Elizabeth Seton
American Saint
by Catherine O'Donnell
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Pub Date Sep 15 2018 | Archive Date Sep 15 2018
Cornell University Press | Three Hills
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
"Elizabeth Seton is a thrilling achievement. Beginning in late eighteenth-century New York, O'Donnell makes superb use of an extraordinary archive to trace Seton's journey as a young woman in an affluent merchant family, a mother, a widow, a convert, a founder of a religious order, an institution builder and, eventually, a saint. The result is a compelling portrait of an American coming-of-age in the first decades after independence and a major contribution to our understanding of Catholicism during an enlightened age."
- John T. McGreevy, author of American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global
"In this thoroughly researched and elegantly written biography, Catherine O’Donnell enlarges our consideration of Elizabeth Seton from the worthy niche of religious history and locates her in the span of the history of the Early Republic. An American original, Seton takes her place alongside leaders like Abigail Adams, Margaret Fuller, the Grimké sisters, and Lucretia Mott. For once, a biographer does this complex and compelling figure full justice."
- John Loughery, author of Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America
"The manifest appeal of Elizabeth Seton stems not only from Catherine O’Donnell’s beautifully crafted narrative with its poetic diction, but also the display of the exuberance of Elizabeth’s temperament, talents, holiness, and the intensity of her love of God."
- Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., editor of Friendship of My Soul: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Ann Seton
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781501705786 |
| PRICE | $36.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 552 |
Featured Reviews
Stacie T, Reviewer
I loved this book. Elizabeth Seton is such an inspiration, and Catherine O'Donnell certainly does her justice. I feel now as though I know her all the more. The author did a beautiful job of telling her story, while keeping the book cozy and easy to read. Very enjoyable.
Janet P, Reviewer
This is a simply marvelouslous biography of Mother Seton! It's great on so many levels. First, it's really well researched, using many, many primary sources and the rich archives of Seton's order.
Second, it's really well-written. In spite of all the research and historic background in the book, you never feel as if it weighs heavily on the reader or that it gets in the way of a really great story.
Finally, and most importantly, the book is objective. Too many books of history and biographies use the subject as a way to advance their own agenda and use a selective approach to their subject to do this. Certainly this has been true of Mother Seton in previous biographies I have read. O'Donnell does not do this. She acknowledges at the very beginning that religion was important to Seton and that it will be important to the book. That was really refreshing and a lovely contrast to the "feminist hero" school of biography the saint has been subjected to.
The author does not ignore the opportunities created by women, both inside Catholic orders of nuns and in the world, but she puts them in a historic context, one that is too often ignored.
I only have one small complaint with the book and that is in its treatment of slavery. O'Donnell shares the current view that slavery is bad and that societies based on slavery are also tainted. I wish she had taken her wonderful objectivity and applied it here as well. It struck a sour note, even if you agree.
Diana B, Media/Journalist
I love this book. The author of "Elizabeth Seaton," Catherine O'Donnell, breaks cardinal writers rules by not starting with the story of her protagonist but far back in the future with Seaton's grandfathers. What she provides is a glimpse of colonial America, New York City specifically, and what it means to be a loyalist during and after the Revolutionary War. She takes us through privations, good stepmothers, poor stepmothers, Doctor's Riots, and the penalties meted out for those on the wars losing side. Through it she provides not only a good biography of the United States first saint, but a biography of a fledgling America.
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