A new essay series on religious artists, writers, thinkers, activists and visionaries from the perspective of Elizabeth Seton’s spirituality.
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Elizabeth Ann Seton was twenty-years old when the Blessed Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne were executed during the French Revolution. A century and a half later Francois Poulenc would tell the world their story in his sublime opera, Dialogues des Carmelites.
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The mid-twentieth century immigrant film director and the early-nineteenth century saint born into Manhattan’s elite shared a deep concern for society’s poor and outcasts that was grounded in their Catholic faith.
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The French Catholic writer and the American saint each knew that God’s light shines brightest in the deepest darkness.
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There could hardly be two women who lived in such different cultures as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, yet Mary spoke to each of them.
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Elizabeth Seton and Sigrid Undset were feminist icons without officially becoming feminists because they drew their strength from their Catholicism.
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The saint Elizabeth Seton and the poet Robert Lowell took divergent paths through the storm clouds of their lives, each seeking shelter under God’s immense umbrella of grace.
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In a remarkable act of trust, Elizabeth Seton referred to the death dates of her daughters as their “Heavenly birthdays”—the day when they were born into eternal life after the long, hard labor of dying.
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The Catholic writer and the Catholic saint each grounded their lives and their works in the astonishing power of grace.
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Luigi Giussani and Elizabeth Seton never planned to found religious movements. Their mission was to love God and neighbor and proclaim that the Incarnate God lives now, in the Eucharist and in our encounters with the people we are given.
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These two immensely talented women gave up everything that stood in the way of their love of God and neighbor.
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Vassar Miller, her body limiting what she could do in the world, lived out her life in Christ through her poetry. Despite their different circumstances, she and Elizabeth Seton are soul sisters, linked by the spirituality that they shared.
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Elizabeth Seton and Henri Nouwen arrived at the same conclusion about what God asks of us: to give ourselves away in love.
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Elizabeth Seton and Denise Levertov were strong women with strong wills who surrendered themselves body and soul to God.
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The lives of Thomas Merton and Elizabeth Ann Seton make for rich, vibrant history which—like good music—resounds down the halls of memory.