A biography of the first American saint, focusing on her deeds and contributions to American Catholicism.

Biography of Elizabeth Bayley Seton, 1774-1821, who spent her childhood in New York City during the Revolutionary War and founded the first native sisterhood in America.

A fictionalized young adult biography of Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), New York socialite, wife, mother, convert and foundress of the American Sisters of Charity and the first U.S.-born saint.Ages 11 and up.

From socialite to saint, it was an extraordinary journey for Seton, one gracefully chronicled in Catherine O'Donnell's richly textured new biography.... A remarkable biography of a remarkable woman.― Wall Street Journal 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.

Elizabeth Seton is an important saint for our times: she was a convert, an American, a wife and mother as well as a widow, the foundress of an order (the Sisters of Charity) and an administrator. Fr. Dirvin, an authority on Saint Elizabeth Seton, takes writings, correspondence, and recollections of Seton to reveal her deep life of faith and prayer. A moving biography and an inspiring record of Elizabeth Seton's interior journey that gives us a profound spiritual portrait of a multifaceted saint.

Here are the rules, conferences and writings of these two Vincentian founders who, through service to the poor, left an indelible mark on the church in France in the seventeenth century and beyond to the present. Louise (1591-1660) first came to Vincent (1581-1660) for spiritual direction and they became coworkers and friends for the rest of their lives.

Excerpt from Elizabeth Seton: Foundress of the American Sisters of Charity, Her Life and Work I praise Thee while Thy providence, In childhood frail, I trace, For blessings given, ere dawning sense Could seek or scan Thy grace. Newman: A Thanksgiving. There stands, at the threshold of the nineteenth century, the forerunner of that noble band of confessors who, during it, renounced honors and wealth, and friendship, and high places, and pleasant lives, for Christ's sake, the figure of a woman, worn and wasted with conflict, yet touched with the radiance of victory; one who, chosen by God to do a great work in the new country that was to repair to the Church the losses inflicted upon her by the schism of the sixteenth century, shows throughout her life the special guidance that He vouchsafes to souls faithful to His inspirations, and the strength and consolation He imparts to those who suffer for His sake. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.