In 1975, two centuries after her birth, Pope Paul VI canonized
Elizabeth Ann Seton, making her the first saint to be a native-born
citizen of the United States in the Roman Catholic Church. Seton
came of age in Manhattan as the city and her family struggled to
rebuild themselves after the Revolution, explored both contemporary
philosophy and Christianity, converted to Catholicism from her
native Episcopalian faith, and built the St. Joseph's Academy and
Free School in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Hers was an exemplary early
American life of struggle, ambition, questioning, and faith, and in
this flowing biography, Catherine O'Donnell has given Seton her
due. O'Donnell places Seton squarely in the context of the dynamic
and risky years of the American and French Revolutions and their
aftermath. Just as Seton's dramatic life was studded with hardship,
achievement, and grief so were the social, economic, political, and
religious scenes of the Early American Republic in which she lived.
O'Donnell provides the reader with a strong sense of this
remarkable woman's intelligence and compassion as she withstood her
husband's financial failures and untimely death, undertook a slow
conversion to Catholicism, and struggled to reconcile her
single-minded faith with her respect for others' different choices.
The fruit of her labors were the creation of a spirituality that
embraced human connections as well as divine love and the American
Sisters of Charity, part of an enduring global community with a
specific apostolate for teaching. The trove of correspondence,
journals, reflections, and community records that O'Donnell weaves
together throughout Elizabeth Seton provides deep insight into her
life and her world. Each source enriches our understanding of
women's friendships and choices, illuminates the relationships
within the often-opaque world of early religious communities, and
upends conventional wisdom about the ways Americans of different
faiths competed and collaborated during the nation's earliest
years. Through her close and sympathetic reading of Seton's letters
and journals, O'Donnell reveals Seton the person and shows us how,
with both pride and humility, she came to understand her own
importance as Mother Seton in the years before her death in 1821.
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