The Making of a U.S. Catholic Saint: Gender, Catholicism, and the Afterlife of Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton

In 1975, American Catholics celebrated the canonization Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born person from the United States so honored. Seton had been an Episcopalian widow and mother of five when she converted to Catholicism in 1805. Four years later, she founded the Sisters of Charity, the first indigenous congregation of women religious. Her congregation quickly became one of the largest in the country, whose members educated thousands, served as war nurses, ran hospitals, and provided social services. While Seton’s life provides multiple opportunities to explore arenas of intersection among Catholicism, gender, and American political culture, this paper focuses primarily on the story of Seton’s afterlife; specifically, it examines her trajectory as a candidate for canonization, from its beginnings in the 1880s through its completion in 1975.  Saints always become popular in particular contexts. For that reason a study of a cause for canonization can often reveals more about the people promoting a saint than it does about the saint herself.  Between the 1880s and the 1970s, Seton’s devotees alternately—and anachronistically--reinvented her as a patriot, a feminist, a crusader against anti-Catholicism, and an architect of the American Catholic parochial school system.  This paper uses these and other reincarnations of Seton to trace Catholics’ shifting understanding of themselves as American citizens.