Santa Isabel Ana Bayley Seton

Isabel Ana Bayley was born into a prosperous New York Protestant family in 1774, at the height of the American Revolution. As she quickly learned, material prosperity cannot fill the heart.

After her mother's death, her father remarried, but Isabel's father and stepmother separated. Her stepmother rejected her and her sister, who were sent to live with her uncle. The child was deeply hurt by the rejection.

The darkness lifted for a time in 1794, when Isabel married William Seton, a merchant who had a business partner, Filippo Filicchi of Livorno, Italy. The Setons had five children. They were an elegant and prosperous Episcopalian family, but their good fortune did not last.

In 1801, William's company went bankrupt. The couple lost their home and William contracted tuberculosis. Hoping that the warm weather would help, the couple and their eldest daughter set sail for Italy. William died shortly after their arrival and Isabel was widowed at the age of 29.

Suffering opened the young girl's heart, and she began to search like someone groping in the dark.

Filippo Filicchi's family felt sorry for this young woman who had just landed in their country, to become a widow in a foreign land. They invited her to live with them for a while. As she suffered, they spoke to her about the comfort their Catholic faith gave them in times of suffering.

Isabel was moved by her faith and began to ask questions. What did Catholics believe about the Eucharist? The mass? The Mother of God, who seemed to them such a close and tender mother? Was there really an unbroken link between the Church now and the apostles? His heart and mind were agitated, but the turmoil soon gave way to peace. When she returned to New York in 1804, she had made her decision.

In 1805, she entered the Catholic Church. “ …I will certainly find it. ” This decision was not without costs. His family disapproved. Isabel opened a small school in Baltimore to support her children, but once word spread that she had become Catholic, parents withdrew their children from the school. The single mother of five would not know where to turn if it weren't for the Lord, whose will she sought in everything that happened to her.

In 1806, she met Father Louis Dubourg, a Sulpician priest. Sulpicians in Maryland had been discussing the possibility of a congregation of American religious sisters, modeled on the French Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, to help educate children in the small but growing Catholic community. They invited Isabel and her children to Baltimore. Soon other young women joined her. In 1809, Isabel became the first of them to take vows.

The small group of women, led by “Mother Seton,” arrived in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1809. There, in that year, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States, got its start. The sisters opened a free Catholic school for poor girls – the beginning of Catholic education in that new country. The school was followed by an orphanage and numerous other works of religious, educational and cultural training for the poor.

Mother Seton remained the sisters' superior until her death at the age of forty-six. She had sought God, as she said, in the simplicity of her heart. He found her and drew her into the service of his Church. His last words to his sisters, on January 4, 1821, were: “ Be children of the Church, be children of the Church ”.

Isabel Ana Seton was canonized in 1975, becoming the first person born in the United States to be declared a saint.