Elizabeth Seton Legacy

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, founder of the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, first active community of Catholic women religious in the United States. She also began St. Joseph’s Academy and the first fee Catholic School for girls staffed by Sisters in Emmitsburg, PA. Mother Seton legacy includes six religious communities with more than 5,000 members, hundreds of schools, social service centers, and hospitals throughout the United States and the world. She was the first U.S. born canonized Saint.

The extraordinary manner in which Elizabeth lived an ordinary life flowed from the centrality of the She was born in New York on August 28, 1774. Her father, Dr. Richard Bayley was a physician, professor of medicine,

Elizabeth finds that she will needed more nuns to help teach. Elizabeth starts the “Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul”. Feeney 167-169). Elizabeth Seton took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on March 25, 1809 and was given the title of “Mother” by Archbishop Carroll. That June, she and her followers donned a simple black religious habit and set out for Emmitsburg, Maryland, situated 50 miles west of Baltimore. Their first house was a cottage on the grounds of St. Mary’s College. On July 31, the group began community life as the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph.(St. Elizabeth Seton)

Elizabeth had been a nun for four years and many regard this as being the first Catholic school in the United States. She was still raising her five children, William, 17, Richard, 15, Catherine, 13, and Rebecca, 11. Her eldest, the child she felt closest to, Anna Maria, born in 1795(Mazzoni,2006). Catholic women from around the country came to her and the beginning of a religious congregation emerged

Today six separate communities of sisters trace their beginning to Emmitsburg. Five of these communities are now independently organized and are called Sisters of Charity. The sixth is the American Daughters of Charity. In 1850, these sisters united with a French order of the same name. That order is the largest order of religious in the Church, in 1982 having thirty-two thousand members across the world. The Motherhouse or headquarters of the order is in Paris, France. In the United States, the Daughters of Charity staff hospitals, child-care institutions, home for the aged and handicapped, and schools at every level (St. Elizabeth Ann