Tag: America’s Saints

Imagine the suffering of a 29-year-old American widow returning home from Italy, having just buried her husband. Underneath the pain, she couldn’t have guessed this, amazingly, was an integral part of God’s plan. Unknown to her, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was on the path to becoming the first canonized saint born on American soil.

The daughter of a physician, born in New York City in 1774, 3-year-old Elizabeth was acquainted with suffering early with her mother’s death. She married a wealthy importer, William Seton, in 1794, and together they had five children. Stress from the bankruptcy of his business in 1802 worsened William Seton’s existing tuberculosis, and doctors prescribed the Italian climate. Elizabeth didn’t leave his side until his death in an Italian quarantine two days after Christmas in 1803. The couple originally planned to stay with his business partners in Italy, and the young widow enjoyed their hospitality until she could return to America. The Filicchi family home had a private chapel, and there Elizabeth had her first experience of Catholicism. Her life was forever changed.

Fascinated by the Church’s liturgy and the Real Presence, the committed Protestant who went to Italy would soon return to America with a Catholic heart.

Antonio Filicchi helped Seton informally begin her study of the Faith on the voyage to New York.

Seton’s conversion to Catholicism brought about many hardships. Hostility from her family was just the beginning of her sufferings in an anti-Catholic New York City. Seton made the Profession of Faith and received her first holy Communion in March 1805 at St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street, the city’s oldest parish. As a victim of prejudice, Seton had trouble finding stable work to provide for her family, and she wrestled about what to do.

God gave the answer when Seton was invited to Maryland by Sulpician Father William DuBourg, who interestingly, as bishop of the Louisiana Territory, worked with St. Rose Philippine Duchesne. In the Catholic-friendly state of Maryland, Seton would establish a school and start a religious order. First teaching in Baltimore for a year, Seton pronounced religious vows in 1809 in the presence America’s first bishop, John Carroll. He gave the foundress of the first religious order established in the United States the title “Mother Seton.” The Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s lived the Rule of St. Vincent de Paul’s Daughters of Charity with a few alterations from Carroll to provide for a mother with children to enter the new order.

Establishing a free school for poor girls near Emmitsburg, Maryland, proved to be a daunting, but not impossible task for Mother Seton. With guidance and assistance from Sulpician Father Jean Dubois — the future bishop of New York who ordained St. John Neumann — Seton and her sisters opened St. Joseph’s Free School in 1810, and for this she is remembered as the mother of Catholic education in the United States.

Seton’s trust in God was undying, although it was tested in her final years on the rough Maryland frontier, especially when two daughters died of tuberculosis by 1816. Persevering in the Faith to the end, Seton exhorted those near her deathbed, “Be children of the Church.” She died of tuberculosis at the age of 46 on Jan. 4, 1821. Seton’s spiritual director, Sulpician Father Simon Bruté, himself a candidate for sainthood, memorialized her saying, “O, such a mother! Such faith and love! Such a true spirit of prayer, of true humility, of true self-denial in all, of true charity to all!”

Seton’s life as a loving wife and mother, a faithful teacher and a holy consecrated woman leaves a lasting example. Blessed Pope Paul VI dispensed with the then-necessary fourth miracle required for sainthood and canonized her in the Holy Year of 1975, exhorting Americans, “Rejoice for your glorious daughter. Be proud of her. And know how to preserve her fruitful heritage.”

Her feast day is January 4.

Michael Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic.

When a young Bohemian immigrant arrived in New York City on a rainy June day in 1836 his hopes for priesthood were uncertain. Due to an ordination moratorium imposed by his homeland’s government, St. John Neumann could not be ordained at home. Forsaking the comforts of home and family, desiring only his life’s oblation in love and service, Neumann chose to go to America. He read accounts of such storied missionaries as Frederic Baraga — a current candidate for sainthood — and he hoped to follow in their footsteps. Little did the young seminarian know when he set foot on American soil that the path God had in store would result in his canonization as the country’s first male saint.

Born in modern-day Czech Republic in 1811, Neumann grew up in a devout Catholic home, and he had many siblings called to religious vocations.

New York’s bishop John Dubois — the one-time advisor to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton — was impressed quickly by Neumann’s intellect and missionary zeal, ordaining him a priest within his first month in America. Dubois assigned him to regions near Buffalo, New York. While there, Neumann expressed how he faced many hardships and bouts with loneliness. Outwardly, he seemed successful, having established many parishes between Buffalo and Erie, Pennsylvania. But Neumann knew he needed a change. With the help of several priest-advisers, Neumann recognized his need for the support of a religious community to settle his troubled spirit, and he set out for the Redemptorist novitiate in Pittsburgh in 1840.

Neumann proved himself to be a competent and talented administrator, responsible for finishing the building project at St. Philomena’s Church in Pittsburgh, where he ministered alongside a fellow Redemptorist, Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos. Neumann then went on to pastor several other churches, mostly in Maryland. A surprise came when Neumann was appointed the American provincial of his order in 1847, requiring a move to Baltimore, where he became a naturalized American citizen the following year.

Administration of his order brought heavy burdens to Neumann since Redemptorists in America at the time tended to work independently. Neumann was chosen to provide unity among his brothers, and proved to be successful. In Baltimore, he also served as pastor of his order’s St. Alphonsus Church and provided much needed support to many religious orders of women in the area. Neumann’s talents as an administrator would change directions in his life yet again in 1852, when he was named fourth Bishop of Philadelphia by Blessed Pope Pius IX. He was ordained a bishop in Baltimore on his 41st birthday.

Neumann received an overwhelming welcome in his new diocese, and he was immediately recognized as a fatherly, kindly and even saintly pastor. His legacy as bishop includes the establishment of the first American diocesan schools system, the founding of religious orders, starting the Forty Hours Eucharistic devotion, and care for the poor and the city’s booming European immigrants. Neumann led his flock courageously amid the rampant anti-Catholicism and anti-immigration prejudices of the Know-Nothing party.

Neumann excelled in the virtues, most notably humility, without which he said “other virtues could be neither genuine nor permanent.” Neumann desired sanctity, praying at his first Mass, “Dearest God, give me holiness!” No matter what obstacles presented themselves in his life, Neumann responded with a total “yes” to God.

A life of love and service came to a sudden end when, on Jan. 5, 1860, at age 48, Neumann collapsed from a stroke on a Philadelphia street. In 1977, when Neumann became the first (and to date, only) American bishop to be canonized, Pope Paul VI said that for Neumann to accomplish his great works, “love was necessary. And love meant giving; love meant effort; love meant sacrifice. And in his sacrifice, Bishop Neumann’s service was complete.”

His feast day is January 5.

Michael Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic.

A young Italian woman seeking a consecrated life simply would not take no for an answer when the Daughters of the Sacred Heart denied her request to enter their order. Despite her frail health — the reason she was denied — the young Maria Francesca Cabrini (1850-1917) would not be deterred from accomplishing the greatness God had in store for her. Motivated by deep faith, Cabrini did something rare for a 24-year-old woman in 19th century Italy: She established her own religious community.

Responding to the needs of her local diocese, Cabrini was asked to manage an all-girls school and boarding house with five companions, all of whom desired religious life.

As they lived and worked together for three years, Cabrini conducted them in a novitiate, resulting in their profession of vows in 1877 and the establishment of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Cabrini composed the rule of the new missionary order and remained superior general until her death.

At her profession of vows, Cabrini adopted Xavier as a secondary name to reflect her devotion to the revered Jesuit missionary, St. Francis Xavier, the great apostle to the Orient. And so, unsurprisingly, Cabrini contemplated bringing her new order to evangelize that region.

During an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she consulted the pontiff about her desire to evangelize the Orient, but she received an unexpected reply: “Not to the East, but to the West.” With that, she prepared to set out for America and begin her order’s mission.

Arriving in New York City in 1889, Cabrini and her sisters were not deterred from getting right to work despite the many difficulties and hardships they faced. Much-needed support from New York’s Archbishop Michael Corrigan helped Cabrini establish several institutions in a city ridden with poverty, including an essential orphanage and other roles such as teaching parochial catechism lessons.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini constantly sought to give more to God all her life. Cabrini’s missionary zeal could not be contained in New York; she established more than 67 institutions of health care, education and social services throughout North and South America and Europe. Requests for Cabrini and her sisters to establish schools, hospitals and orphanages came from American cities such as Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Denver, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and she did not disappoint. She always seemed to be on the move. Cabrini was known also as something of a miracle worker in her day, most notably in the case of the portentous discovery of a spring on the site of a summer camp-turned shrine now dedicated to her in Golden, Colorado.

A lifetime of tireless, selfless and often harrowing missionary work took a toll on Cabrini. Hoping for a simpler life and fresh leadership for the order she founded, Cabrini announced retirement plans in 1910, which were quickly dashed when her sisters throughout the world wrote to Rome asking that she be secured as their mother general for life. Pope St. Pius X agreed, the request was granted, and Mother Cabrini, as she still affectionately is known today — a title perhaps more familiar than “saint” — labored in her missions with the love of a mother until her death on Dec. 22, 1917, in the Chicago hospital she founded.

Cabrini’s holiness was revered even during her life, and she was canonized fewer than 30 years after her death by Pope Pius XII in 1946. Known and loved for her amazing missionary work, it is perhaps most timely to meditate on her example of work among immigrants; Cabrini herself became a naturalized American citizen in 1909.

As Pius XII implored at her canonization, may St. Frances Xavier Cabrini beg from God that “public, private and international relations will be regulated not by unbridled desire for selfish advantage, but in justice and equity, restoring mankind the true peace from which the common good flows. Amen.”

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini is a patron saint for immigrants, and her feast day is Nov. 13.

Michael Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter @HeinleinMichael.

Like so many others in the litany of America’s saints, Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos was filled with missionary zeal. His boyhood desire to follow in the footsteps of his namesake — the patron of missionaries, St. Francis Xavier — led Seelos to spend his life leading many souls to the Lord though preaching and the sacraments. And his saintly example continues this work today, as Pope St. John Paul II prayed when beatifying Seelos in 2000, “Today, Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos invites the members of the Church to deepen their union with Christ in the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist.”

The German native was baptized on the day of his birth in 1819. Early on, Seelos felt called to the priesthood. After entering the seminary, he became familiar with the Redemptorist order, known for works of evangelization and care for the poor. Seelos was moved by letters he read from Redemptorist missionaries in America who told about the great need for spiritual
care among the German immigrants. Seelos decided to offer his life to join in this noble work.

Seelos arrived in New York City in 1843, and he completed the Redemptorist seminary and novitiate in Maryland. He was ordained a priest the following year at St. James Church in Baltimore. He spent eight months there before his first assignment at St. Philomena Church in Pittsburgh. There he served alongside St. John Neumann, and the young priest was greatly influenced by his saintly pastor. Of Neumann, Seelos wrote, “In every respect, he was a remarkable father to me … he guided me as my spiritual leader and confessor.” Seelos quickly showed leadership abilities and was named the order’s novice master.

Cheerful and kind, Seelos always was smiling. He enjoyed a good joke and wasn’t afraid of humor. Devotion to prayer and dependence on the will of God also characterized Seelos. Quickly developing a reputation as an ideal pastor, Seelos was known for his empathy and understanding as a very popular spiritual director and confessor. His confessional became known as a place of forgiveness and mercy, open to all who wanted divine healing. “I hear confessions in German, English, French, of whites and of blacks,” Seelos said.

After leaving Pittsburgh, Seelos was assigned to various parishes in Maryland and to the formation of Redemptorists. In 1860, Bishop Michael O’Connor of Pittsburgh resigned and recommended Seelos as the most qualified candidate to succeed him. Seelos wrote Blessed Pope Pius IX asking “to be liberated from this calamity” as he explained his inadequacies. Learning another priest was chosen for the position, Seelos joyously said, “I would rather be bishop of my students than bishop of Pittsburgh.”

After a military draft in 1863 required all men to serve during the Civil War, Seelos traveled to Washington, D.C., to seek an exemption for Redemptorist seminarians. In a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln, he obtained the exemption. Not long after, Seelos unfortunately was removed from his office. Others in the order faulted him for not being strict enough, and this caused him great sorrow.

From 1863 to 1866, Seelos was a travelling missionary. He preached in English and German throughout many states between Rhode Island and Missouri. After spending a few months at a Detroit parish, Seelos arrived as pastor of Assumption Church in New Orleans in 1866, prophetically stating, “I have come here to pass the rest of my days and find a last resting place.”

In New Orleans, Seelos was known for his devoted service to the poor and marginalized. Caring for the victims of an outbreak of yellow fever, Seelos contracted the disease himself. Suffering intensely but patiently, Seelos died on Oct. 4, 1867, at the age of 48. A miracle was attributed to Seelos’ intercession the next day, when the sickly Christine Holle touched his hand and was instantly cured of all pain. His remains were buried that day in the New Orleans church where he died.

His feast day is Oct. 5.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic.