Mother Seton's Emmitsburg: America's First Saint

On the eastern edge of the South Mountain in Maryland, the small town of Emmitsburg holds a claim unlike any other place in the United States: it is where the country's first native-born saint established the foundation of the American Catholic school system.

Elizabeth Ann Seton arrived in Emmitsburg in June of eighteen oh nine, a widow with five children and a recent convert to Catholicism. She had grown up in a prosperous New York Episcopalian family, married a merchant, and been widowed at twenty-nine when her husband died of tuberculosis in Italy. The grief and the experience of Italian Catholic community drew her toward Rome, and by eighteen oh five she had converted, at considerable social cost. She lost friends, lost financial support, and faced open hostility from some of her Protestant family.

In Emmitsburg she found her vocation. She founded Saint Joseph's Academy and Free School, the first free parochial school for Catholic girls in the United States , and in doing so, laid the cornerstone of a system that would eventually educate millions of American children. She also established the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph, the first religious community of women founded in what was then the territorial United States.

Seton died in eighteen twenty-one, exhausted and tubercular at forty-six. She had spent twelve years in Emmitsburg building institutions that outlasted her by centuries. The Sisters of Charity she founded grew into one of the largest teaching orders in American history. The school she started became Saint Joseph College, which operated for over a century and a half.

The Catholic Church began her cause for canonization decades after her death, and on September fourteenth, nineteen seventy-five, Pope Paul the Sixth canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton in Rome. Her remains rest in the basilica here, which draws tens of thousands of pilgrims each year. She is the patron saint of Catholic schools, and her story begins in this quiet Maryland valley.