The world watched amazed at an unfamiliar sight: There in St. Peter’s Square they were used to seeing Italians step into the spotlight, but never someone born in America.
New York’s cardinal provided commentary: “Americans, and American Catholics in particular, should be proud of this jewel in the very center of their crown,” he said.
But this wasn’t Cardinal Timothy Dolan hailing the emergence of Pope Leo XIV into the heart of the Church in 2025. It was Cardinal Francis Spellman praising Elizabeth Ann Seton on the eve of her beatification in 1962.
The commonalities between St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and Pope Leo XIV are more than superficial.
Cardinal Spellman was fascinated by the thought that an American had reached the highest level of appreciation in the Catholic Church.
“Elizabeth Ann Seton was wholly American. She had the blood of French, English and Dutch colonial pioneers in her veins,” he said, but was nonetheless “of thoroughly American stock” since her parents and two grandparents were born here.
Robert Francis Prevost likewise has an American “melting pot” pedigree with French, Italian, African and Spanish ancestors — and parents who were Chicago natives.
“The names of streets and places familiar to us were familiar” to Elizabeth Seton, said Spellman: Wall Street, the Battery, Greenwich Village and vacations in Westchester. “She was not a mystical personage in an unattainable niche. She was a down-to-earth woman who breathed American air, loved American towns and countryside, enjoyed American pastimes, followed American social conventions.”
The same is true of Robert Prevost, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He was an altar boy at St. Mary of the Assumption in Riverdale. His mother was a librarian who had her children later in life after earning her master’s degree. She taught her children how to cook casseroles and iron their clothes. His father was a D-Day Navy veteran and a superintendent of schools who took his kids on summer vacations and passed on his love for baseball.
But more than that, both of them drew from the American experience for the benefit of the Church.
“Elizabeth Seton was someone who showed that the great American virtues of industry and common sense, of relentlessness, can be sanctified in a way that changes the world,” said John-Mark Miravalle, Professor of Systematic and Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.
In the early days of America, the Filicchi brothers—Filippo and Antonio—saw the promise of America’s virtues.
Filippo had married Mary Cowper of Boston, and the brothers were friends with Washington, Jefferson, Madison — and Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore. They saw how well the faith fit the United States, and when Elizabeth Ann Seton traveled to their home in Italy to seek a cure for her husband, their business associate William Seton, they saw an opportunity.
According to historian Catherine O’Donnell, in her biography Elizabeth Seton, American Saint, Filippo wrote the following in a letter to Bishop Carroll:
“I was struck with the idea that Providence had arranged the plan of her voyage to Italy for the particular purposes of giving her an opportunity of rectifying the prejudices entertained against our religion, of enlightening her mind and of granting her the blessing of discerning the true Church and being a Member of it.”
The hope was realized when, after her husband’s death, Elizabeth not only became Catholic, but became a religious sister and foundress.
Just as the Filicchis recognized the potential in Elizabeth to evangelize America, the cardinals recognized the promise in Robert Prevost to evangelize the world.
The Church has long admired the no-nonsense, straightforward approach of Americans.
You can see American influence in everything from the Church’s affirmation of democratic ideals to the embrace of religious liberty — rightly understood — with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65)
In her biography, O’Donnell notes that Mother Seton anticipated what would become the Catholic approach to religious pluralism.
“She believed with [Archbishop] John Carroll that the ill effects of Catholic self-seclusion outweighed those of mixing, and she hoped that simply exposing Protestant children to the Catholic atmosphere of [her school] might plant the seeds of the faith.”
The Catholic bishops in America followed suit, saying at the Baltimore Plenary Council in 1883: “We consider the establishment of our country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws as a work of special Providence, its framers ‘building wiser than they knew,’ the Almighty’s hand guiding them.”
Pope Leo XIV chose as his motto In illo uno unum, identifying it as a phrase of St. Augustine that means “in the One (that is, Christ) we are one.”
“We Christians,” the Pope said, “are all called to pray and work together to reach this goal, step by step, which is and remains the work of the Holy Spirit.”
The Church has also long appreciated the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans.
The American ability to innovate and create has also always been a strong fit with the Church’s apostolic mission to bring Christ to every new people.
In 1809, a widowed mother with five children moved from the center of New York to the out-of-the-way Maryland town of Emmitsburg. By 1852, just decades after her death, Archbishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Baltimore declared: “Elizabeth Seton did more for the church in America than all of us bishops together.”
Cardinal Spellman listed the “firsts” of Mother Seton, whose patron was John Carroll, America’s first bishop: She established the first Catholic orphanage in New York, founded the first U.S. congregation of religious women — the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s — and opened the nation’s first free Catholic school for girls run by Sisters—a precursor of the American parochial school system.
Then she took that entrepreneurial spirit overseas. Spellman said communities “that call her mother” have carried “plantings of her zeal throughout the United States and Canada and even into Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Japan, Italy, China, Bermuda and the Bahamas.”
Robert Prevost, the future Pope Leo, was a child of the school system St. Elizabeth Ann Seton pioneered, and he followed in her missionary footsteps, as well.
He spent his life in Peruvian missions, and, on becoming Pope, called on Catholics to be “missionaries of hope among all peoples.”
“Truth does not depend on the people around us, or the place we are in,” he said. “Yet truth can never be separated from charity, which always has at its root a concern for the life and well-being of every man and woman.”
It is the truth and love of Christ that allowed Elizabeth Seton and Robert Prevost to accomplish great things in small ways.
Cardinal Spellman said, “It is surely no accident that this woman who was responsible for Catholic teaching and Catholic charity now so developed that with true missionary spirit it expands and extends into foreign lands, should have been so thoroughly American. She is a glorious tribute, by God’s grace, to the health, zeal and spirituality of Catholicism in America.”
And it is surely no accident that Leo XIV is an American either.
He left the United States with its motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) to do mission work in the peripheries of Peru.
Then, when he was called to the center, in Rome, he invited the whole Church and the world “to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people.”
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: Pope Leo XIV, Wikicommons
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