page_title: Elizabeth Ann Seton
section_title: Widowhood and conversion to Catholicism
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Ann Seton / Biography / Widowhood and conversion to Catholicism
caption_attribution_description: English: en:James Watson House from en:Battery Park on a sunny late winter afternoon
context_page_description: Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, SC, was the first person born in what would become the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church. She established the first Catholic girls' school in the nation in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she also founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.
context_section_description: A dispute between the United States of America and the French Republic from 1798 to 1800 led to a series of attacks on American shipping. The United Kingdom's blockade of France and the loss of several of his ships at sea led William Seton into bankruptcy, and the Setons lost their home at 61 Stone Street in lower Manhattan. The following summer she and the children stayed with her father, who was still the health officer for the Port of New York on Staten Island. From 1801 to 1803 they lived in a house at 8 State Street, on the site of the present Church of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary (built in 1964). Through most of their married life, William Seton suffered from tuberculosis. The stress worsened his illness; his doctors sent him to Italy for the warmer climate, with Elizabeth and their eldest daughter as his companions. Upon landing at the port of Leghorn, they were held in quarantine for a month, for authorities feared they might have brought yellow fever from New York. William died on December 27, 1803, and was buried in Italy's Old English Cemetery. Elizabeth and Anna Maria were received by the families of her late husband's Italian business partners, Filippo and Antonio Filicchi, who introduced her to Catholicism.
  Returning to New York, the widow Seton was received into the Catholic Church on March 14, 1805, by the Reverend Matthew O'Brien, pastor of St. Peter's Church, then the city's only Catholic church. (Anti-Catholic laws had been lifted just a few years before.) A year later, she received the sacrament of Confirmation from the Bishop of Baltimore, the Right Reverend John Carroll, the only Catholic bishop in the nation.
  In order to support herself and her children, Seton had started an academy for young ladies, as was common for widows of social standing in that period. After news of her conversion to Catholicism spread, however, most parents withdrew their daughters from her tutelage. In 1807, students attending a local Protestant Academy were boarded at her house on Stuyvesant Lane in the Bowery, near St. Mark's Church.
  Seton was about to move to Canada when she met a visiting priest, the Abbé Louis William Valentine Dubourg, SS, who was a member of the French émigré community of Sulpician Fathers and then president of St. Mary's College, Baltimore. The Sulpicians had taken refuge in the United States from the religious persecution of the Reign of Terror in France and were in the process of establishing the first Catholic seminary for the United States, in keeping with the goals of their society. For several years, Dubourg had envisioned a religious school to meet the educational needs of the new nation's small Catholic community.
caption: The Seton home in New York City was located at the site on which a church now stands in her honor, with the adjacent James Watson House serving as the rectory.
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