Francis Xavier Seelos was born into a world very different from the New Orleans streets where he died ministering to the sick.
But his ability to forgo all national prejudice freed him to see in everyone not a nationality but an icon of Christ.
This is a lesson he learned from the Gospel — but it is also at the heart of the Vincentian charism that inspired St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. “It is in the humble, poor, and helpless He delights to number His greatest mercies so that He may set them as marks to encourage poor sinners,” she said.
When Father Seelos came to America as a missionary, he was a long way from home.
Born in 1819 Bavaria, Francis Seelos grew up in a family of 12 children where he made no bones about what he wanted to be when he grew up, as he played Mass and prayed extra rosaries by himself. He wanted to be a priest, and not just any priest.
“Someday, I will become a second Francis Xavier,” he is reported to have said.
He earned high marks in school in the kingdom of Bavaria, but his family was not wealthy. To send Francis to secondary school his father had to save what he could from his weaving business and small farm. At school he had to rely on the charity of others many miles from home for his necessities. To make matters worse, Fr. Seelos had the habit of giving away much of the money that came his way.
He couldn’t help it. To him, the poor were Christ. “I cannot stand to see them go without when I have something to share,” he wrote home.
After studying many of the prerequisites, Francis finally entered the diocesan seminary in 1842 when he was 23. He made an impression on all he met. When he left his homeland, a daily newspaper in Bavaria reported, “This morning there departed from the diocesan seminary here one of its most worthy members, Francis Xavier Seelos.”
His departure had been sudden. Until three weeks prior, only his father knew of his intention to leave for the United States. He later confided to his brother that the Blessed Virgin Mary had appeared to him, urging him to leave his homeland and follow a missionary path in the new world.
He was soon in New York preparing to minister to German-speaking immigrants. When he was ordained a Redemptorist priest, Fr. Seelos was assigned to serve with St. John Neumann, another immigrant Catholic who was leading a parish in Pittsburgh, PA.
Fr. Seelos had much to contend with — but culture shock was the worst thing he faced.
He complained in a letter home about “The bedbugs, insects, the religious sects, the language and so many things more.” But he also objected to “the vulgar spirit of speculation, business, money, the coldness and dryness of the people — nowhere a cross or a church of pilgrimage — no happy faces, no songs, no singing, everything dead.”
He made the most of it, though, and counted the blessings: plenty of food, inexpensive clothing, efficient heating systems and 24-hour running water. He became a popular confessor, hearing all comers — whether they were new German or French immigrants or Americans speaking English.
He was known for his simple preaching style, which made theological concepts graspable by working-class Catholics and their children, and he gradually grew to love his American parishioners. He began to lead parish missions throughout the Midwest and New England. In true Redemptorist style — the order was founded by St. Alphonsus Liguori, one of the Church’s great moral theologians — he would bring his congregations to a knowledge of their own sinfulness and then invite them to confession.
He would challenge people to think of a sin they believed was too great for God’s mercy — and then bring it to confession. “None of the damned was ever lost because his sin was too great, but because his trust was too small,” he said.
He clearly saw that people’s spiritual needs were even greater than their material needs. He slept next to the door of his room in his clothes so that he could be awakened at night and go at a moment’s notice to serve someone in need.
One popular story says that he was called to the bedside of a prostitute who was dying in a brothel. He didn’t hesitate, even though he knew that such an action in that time and place would be widely misunderstood and eagerly shared.
“Let them talk,” he said. “I saved a soul!”
The lessons of St. Francis Xavier Seelos’s life were central to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s as well.
Their lives barely overlapped — Fr. Seelo was 2 years old when Mother Seton died. But they shared the same Gospel-rooted vision: to see Christ in every person, regardless of race, nationality or culture.
Elizabeth wrote a letter to her son William in 1815 as he prepared to travel with the military.
“I beg you so much not to give way to national prejudices, but to allow for many customs and manners you will see. Why should not others have their peculiarities as well as we have ours?” she wrote.
To Mother Seton, we are all citizens of heaven —”foreign” to each other in this world, but at home together in the Father’s kingdom. “My full confidence is that whatever changing events you may pass through you will act as a Man and a Christian and will keep in view our true Home and eternal reunion,” she wrote to William. “That Confidence is even extraordinary since you are so young and may have so many trials to pass through.”
Father Seelos lived out precisely the kind of Christian witness she described. He overcame the pull of familiar comforts and natural affections to embrace a supernatural calling. He served wherever God sent him, and died not only far from his Bavarian homeland, but a long way from the Pennsylvania headquarters of his religious order.
In 1866, after a failed stint teaching in seminary, he was appointed pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in New Orleans.
“I will be there one year and then I will die of yellow fever,” he told a School Sister of Notre Dame.
That is exactly what happened. He died at age 48 and returned home at last.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
Image Credit: Wikicommons.