim on their earthly good that is not anything I could muster, something that I could only describe as a historian and marvel at as a human being. It did-- it did enable Elizabeth Seton to be enormously comforting to others who were experiencing grief.
And as you note, this is everyone eventually even now and everyone often, in time, with less medical training. And she-- she would tell people, "There's-- there's no way to cure this. There's no way to speed this up. You just live through it. It's a-- it's a season of life," and continuing to love the sufferer, the person who has died and God is the obligation that Seton felt and that she and that she-- she taught to others. But I don't know if your listeners see a video but I'm just shaking my head even as I described this because the extent to which she accepts this even as it is so painful is really still unfathomable to me even after spending, you know, ten years with this woman's papers.
Interviewer: Did she-- did she and the sisters there believe that sickness, pain, and death were-- were given to them because of something they did wrong? I saw some threads of that but not-- not always.
Catherine: Yeah, that's it. That's a pretty deep question. I think it's clear that at some point in her life, she did and as with - I think I used the word “barter” about her saying like, "I'll do anything if God allows my family to be, to be saved." There's there's a tit-for-tat almost a transactional quality to some of her experience of religion that does eventually drop-- drop away, I think, so that she becomes more content with the idea that God is unknowable in all but love and so that it is inappropriate just simply silly, I guess, to try to parse why something happened or certainly to try to offer something up in hopes of getting something back. But I agree with you that there are definitely moments in which Seton or people around her such as her daughters seemed to be thinking a specific piece of suffering might emerge from a specific, a specific bad-- bad deed. But it's really a kind of fascinating subject, and the last-- the last thing I'll say is a couple of her friends argue with her about this a little bit, a Protestant friend of hers, a very interesting woman, Eliza Sadler, kind of pokes it early on, and she's like, "Well, it would be kind of pretty to think that things had this specific meaning or you could pay for X by offering Y but-- but I-- but I doubt you." And as I say, I think that Seton also moved away from that more transactional style of worship as she aged.
Interviewer: Okay. Let's move on-- we just have a few more minutes. I want to get to a few more questions and then let you sort of have the last word. You once wrote in the book that, "Elizabeth hinted that she saw The Sisterhood as some devout women who service to God was less important than the clergy. The priesthood was an embassy, The Sisterhood an errand. She drew the contrast ruthlessly." Can you elaborate briefly on Elizabeth's thoughts here?
Catherine: Yeah. So to her, the priesthood was the greatest calling on earth, right? I mean priests have the ability to turn the Eucharist into the body of Christ, right? They have sacramental authority and she knew that she could not be a priest because she was a woman and she also knew and she makes this a little bit clearer, she could be pretty prickly, that some men of dubious character could be praised because their manhood allowed that. So she's a keen observer and when a priest friend of hers, a collaborator, kind of whining because he's not allowed to lead the heroic missionary life he wished he led, she sympathizes with him and she also pokes it at him a little bit and says, "Well, you can be a priest." So she observes it. That said, she does not want to up-end it, right? She understands the gendered architecture of the church as something that she needs to live within as her inability to be a priest is another cross to bear as there are many crosses to bear. And in the end, she does clearly believe that priests as ambassadors, sisters as errand-runners, they're both servants and the distance between both the clergies and the sisters and divinity is so much more immense, than the difference between sisters and clergy that, again, she is content with it. She's-- she's serene about it, but she is a careful observer.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. By the early 19th century, you write that the Sisters of Charity were, "Alive in the thoughts of Catholic Church clergy throughout the United States." What was the influence of this organization?
Catherine: Yeah. And also moving forward, right? Through the 19th century, they're caring for children, their founding schools, their founding orphanages which both cares for the vulnerable and also means in a public way, you don't have a lot of impoverished Catholic children running the streets, right? It's both an act of mercy and something that enables Catholicism to become more accepted in the United States. They-- The Sisters of Charity found communities everywhere in the deep South, the Midwest, California and they are absolutely essential to the fabric, the spiritual, and the practical work of the Catholic Church throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. I wanted to get that from you before we end with a little bit more of Elizabeth's experience. The final death that we encounter in the book is Elizabeth's own in 1821 at the age of 47, quite young. You describe Elizabeth's reaction to death's imminence in this way, "Perhaps after so many years of being both Mother, capital M, and mother, lowercase M, in her last moments, she could only be the first." What did you mean and how did Elizabeth view her death?
Catherine: Yeah. So she had one surviving daughter at this point, her other two daughters had both died of consumption and her two sons were off trying to make their way in the world. And Catherine, the surviving daughter is there but Seton pays her no particular mind on her-- on her deathbed. She has kind of transcended her blood family and is fully inhabiting her role as the mother to this Sisterhood and there's nothing cruel about it. She's been an extraordinarily devoted mother but in these last moments of her life, it's-- it's her spirituality that is central. And it's also quite striking that someone who had originally tried to trade for having for everyone who had, in a way found her way into formal Christianity in the hopes of a nice cozy afterlife, by the end of her life, she envisions a heaven that is infinite time and on landmarked space and absolutely unknowable and she's just shed all of her preconceptions, she shed all of her earthly desires, even for particular attachments to these people she deeply loved and all she is waiting for is-- is a union in whatever form it comes with-- with God. And it's extraordinarily moving even to read her writings from those last week's or the writings of people that were near here. It's moving at the distance of two hundred years. So one can only imagine what-- what that little room was, was like when-- when she died.
Interviewer: Thank you. You write that, "No public notice condemned Elizabeth's faith when she died. She was lauded by a culture that for the moment feared a religion more than potpourri or Catholicism." Help us quickly understand the American religious landscape at the time of her death and her position in it.
Catherine: Yes. So Catholicism had been mistrusted, Catholicism will, kind of, be mistrusted again when you have the waves of Irish immigrants, my people, coming in the 1840s, should have re-sparked a lot of the animosity. But at this point, early 19th century, Catholicism was accepted as a form of Christianity which may seem obvious now, which absolutely had not been obvious through much of colonial and early national history. Seton and the other Sisters of Charity who were already running more than one school and more than one orphanage, might have been considered by Protestants to be somewhat odd, right? Their dress would be striking but they were seen as benevolent, pious women who were a boon to the community and to the nation and that is the note that is struck in the notices of Seton's death.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. Catherine, as we conclude, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the book either in terms of important historical transformations you charted or are charting or in terms of helping us better understand our present moment in the American narrative?
Catherine: Interesting. So, I would say that this is a story about the early days of the first amendment of religious liberty in the United States and the-- the legal structures were in a sense in place but the way people would live within those structures was very much being invented. So, even if one has the right to choose religion and to abandon the religion of your father and your mother and to choose your own, that doesn't mean you know how to do it without breaking your mother's heart. That doesn't mean you know how to do it without angering your neighbor, and I think watching Elizabeth Seton and the people around her figure out how to live fully within this liberty that they enjoyed is extraordinarily moving and to see her change her mind - so, to go from wanting to proselytize and convince people of what she believed at the time of her conversion to later in her life being quite adamant that she would live out her faith, but others would make their own decisions and she would not try to persuade anyone of anything is really quite moving. And I think perhaps instructive as people still believe things very deeply and yet still want to live gently among people who disagree profoundly.
And then the last thing I would say is that Seton is an ethos of connection, always connect. So she saw people very specifically, she tried to understand what each student would respond to, to listen to people, and to be critical or supportive or humorous as that person seem to need in that moment. And so that kind of attention and love as a skill, right? That you can develop not as like an emotion that you just let wash over you is I think enormously instructive and this may seem a little bit touchy-feely, but-- but I think it can also be a civic virtue, right? To see other citizens clearly, to listen carefully to be specific in our relationships to avoid characters caricatures to connect rather than separate, that I think is-- is just always useful and perhaps at this moment, more-- more useful than ever.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. Very, very helpful. We have been talking with Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint as part of “Religion in the American Experience”, a podcast series of the National Museum of American Religion, which is dedicated to telling the profound story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion. We trust that as a result, listeners will see how revolutionary and indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its future.
Please join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words, "Almighty God hath created the mind free," by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, thank you for being with us today and doing the really hard work of writing, researching, and writing a book that helps us all understand America a little bit better. It's been super enlightening for me, and I hope our listeners and I hope you've enjoy the time with us as well.
Catherine: Thank you so much for having me. I did enjoy it.
Today, to help us understand the life and times of Elizabeth Ann Seton in our quest to comprehend America is Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint which was awarded the Distinguished Book Award by the Conference on the History of Women Religious, as well as the Biography Prize from the Catholic Press Association. Her primary research interests include early American history, culture, and religion. She is also the author of Men of Letters in The Early Republic and many articles appearing in venues including the William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of The Early Republic, Early American Literature, and The US Catholic Historian. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early American history and the Atlantic World.
It is hoped that our time together today will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will come to better understand how revolutionary and indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its future. Join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words – “Almighty God hath created the mind free”, by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, after that lengthy monologue, thank you for being with us today.
Catherine: Thank you.
Interviewer: First, Catherine, tell us how you became interested in Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Catherine: I think there are two paths to that. So I did-- I did grow up Catholic. I always loved the stories of the saints. But I like the medieval ones, you know, the ones that smelled like roses after they died, the sort of thing. And it was when I was actually teaching, university, this was at William and Mary and I was teaching a course on Early American Biography and I let students choose their person. And I was teaching in Virginia, so, you know, there were five James Madisons and Jeffersons, and one young woman said she wanted to write about Mother Seton. And I just thought, "Wait a minute. She's filed in my head with the Catholic Saints, not with Early American History." But, of course, she was both and I was startled to discover there was not a lot of modern scholarship on her and that's where the journey began.
Interviewer: Okay, fair enough. Now, Catherine, for our listeners, many of whom are not Catholic, why should understanding Elizabeth Seton be of interest to them or stated differently - why would it make them better citizens of the United States to learn about the life and times of Elizabeth Ann Seton?
Catherine: Interesting. So I confess that I think that learning about anyone deeply is a good step toward being a better citizen, in that it helps to build community to understand other people's perspectives and experiences. Seeing in particular, I would make two, kind of, maybe almost competing claims for her. So, first, she was an adventurer. She was willing to change her mind, to try new things, to irritate people that she knew by thinking very differently from them and that's kind of admirable and necessary. At the same time, she took very seriously the need to live in harmony with others and she constantly thought about how to reconcile her single-minded pursuit of truth with her really sincere wish to be compassionate and gentle with other people. So if we could kind of do both of those things, I feel that that would be useful as citizens.
Interviewer: Sure. That's, that's a great-- that's a great answer. Now the final question to frame our discussion before we get into the nitty-gritty. You write that during the last half of the 18th-century, "The rhetoric and pageantry of New York's anti-popery [or anti-Catholicism] outstripped true persecution." Catherine, can you describe for us the religious and religious freedom landscapes of New York City during this time, which I think is essential for us to understand Elizabeth Seton?
Catherine: I agree. It is essential. So, New York has this fascinating history. It's first a Dutch colony and the Dutch Reformed Church is in power than it's an English colony and Anglicanism, what would become Episcopalianism is powerful. And Anglicanism was officially the established religion during Seton's childhood, early childhood, and just before. But, New York was always this sort of quilt and you very early begin to have Methodists and Baptists there as those denominations and Evangelicalism begins to flourish. You have Quakers whom Seton admired when she was young because she liked their plain clothes. You have Jews in New York City and a synagogue as well. You have enslaved people who have brought African religions and-- and syncretistic religions to New York. And you also have this kind of mix of vitriol, ill-feeling, sometimes directed against Catholics as sort of soldiers of the pope and disloyal people and a lot of tolerance because New Yorkers wanted to get along, they wanted to go along, and often it made more sense just not to ask questions. So it's a really fascinating kind of stew of different religions and different approaches to religion.
Interviewer: Okay, great. That's helpful. Now, let's get to Elizabeth Seton herself. Can you just give us a brief biographical sketch of her taking us from her birth in 1774 to when she set sail for Livorno, Italy at age 29 in 1803?
Catherine: Yes. She was born as you hear from that date, right, as revolution creeps toward the colonies and she's born in New York to a very ambitious doctor father who actually sails away to England to continue his medical education as the colonies are in peril. He does come back as essentially a medic in the British army but Seton's mother dies during the revolution shortly after giving birth to the couple's third child. And Seton grows up in a family and a city that is recovering from this terrible war. Her father remarries but Elizabeth's stepmother is cold and awkward. Her father has to, sort of, wangle his way back in because he was a loyalist to the city's good graces. She's conscious of all of this. She's intellectually ambitious. Not particularly interested in organized Christianity, but she did enjoy nature and kind of clearly felt a craving for Divine presence. She felt that more on her own than through, than through services. And her family was Episcopal, she had no connection with Catholicism at this point.
So she thinks of herself as melancholy, it's clear she was kind of, a beauty, kind of a flirt. And she attracts her husband, William McGee Seton who's a tall, handsome, transatlantic merchant, six or seven years older than she is. And they marry and she's just thrilled, from her letters it's clear that after this kind of unsettled, somewhat unhappy childhood, she has a husband she loves. She begins bearing children, she eventually has five children. But her husband is coughing and weakening and it turns out he has tuberculosis - consumption, they would have called it. At the same time, the family's merchant business is at risk because of the Napoleonic Wars and her husband's not the best businessman. So Seton then is faced with a frail, truly frail husband and a husband who has gone bankrupt. She's recently given birth to her fifth child, and the question is what to do? And what they come up with is this kind of cockamamie plan to go to Italy where William has business associates and the hope is that those associates, the Filicchi family, will help William build his business back and the lovely Italian climate will somehow save him from tuberculosis.
Interviewer: Okay. So they set sail. By the way, I also found it interesting that they were protected by the nation's first bankruptcy law because if that-- because otherwise the horrible debtor's prison loom.
Catherine: Yeah.
Interviewer: Right? And that created great stress, I think. That's what I read, correct? That that was a real stress.
Catherine: Absolutely. I thought that detail might be too, sort of, historian nerdy but it's important, right? So prior to the bankruptcy law, you could be put in debtor's prison until you could pay off your creditors as if being in debt was criminal, right? In a way that seems very foreign to us. And, William, Elizabeth's husband, had seen this happen to people close to him throughout his life and he was terrified of it and it was just really in the months before he used this bankruptcy law that the first law was passed and it did mean they weren't spared humiliation, right? They were not spared financial risk, but they were spared his imprisonment.
Interviewer: You write that during this time period you just described, "Amid calamities, large and small, Elizabeth drained her mind of words and images until she felt only God." What is going on here with Elizabeth and her religious views?
Catherine: Yeah. So as I mentioned, she had always wanted to feel close to God but had not found a church that spoke to her, really. And so, including when she was a young mother she would read sermons, she would read the Bible, she would walk in nature, as she began to be more and more fearful for her husband and her family, she did turn more toward a communal religion, right? To shared religion rather than just individual. There's a minister, an Episcopal minister, at Trinity Church - John Henry Hobart, who became a kind of spiritual guide. But it was still the case is clear in that passage, that specific doctrine is not what is moving her, right? It's a kind of imminence. It's just as a sense of closeness to God that in some sense, some people who read these passages feel it-- feels more Eastern than Western, but there's also this tradition of prayer within Christianity. And-- and that is what she found solace in and what began to make Christianity and worship really central to her life so that it wasn't just that Christianity created an ethical person, which she also found important. It was that the worship itself was sustaining to her.
Interviewer: Okay. And she also believed at this time you write, "She considered her choice of religion a matter of taste, not virtue." And you also quoted as saying, "I think the first point of religion is cheerfulness and harmony." How does that fit into your understanding of Elizabeth's religious persona at that time, before she set sail?
Catherine: Yeah. I love how you're specifying at that time she right because this is something that changes throughout her life in a fascinating way. So religion was like cuisine or like fashion, right? It came in different forms and people enjoy different variants of it and that was-- that was fine. Right? One can get one's calories from curry, from beef stew, and one is still getting the job done. That's kind of how she thought about religion, throughout her young life. When she became more interested in Episcopalianism, Hobart, this minister, did begin to get her thinking that the Episcopal communion had some kind of distinctive claim perhaps, some particular relationship back to, Christ's Apostles. But that was sort of just an overlay over what we would call ecumenicism, right? Or it just a sense that the differences among the denominations were not so important.
Interviewer: Okay. Fair enough. Good. Now she's going to set sail with her husband and one of her children on the Shepherdess to Italy, and when she does that, as you described it, Elizabeth was, "Trying to strike an ambitious bargain. She would give up everything else if God allowed her the only thing she truly wanted - her family's reunions after death." What does this-- this is a very deep sentiment. What-- and very, very, very religious in its own right, not attached to a particular church or faith. What does this represent in her life story?
Catherine: Yeah. So she-- she had become more and more drawn to-- to the idea, sort of, summed up in scripture, "This world is not my home," that this is a temporary passage and her life had been marked by loss, as I mentioned the-- the death of her mother and of her infant sister, it's really her first memory. She fears the death of her husband, her children because this is the 18th century, you know, she'd seen her children ill and not known whether they would survive, and so she's accepted that she can't control what happens in this world. What she wants is a reunion after death, right? In some kind of non-doctrinal Christian afterlife. And she will do anything. Right? There is, no possession, no ambition that she holds, that she places above that hope of reunion in a-- in a Christian afterlife. And it goes beyond lip service, right? I mean, she does, sort of, sail through this bankruptcy and this calamity, without really being that upset that she has to write down every single possession that her family owns and hand the list over to people, right? She-- she really has begun to-- to set aside the things of this world, in her hope for a future, but there is an element of barter here, right? She wants something from-- from this God that she believes in so passionately and what she wants is her family's safety after death.
Interviewer: Okay. So, they arrived in Italy, several things happen, which are quite intense. Tell us what happened to her in Italy, give us a brief sketch of sort of her trip there, what happened? What happened religiously?
Catherine: Yeah. There's so much drama in her life.
Interviewer: There is a lot of drama.
Catherine: So, you know, her father had actually died as a doctor serving ill people in New York, then she gets to Italy with her ill husband and there was really no such doctor to help them. And her husband dies shortly after this little group - Elizabeth, her husband, and her oldest daughter are released from a cold, damp quarantine. So there she is, the plan has failed, right? William actually dies dreaming that he's won the lottery, but he has not, he's still bankrupt, and she's a widow. She's an impoverished widow now in Italy with her-- with her oldest daughter and she's got these sermons that her Episcopal minister has sent with her and the family that she's staying with, the Filicchi, have always thought of the United States as maybe a home for Catholicism, which they see as endangered by Napoleonic Europe. And they think it's providential, it's God's grace that this pious widow has landed in their home and they immediately, kind of, unabashedly begin to try to convert her to Catholicism and I'm laughing because Elizabeth Seton laughed. She like, she could not believe, that they were doing this and she wrote, you know, "These charitable Romans. They didn't waste a minute," and she's polite and she reverts to this ecumenicism that she's always held, right? "They're Catholic, I'm Protestant, everybody's doing their best. I'm a kind of a good New Yorker. I'll be a tourist. I'll go around. I'll see what these people do," but she expected it to be almost like visiting a museum, you know what I mean? Watching somebody else's festival and she found herself moved by Catholic masses, by this beautiful art. The Filicchi, kind of, cheated and they took her to Florence. So she saw this beautiful Catholic art. She's very moved by the figure of the Virgin Mary which was not at all prominent in the Protestantism that she knew but which is prominent in Italian Catholic devotion.
And, little by little, she becomes aware that this is not a religion she's watching. This is a religion that speaks-- speaks to her in its beauty, in the Catholic teaching that Christ is present in the Eucharist, right? Which gave her the sense of presence that she'd always wanted and she's amazed. She kind of doesn't know what to do with that. At first, and resist she knows this will not go over well at home, but she does decide to convert to Catholicism while in Italy.
Interviewer: Right. And you mentioned this briefly but I'm going to ask you to elaborate a little bit more, uh, the Filicchis and some, I think Bishop Carroll in Baltimore because, of course, perhaps, they all felt like, "God had given Filippo Filicchi the chance to plant Catholicism in the United States."
Interviewer: Does this have significant ramifications?
Catherine: That's a-- that's a wonderful question, and that is a part of her life or a part of the book that people read very differently. So there are some who see this as Filippo did, right? And Antonio, these Italian brothers as a moment in which kind of human intentions were less-- it was less important than Divine intention and there Elizabeth was and she was there for a Divine reason. You know, as a-- as a historian, I follow the earthly evidence and it's clear that so Filippo had earlier travel to the United States. He'd written to the pope suggesting that, "This freedom of religion in the US, this is not actually dangerous to Catholicism. This is good. We can work with this." So he had a very kind of forward-looking view, and certainly, I think without this family actively exposing her to Catholic writing, taking her to mass, it's unlikely that Seton would have taken it upon herself to experience religion in this way.
That said, she also was a woman not to be trifled with. And, in fact, if Filippo had understood her a little bit better, he might not have dared to try. It was almost his ignorance that made this work because he thought she was malleable. Well, she was not malleable, she was polite and she was determined to make her own decision about whether this religion spoke to her. And, in fact, it did. It touched her, it moved her, it gave her the sense of divine presence. It was as if, kind of, heaven reached down to earth as she saw it. And there is a way in which there's a certain amount of Eat, Pray, Love here, I was thinking. Like, this is a tourist and you go to somewhere else and you think, "Oh, these happy-- these happy people, right? They-- they've got it all figured out." Tourists can feel this, right? You go somewhere else and everything seems simpler and the colors seem brighter. And in fact, Northern Italy during this period is incredibly complicated. There's religious diversity but what she saw was a, sort of, unified Catholic belief and beauty, that she wanted to live within. So she'd always lived amongst choices in New York and here she saw unity and that's what she wanted.
Interviewer: Okay. So once-- when she gets back to New York City, she does leave her Episcopal faith and join St. Peter's Catholic Church in New York. And I like how you wrote about it that she liked, "the Church of St. Peter with a cross on the top instead of a weathercock." She seemed most convinced of Catholicism being the true way because of her singular experience with the Eucharist. You mentioned that briefly. Can you explain that? It's-- what it did to her exactly, and why that was such a powerful and almost a singular reason it seemed that she--
Catherine: Yeah.
Interviewer: Came to the Catholic Church.
Catherine: Yeah. So as she understood and was taught Episcopal teachings, the communion in her Episcopal Church was an honoring of the Last Supper, right? It referred to the Last Supper. It was an act of communion amongst the congregation but Catholic teaching offered her something else. And that was that Christ was, in a real way, present in this bread or this wafer that she's going to consume and her minister, her former minister, as were many Protestants were apoplectic at this, right? Like, to them, this was the heart of Catholic absurdity and barbarism and they're just very straightforward about it. So there's hundreds of thousands of little Christs and you're crunching into them when you eat the bread. I mean, it's-- it's completely disrespectful, I suppose, if one believes, right? But they're just sort of trying to jar her out of believing this. It's a fantasy for them. It's little green men. To her, she comes to the view that, "Well, you believe in all these other miracles? Right? How much of life do you actually understand? Why is it that this one part of faith you decide to be completely rational about and disdainful of?" To her, it's the greatest gift because since childhood, what she has wanted like craved is a feeling that she is near God and God is near her and so to be told that in communion, she's-- she's one, right? She's consuming divinity in a real way is just so fulfilling and gorgeous to her. And this is something we see throughout Catholic history and interestingly, often with women. It's a-- it's a thread through the history of female saints in particular and Seton takes her part in that-- in that tradition and just the joy she feels throughout her life. I mean, communion is the last meal she will have right before she dies that that never leaves her, this-- this deep satisfaction in taking Catholic communion.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. We are talking with Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, as part of “Religion in the American Experience”, a podcast series of the National Museum of American Religion, which tells the profound story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion which includes the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle. Join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words, "Almighty God hath created the mind free," by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, we read of two interesting things during Elizabeth's Catholic time in New York. One, that her Catholic Priest wanted to get rid of New York's requirement for office holders to force-swear allegiance to foreign powers including the ecclesiastical ones, and a sexual abuse scandal. Can you talk a little bit about these two events and how Elizabeth fits into them?
Catherine: Yeah. So the first is an effort to rid the new United States of this legacy of formal anti-Catholicism that was part of the English tradition. And the rule that you had to force-swear allegiance to the pope is a holdover from the idea that Catholics could not be good British subjects and then could not be American citizens because their loyalties lay in Rome. And so the effort to get rid of that was an effort to defend Catholic liberty, but it was also part of this larger decision that religion could be private, right? That Americans could have relationships through business, through politics, through walking down the street together, and the god that they believed in, the way that they worshipped would not interfere with those relationships. So that's an incredibly important idea in American history and you see it flowering at this period.
At this moment in her life, Seton has doubts about it, I have to say because she's just risked everything to convert. She's converted because she thinks that Catholicism is a uniquely safe and sure path toward this afterlife that she wants for herself and for everyone and she's honestly kind of thinking like, "I don't know. This is not a dinner party. Should I be polite and keep things to myself? What if doing that prevents others from finding this important truth?" So she will change her mind again about this. But at this point, she wants to proselytize or convince others of this truth that she thinks she's found. So that's the first piece. The second piece is part of this long tragic story of the Catholic church and sexual abuse which is we know is an issue-- still an issue, still being uncovered and you see it, it comes out in documents early in the church. And in this-- in these early days, it tends to be a priest in a relationship with a woman, usually an adult woman. And what's happened in New York here is that it looks as if a priest had approached inappropriately a young Irish woman and interestingly, another priest in the parish was outraged by this and helped the young woman bring it to the attention of Bishop Carroll who was then the nation's only bishop. And Bishop Carroll actually takes it seriously. It's a dark story. The brighter thread in it is the efforts, awkward though they were of these clergy to respond, in the end, some of these priests are removed from their-- their duties.
And Seton clearly knows about this. Her response is not to involve herself at all, but it's clear that the Catholicism she understands herself to join is a-- is a broader world than this little tangled Parish in New York. So she's reading Thomas à Kempis, she's reading Aquinas, she's seeking guidance from clergy in Boston and elsewhere, I think, trying to draw on the-- the deeper and more sincere parts of the Catholic church and separate herself a bit from this troubled parish.
Interviewer: Right. Okay. Well, let's see.
After finally leaving New York, so Elizabeth does and her family does leave New York and they first go to Baltimore, and then they go on to found the Sisters of Charity in-- in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where, as you movingly write, "The landscape felt sacred for these Catholic women as for Evangelical Protestants gathering for revivals in the fields and clearings across the new nation, God filled the raw American air." Can you tell us briefly the story of her from New York to Emmitsburg and what she founded?
Catherine: Yeah. She, she is impatient with New York. She wants to live a more fully devotional life. And as you-- as you note, some of these priests - many of whom were refugees from the French Revolution and who kind of like these Italians I was talking about, saw the United States as a place where a different kind of Catholicism could thrive. They see her as a respectable face for this church that a lot of Americans mistrust. She first was brought to Baltimore, she's a school teacher there. It's okay, but she has bigger dreams, the priests have bigger dreams for her, and she is able to found, with their help, this Sisterhood in Emmitsburg near the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is gorgeous, which remains gorgeous. It's just a shockingly lovely part of the country, and she had always, throughout her life, kind of, felt God in nature, um, and she does there. And that, as well as her desire for intense religious experience, and her willing to experiment, actually makes her a companion of a lot of other Americans who were becoming Baptists and Methodists during this time, right? Their-- the doctrines they were choosing are quite different and they might even have mistrusted each other's doctrines. But this desire for a more intense experience of religion and a willingness to, you know, upset your uncle [laughs] and an eagerness to feel God in the air around you, all of that unites Seton's Catholicism with these other Protestant experiences.
So, but the community she founds is very much within the Catholic - we might say, monastic tradition or tradition of convents and monasteries and so forth. The-- the key piece of it is that it's not cloister, right? The women, Seton, and the women who quickly begin to join her don't have to stay inside and pray with their contribution being prayer. They do pray but their contribution is also taking care of others and this is drawing on a French tradition of Daughters of Charity, and that's particularly useful in the United States because there are very few priests, the country is enormous, and there are a lot of Catholics who have no contact with clergy, very little contact with clergy, children who will grow up what-- what would have been called unchurched without perhaps the help of these women these Sisters of Charity, who could tend to people's bodies and their minds and also bring the Catholic Church into people's lives in a way that clergy could not do.
Interviewer: Okay. And so Elizabeth was the mother - capital M, there at Sisters of Charity, as well as mother - small, lowercase M for her-- for her children, and we'll get into some of that a little bit later. Um, I noted that-- and we won't talk about this but I did note that, um, just as Elizabeth stayed away from the sexual abuse scandal and that-- that the-- you write, "She prepared girls to enter society, not upended." So she-- she did certain things, but she didn't do other things. Uh, something also you've mentioned was tuberculosis. Now, tuberculosis plagued Elizabeth and her family as it did society and, in fact, I don't think I've ever read about a biography where sickness and death were so vividly and frequently described in great and moving detail as yours did, Catherine. And I'm guessing this was also not foreign to many Americans at that time. Sickness always stalked and there was little knowledge of how to prevent death, but it was a profound experience to feel in some small way what they felt and especially Elizabeth. I read when Anna died, you wrote of a painful procedure that they suggested to her. That was suggested to Anna that would allow her to-- and Anna thought of this. She said, she decided to go along with it because, "It would pay my penance for so often drawing in my waist to look small and imitate the looks of my companions, let the ribs now draw with pain for having drawn with vanity." So she was but dying and she knew it. This is representative of what, Catherine? For Anna and her sister, Beck, who later dies as well, you know, heart-rending. What is this representative of? This approach to sickness and death that was all around Elizabeth and her family?
Catherine: Yeah. There's-- there's a radical acceptance of pain and loss throughout Seton's life and it is the-- the challenge of her life, right? The heroics of her life, the way a ship's captain's heroics come from the sea and storms and maybe battles, right? This is where her-- her story and it's drama lies and she originally, you know, had even tried to train herself to love people less, in the hopes that it would hurt less when they died and she forced herself not to do that. She forced herself to love fully and yet to love with the acceptance that people might be taken away and might be taken away in these kind of brutal ways. I'll say sort of on-- I'm not sure this is appropriate but on a personal level, like I'm a mother and it was not just painful to read about the loss of her children, but unsettling, it was unsettling to see the-- her acceptance of it. There's just a radical rejection of any claim on their earthly good that is not anything I could muster, something that I could only describe as a historian and marvel at as a human being. It did-- it did enable Elizabeth Seton to be enormously comforting to others who were experiencing grief.
And as you note, this is everyone eventually even now and everyone often, in time, with less medical training. And she-- she would tell people, "There's-- there's no way to cure this. There's no way to speed this up. You just live through it. It's a-- it's a season of life," and continuing to love the sufferer, the person who has died and God is the obligation that Seton felt and that she and that she-- she taught to others. But I don't know if your listeners see a video but I'm just shaking my head even as I described this because the extent to which she accepts this even as it is so painful is really still unfathomable to me even after spending, you know, ten years with this woman's papers.
Interviewer: Did she-- did she and the sisters there believe that sickness, pain, and death were-- were given to them because of something they did wrong? I saw some threads of that but not-- not always.
Catherine: Yeah, that's it. That's a pretty deep question. I think it's clear that at some point in her life, she did and as with - I think I used the word “barter” about her saying like, "I'll do anything if God allows my family to be, to be saved." There's there's a tit-for-tat almost a transactional quality to some of her experience of religion that does eventually drop-- drop away, I think, so that she becomes more content with the idea that God is unknowable in all but love and so that it is inappropriate just simply silly, I guess, to try to parse why something happened or certainly to try to offer something up in hopes of getting something back. But I agree with you that there are definitely moments in which Seton or people around her such as her daughters seemed to be thinking a specific piece of suffering might emerge from a specific, a specific bad-- bad deed. But it's really a kind of fascinating subject, and the last-- the last thing I'll say is a couple of her friends argue with her about this a little bit, a Protestant friend of hers, a very interesting woman, Eliza Sadler, kind of pokes it early on, and she's like, "Well, it would be kind of pretty to think that things had this specific meaning or you could pay for X by offering Y but-- but I-- but I doubt you." And as I say, I think that Seton also moved away from that more transactional style of worship as she aged.
Interviewer: Okay. Let's move on-- we just have a few more minutes. I want to get to a few more questions and then let you sort of have the last word. You once wrote in the book that, "Elizabeth hinted that she saw The Sisterhood as some devout women who service to God was less important than the clergy. The priesthood was an embassy, The Sisterhood an errand. She drew the contrast ruthlessly." Can you elaborate briefly on Elizabeth's thoughts here?
Catherine: Yeah. So to her, the priesthood was the greatest calling on earth, right? I mean priests have the ability to turn the Eucharist into the body of Christ, right? They have sacramental authority and she knew that she could not be a priest because she was a woman and she also knew and she makes this a little bit clearer, she could be pretty prickly, that some men of dubious character could be praised because their manhood allowed that. So she's a keen observer and when a priest friend of hers, a collaborator, kind of whining because he's not allowed to lead the heroic missionary life he wished he led, she sympathizes with him and she also pokes it at him a little bit and says, "Well, you can be a priest." So she observes it. That said, she does not want to up-end it, right? She understands the gendered architecture of the church as something that she needs to live within as her inability to be a priest is another cross to bear as there are many crosses to bear. And in the end, she does clearly believe that priests as ambassadors, sisters as errand-runners, they're both servants and the distance between both the clergies and the sisters and divinity is so much more immense, than the difference between sisters and clergy that, again, she is content with it. She's-- she's serene about it, but she is a careful observer.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. By the early 19th century, you write that the Sisters of Charity were, "Alive in the thoughts of Catholic Church clergy throughout the United States." What was the influence of this organization?
Catherine: Yeah. And also moving forward, right? Through the 19th century, they're caring for children, their founding schools, their founding orphanages which both cares for the vulnerable and also means in a public way, you don't have a lot of impoverished Catholic children running the streets, right? It's both an act of mercy and something that enables Catholicism to become more accepted in the United States. They-- The Sisters of Charity found communities everywhere in the deep South, the Midwest, California and they are absolutely essential to the fabric, the spiritual, and the practical work of the Catholic Church throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. I wanted to get that from you before we end with a little bit more of Elizabeth's experience. The final death that we encounter in the book is Elizabeth's own in 1821 at the age of 47, quite young. You describe Elizabeth's reaction to death's imminence in this way, "Perhaps after so many years of being both Mother, capital M, and mother, lowercase M, in her last moments, she could only be the first." What did you mean and how did Elizabeth view her death?
Catherine: Yeah. So she had one surviving daughter at this point, her other two daughters had both died of consumption and her two sons were off trying to make their way in the world. And Catherine, the surviving daughter is there but Seton pays her no particular mind on her-- on her deathbed. She has kind of transcended her blood family and is fully inhabiting her role as the mother to this Sisterhood and there's nothing cruel about it. She's been an extraordinarily devoted mother but in these last moments of her life, it's-- it's her spirituality that is central. And it's also quite striking that someone who had originally tried to trade for having for everyone who had, in a way found her way into formal Christianity in the hopes of a nice cozy afterlife, by the end of her life, she envisions a heaven that is infinite time and on landmarked space and absolutely unknowable and she's just shed all of her preconceptions, she shed all of her earthly desires, even for particular attachments to these people she deeply loved and all she is waiting for is-- is a union in whatever form it comes with-- with God. And it's extraordinarily moving even to read her writings from those last week's or the writings of people that were near here. It's moving at the distance of two hundred years. So one can only imagine what-- what that little room was, was like when-- when she died.
Interviewer: Thank you. You write that, "No public notice condemned Elizabeth's faith when she died. She was lauded by a culture that for the moment feared a religion more than potpourri or Catholicism." Help us quickly understand the American religious landscape at the time of her death and her position in it.
Catherine: Yes. So Catholicism had been mistrusted, Catholicism will, kind of, be mistrusted again when you have the waves of Irish immigrants, my people, coming in the 1840s, should have re-sparked a lot of the animosity. But at this point, early 19th century, Catholicism was accepted as a form of Christianity which may seem obvious now, which absolutely had not been obvious through much of colonial and early national history. Seton and the other Sisters of Charity who were already running more than one school and more than one orphanage, might have been considered by Protestants to be somewhat odd, right? Their dress would be striking but they were seen as benevolent, pious women who were a boon to the community and to the nation and that is the note that is struck in the notices of Seton's death.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. Catherine, as we conclude, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the book either in terms of important historical transformations you charted or are charting or in terms of helping us better understand our present moment in the American narrative?
Catherine: Interesting. So, I would say that this is a story about the early days of the first amendment of religious liberty in the United States and the-- the legal structures were in a sense in place but the way people would live within those structures was very much being invented. So, even if one has the right to choose religion and to abandon the religion of your father and your mother and to choose your own, that doesn't mean you know how to do it without breaking your mother's heart. That doesn't mean you know how to do it without angering your neighbor, and I think watching Elizabeth Seton and the people around her figure out how to live fully within this liberty that they enjoyed is extraordinarily moving and to see her change her mind - so, to go from wanting to proselytize and convince people of what she believed at the time of her conversion to later in her life being quite adamant that she would live out her faith, but others would make their own decisions and she would not try to persuade anyone of anything is really quite moving. And I think perhaps instructive as people still believe things very deeply and yet still want to live gently among people who disagree profoundly.
And then the last thing I would say is that Seton is an ethos of connection, always connect. So she saw people very specifically, she tried to understand what each student would respond to, to listen to people, and to be critical or supportive or humorous as that person seem to need in that moment. And so that kind of attention and love as a skill, right? That you can develop not as like an emotion that you just let wash over you is I think enormously instructive and this may seem a little bit touchy-feely, but-- but I think it can also be a civic virtue, right? To see other citizens clearly, to listen carefully to be specific in our relationships to avoid characters caricatures to connect rather than separate, that I think is-- is just always useful and perhaps at this moment, more-- more useful than ever.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. Very, very helpful. We have been talking with Catherine O'Donnell, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint as part of “Religion in the American Experience”, a podcast series of the National Museum of American Religion, which is dedicated to telling the profound story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion. We trust that as a result, listeners will see how revolutionary and indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its future.
Please join us in building the National Museum of American Religion in the nation's capital to open in 2026 on the 240th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's immortal words, "Almighty God hath created the mind free," by donating at storyofamericanreligion.org/contribute.
Catherine, thank you for being with us today and doing the really hard work of writing, researching, and writing a book that helps us all understand America a little bit better. It's been super enlightening for me, and I hope our listeners and I hope you've enjoy the time with us as well.
Catherine: Thank you so much for having me. I did enjoy it.
