American Saint

American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton by Joan Barthel, 216 pages

 

In reading American Saint, St Louis-based journalist Joan Barthel's biography of St Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born US citizen to be canonized, two things become clear.  One is that St Elizabeth was a woman of remarkable strength and sanctity.  The other is that Barthel doesn't much care for the Catholic Church.  Unfortunately the latter tends to obscure the former.

 

St Elizabeth was born into a prominent New York family in the 18th century.  After years of happy, though hardly carefree, marriage and five children, her husband died during a trip to Italy.  Though a pious Episcopalian involved in numerous charitable works, the widow found herself drawn increasingly to the Catholic Church.  Despite deep anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of New York society and her own family, she formally converted in 1805.  Moving to Maryland, she founded the first order of active women religious in the United States (the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph), and, more importantly, laid the foundation of the Catholic parochial school system.  In the tradition of great Catholic women like Sts Birgitta, Frances of Rome, Jane Frances de Chantal, and Louise de Marillac, she overcame every obstacle with faith, every tragedy with hope, every hatred with love.

 

Barthel's entire approach in telling this story is anachronistic.  An odd digression on the meaning of "God's will" in St Elizabeth's writings uses definitions from a book by an obscure twentieth century Evangelical pastor - for that matter, 20th century heterodox Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin has more books in the bibliography than 17th century bishop St Francis de Sales, who had a substantial impact on St Elizabeth's spirituality, while Dom Scupoli's Spiritual Combat, which St Elizabeth ordered read every day at tea, is not included, though a book by Gandhi is.  The book is full of smug chronological snobbery - if "the past is a foreign country", this book is a rude tourist who will not cease complaining about anything that isn't like it is back home.  Subtly but persistently, St Elizabeth's iron faith is recast as vague sentimental spirituality, her supernatural hope left orphaned, her love heralded as repressed resentment of the patriarchal oppressor.

 

St Elizabeth's last deathbed instruction to her spiritual daughters was, "Be children of the Church."  Barthel urges those same women to move "beyond the Church, even beyond Christ."  There is something willfully perverse in using the life of St Elizabeth to attack the faith she loved.  St Elizabeth Ann Seton's sanctity is far more interesting than Joan Barthel's bitterness.