(OSV News) — If St. Elizabeth Ann Seton‘s life was written as a Hollywood screenplay, a script doctor might say it was simply too tragic for audiences to believe — let alone that the heroine would repeatedly persevere.
The death of her mother when she was 3. The separation of her father and step-mother, who practically shunned her and her older sister. The death of her father from contagious disease. The bankruptcy of her husband’s business and the loss of their home. The death of her husband in a foreign land. The opposition of some of her family and friends when she converted to Catholicism. The deaths of two of her children during her lifetime.
If it all seems a bit too much — truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and as she herself declared, “Faith lifts the soul. Hope supports it. Experience says it must. And love says let it be!”
Sept. 14 marks the 50th anniversary since the canonization of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), the first American-born saint. And while it’s been more than 250 years since her birth, her admirers say Mother Seton is hardly a quaint figure from an antique past — she’s instead a vibrantly relevant woman who continues to have much to share with modern believers.