EMMITSBURG, Md. — The Seton Shrine is expected to receive thousands of visitors throughout the summer, particularly on June 6, when the Eastern pilgrimage of the National Eucharistic Revival — a movement to re-catechize U.S. Catholics on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist — passes through Emmitsburg, Maryland. One of the four pilgrimage trails is named in honor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
This stop is most appropriate, as, upon receiving her first Communion, St. Elizabeth proclaimed: “At last … at last, God is mine and I am his!”
The first American-born saint was also much moved by Scripture.
In the Book of Tobit, Anna is in agony. Her son, Tobiah, has been sent to Media to retrieve funds for his ailing-and-now-blind father, Tobit. She is convinced, however, that Tobiah is dead; and in her grief, she weeps aloud and keeps watch at the road, waiting for his return (Tobit 10:7).
This striking image of a mother’s pain deeply impacted St. Elizabeth so much so that her Bible, gifted to her by friend Antonio Filicchi after entering the Catholic Church in 1805, still retains her pen’s underling of “her son coming.”