St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
A widow with five children who started American Catholic school.
Elizabeth was born in New York before there was much of a United States. She married young, had five children, and then her husband got sick and they sailed to Italy hoping the warm air would help. It did not. She was widowed at twenty nine, in a foreign country, with five kids and no money.
The Italian family who took her in were Catholic, and she watched how they prayed. When she came home and joined the Church, most of her friends stopped speaking to her.
So she moved to Maryland and opened a school. It was the first free Catholic school in the country, and the order of sisters she founded to run it went on to open hundreds more. She is the first person born in America to be named a saint.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton facts for kids
- The first American-born saint
- She was a widow at 29 with five children
- She founded the Sisters of Charity, the first religious order started in the US
- Her school in Emmitsburg, Maryland is why she's patron of Catholic schools
Feast day: January 4 · Patron of Catholic schools and widows
Proper to the calendar of the United States.
St. Elizabeth Ann, when everything changes at once, help me start something anyway.