Saintly Mother

Since 1907 U. S. Catholics have been seeking the canonization of Mother Seton, and their hopes are high that the Vatican will make her the first U. S.-born saint.* Mother Seton founded the Catholic parochial school system and the Sisters of Charity in the U. S. Today, 8,911 nuns of her order, eight colleges, 160 high schools and academies, 447 parochial elementary schools and many a hospital and asylum are her monuments. Last week, Rev. Leonard Feeney, poet and associate editor of the Jesuit weekly, America, argued her claims to sainthood in an eulogistic, lyrical biography./- Cried he: "It will be the signalization in time--for our newspapers (you know our flair for publicity?) will give it their largest headlines--and the commemoration in Eternity ... of the first American girl who 'made good' according to God's exact standards."

Born in 1774, slender, brilliantly dark-eyed Elizabeth Ann Bayley, reports Father Feeney, was the most beautiful debutante of Manhattan in her day. One of her distant relatives is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She was born a Protestant, married a handsome merchant, William Seton, bore him five children. They went to Italy to improve his frail health, instead were taken off their ship at Livorno and quarantined in a lazaretto because yellow fever had broken out before they left Manhattan. Cold, underfed, Elizabeth made no complaint but prayed in their dungeon while in the next room hard-bitten sailors cursed and killed themselves. When they were released her husband died. Widowed Elizabeth Seton became a convert to Catholicism. Eventually, as the result of persecutions by her onetime friends, she fled Manhattan, went to Baltimore to open the first Catholic parochial school, then to Emmitsburg, Md. to conduct the first American convent for the Sisters of Charity. Throughout her short life Mother Seton kept up a journal and a voluminous correspondence, with a remarkable literary quality which Author Feeney likens to Elizabeth Browning's. To her son William, who went to sea as a midshipman, she wrote passionately loving letters. Excerpt: "Last night I had you close where you used to lie so snug and warm when you drew the life stream 20 years ago, and where the heart still beats to love you dearly till its last sigh, which even then will love you best of all."

One day in 1821 William's frigate arrived in Boston Harbor from a two-year cruise. Frantically impatient to see his mother, William jumped into a small boat, pulled furiously for the land, leaped ashore, rode day and night, by carriage, coach and wagon, to Emmitsburg. He ran the last two miles, up & down hill, only to find, when he arrived at the convent, that his tuberculous mother had been six months dead.

* Another U. S. candidate is an Indian girl named Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-1680), for whose beatification proceedings were begun by the Bishop of Albany in 1931. Steps toward canonization include examination of the candi date's writings, collection of evidence on martyr dom or heroic practice of the theological virtues -- faith, hope and charity -- and the four great moral virtues -- prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Evidence of two miracles worked before beatification and two afterward is required for canonization.

/-AS AMERICAN WOMAN -- Leonard Feeney -- American Press ($2).

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