St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is a model of what it means to be a woman. Just ask Pope Saint John Paul II.<\/p>\n
We celebrate his feast day on Oct. 22, the anniversary of his inauguration as pope. Pope Francis called him a \u201cprophet.\u201d His World Youth Days changed what it meant to be a young Catholic, his document Ex Corde Ecclesiae <\/i>changed what it meant to be a university, and his Theology of the Body changed the way we looked at human love.<\/p>\n
But St. John Paul II also changed the way the Church talks about women by writing extensively about the \u201cfeminine genius.\u201d Exactly 25 years ago John Paul\u2019s Letter to Women expressed the Church\u2019s thanks to women for their unique contributions to society, and it is uncanny how closely his description fits Mother Seton.<\/p>\n
John Paul starts by being grateful for motherhood.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, women who are mothers!\u201d he writes. \u201cYou have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God\u2019s own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child’s first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was exactly this, embracing her five children as infants, and standing by them from her arms to \u2014 in two cases \u2014 their graves.<\/p>\n
Mother Seton is truly \u201cGod\u2019s own smile\u201d to her children in her many letters to them. \u201cThis is your birthday, the day that I first held you in my arms,\u201d she wrote to her daughter Anna Maria as a child. \u201cMay God Almighty Bless you my child and make you his child forever. Your mother\u2019s soul prays to him to lead you through this world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elizabeth also resembles John Paul\u2019s description of a wife.<\/b><\/p>\n
Said John Paul II: \u201cThank you, women who are wives! You irrevocably join your future to that of your husbands, in a relationship of mutual giving, at the service of love and life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elizabeth was a famously conscientious wife, and not by accident. Early on she wrote to a friend, \u201cI must learn one thing which few women could acquire the first year of their marriage which was to let their husbands \u2018Act for the best.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She learned to \u201cact for the best\u201d for her husband, too. She took him to Italy in hopes that the climate would cure his tuberculosis, and her service to him had the effect John Paul wrote about in The Family in the Modern World<\/i>. He said wives\u2019 and husbands\u2019 lives of sacrifice were \u201cthe permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross\u201d (No. 13). Elizabeth\u2019s husband lost his life there, and she met Jesus Christ in the sacraments of the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n
Next in the <\/b>Letter to Women,<\/i><\/b> St. John Paul II expresses his gratitude for women in their first families.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters!\u201d he wrote. \u201cInto the heart of the family, and then of all society, you bring the richness of your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elizabeth was a devoted daughter to both her father and father-in-law, and a loving sister. She wrote to a friend about sharing her house with her sister Mary Post, and said \u201cthe pleasure of receiving our husbands together in the evening, the company and protection we are to each other, when they are detained from us, counterbalances every inconvenience which a union of families always occasions.\u201d<\/p>\n
If she were posting on Instagram instead of writing a letter, she would have added a #sistersquad hashtag.<\/p>\n
Significantly, John Paul thanks women for their participation in the workplace.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life \u2014 social, economic, cultural, artistic and political,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
He said that women\u2019s contribution was different in kind from men\u2019s. \u201cYou make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling,\u201d he said, \u201cto a model of life ever open to the sense of \u2018mystery,\u2019 to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mother Seton \u2014 who interacted with her husband\u2019s business when she had to help with the books during his illness and who led the work of the Sisters of Charity later in life \u2014 described what this \u201cwomanly\u201d approach to work looks like. Consider the list of \u201cwork verbs\u201d she wrote to a friend, \u201cmy days ever the same are spent in \u2026 keeping, walking, teaching, loving, and praying all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
She even took joy in the difficulties of work, she said. \u201cAll day long at all kind of work, my loadstone is present,\u201d she said. \u201cTo enjoy we must love, and to love we must sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n
John Paul thanked religious women too, another aspect that St. Elizabeth Ann lived out.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, consecrated women! Following the example of the greatest of women, the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, you open yourselves with obedience and fidelity to the gift of God\u2019s love,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth entered a kind of consecrated life even before she officially professed. \u201cI have long since made the vows which as a religious I could only renew,\u201d she told the Italian friends who introduced her to the faith.<\/p>\n
She made private vows to Bishop John Carroll in 1809, and then official, public vows in 1813. Through her vows, she said, \u201cthe thirst and longing of my soul is fixed on the cross alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a widow and then a religious sister, she would personally understand what John Paul II praises in religious women: \u201cYou help the Church and all mankind to experience a \u2018spousal\u2019 relationship to God, one which magnificently expresses the fellowship which God wishes to establish with his creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last, John Paul thanks every woman for femininity itself.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman! Through the insight which is so much a part of your womanhood you enrich the world\u2019s understanding and help to make human relations more honest and authentic.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said \u201cthe daily relationships between people, especially within the family, society certainly owes much to the \u2018genius of women.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Mother Seton reveals this \u201cfeminine genius.\u201d She didn\u2019t write polemics or theological disquisition \u2014 she wrote letters to friends, family and Church figures. We know what she thinks about God and the Church because she expressed it to those in her circle, to increase their unity, comfort, and appreciation of God in their lives.<\/p>\n
All these things make St. Elizabeth Ann Seton a model woman in every aspect that John Paul mentions \u2014 a true feminine genius.<\/p>\n
TOM HOOPES<\/strong>,\u00a0autor m\u00e1s reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitri\u00f3n de La extraordinaria Stor<\/a>y podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco<\/a> ya est\u00e1 disponible en Audible<\/a>. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comit\u00e9 de Medios y Arbitrios de la C\u00e1mara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pas\u00f3 10 a\u00f1os como editor del peri\u00f3dico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.<\/em><\/p>\n