St. Elizabeth Ann Seton would have understood well what St. Cyril of Jerusalem meant when he told new catechumens, “You have been caught in the nets of the Church. Be taken alive, therefore; do not escape — for it is Jesus who is fishing for you.”
Both St. Elizabeth Ann and St. Cyril learned how belonging to the Catholic Church could be like being caught in a net.
Elizabeth was a married Protestant mother of five when she traveled to Italy with her husband in hopes of curing his tuberculosis. He met his death there, and she met the Catholic Church, which she eventually entered. She would become a well-known Catholic woman in her time, but she always heard the echoes of her Protestant upbringing.
Through it all, every March 18, she would have celebrated the feast of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, a saint who knew how she felt.
In the time of the Arian heresy, the Church considered Cyril too close to the Arians. The Arians considered him too close to the Church.
Cyril was born in 315 AD, near Jerusalem. He was educated in Biblical studies, ordained a priest as a young man and was only about 33 years old when he became a bishop.
The Arian heresy had taken hold of many Christians of the time. Arians believed that Jesus Christ, while greater than any other human being, was something less than divine, and that the Persons of the Trinity were not equal. Catholics, Orthodox and most Protestant Christians believe that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three uncreated coequal Persons in the one God.
Unfortunately, since the bishop who ordained Cyril was an Arian, the faithful Church was suspicious of Cyril. And the Arians soon found that Cyril was no ally, so they turned against him too — exiling him three times in 20 years, with his final exile lasting 11 years.
In fact, Cyril ended up helping to resolve the Arian heresy at the Council of Constantinople with his friend St. Gregory of Nyssa. The two men first met when Cyril was sent to investigate Cyril for heresy.
Both Elizabeth and Cyril profoundly influenced the Church.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had an outsized effect on the Church in America. In addition to the congregation of women religious she founded, she was a pioneer of America’s Catholic school system.
Likewise St. Cyril’s way of teaching catechumens about the faith “remains emblematic for the catechetical formation of Christians today,” Pope Benedict XVI said.
Cyril gave 23 lectures on the creed and the sacraments with baptism as his primary focus. Those lectures are still read to this day. He once grandly announced to Jerusalem neophytes:
“Great is the baptism that lies before you: a ransom to captives; a remission of offenses; a death of sin; a new birth of the soul; a garment of light; a holy indissoluble seal; a chariot to heaven; the delight of Paradise; a welcome into the kingdom; the gift of adoption!”
He described the experience of baptism with drama and flair, saying, “You go down into the water, bearing your sins, but … you come back up with the first flames of righteousness kindling in your soul.”
He also warned new Christians that, just as “After his baptism, [Jesus] was tempted forty days” they should expect the same. “Though not daring before your baptism to wrestle with the adversary, after you receive the grace … you too must do battle.”
Cyril also helped shape the Mass as we know it today.
Catholics will recognize his instructions to new Christians on receiving the Eucharist. It is what the Church teaches again since Vatican II. “Do not approach … with your fingers spread; but make your left hand a throne for the right, as for that which is to receive a king. And having hollowed your palm, receive the Body of Christ saying over it, ‘Amen,’” he said.
Cyril also preached the importance of the sign of peace as the moment before communion when we fulfill Jesus’s command to “First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” at the altar.
All of this flowed from St. Cyril’s conviction that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist.
Cyril told catechumens, “Since he himself declared and said of the bread, ‘This is my body,’ who shall dare to doubt any longer? And since he has himself affirmed and said, ‘This is my blood,’ who shall ever hesitate, and say that this is not his blood?”
This makes St. Elizabeth Ann very much a sister to St. Cyril.
Mother Seton was drawn to the Catholic Church by the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, especially in the forms of Eucharistic piety she saw in Italy. And her faith was thoroughly sacramental, like Cyril’s.
When her former co-religionists ever questioned her new Catholic convictions, the sacraments were her place of solace. In 1814, five years after founding her congregation, she wrote to her Italian patrons in the faith about it.
“I had a most affectionate note from Mr. H[obart] today asking me how I could ever think of leaving the church in which I was baptized,” Elizabeth wrote, then mentioned other Protestant friends who asked her the same question.
She prayed in response: “But oh my Father and my God, all that will not do for me. Your word is truth, and without contradiction wherever it is, one Faith, one hope, one baptism I look for, wherever it is, and I often think my sins, my miseries hide the light, yet I will cling and hold to my God to the last gasp, begging for that light — and never change until I find it.”
It seems that, as with Cyril, there was always someone on hand to suggest that Elizabeth was not in the right place. But as with Cyril, a truer commitment took precedence.
She was caught by Jesus in the Church’s sacramental net, just like Cyril had described, and she had no intention of leaving it.
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: St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Wikicommons.
This reflection was previously published. Click here to view all Seton Reflections.