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A Place for Seton By JOHN WOODS The Sisters of Charity in America opened the Bicentennial celebration of their founding on the first weekend of January. There was a big celebration at Convent Station, N.J., which drew some 450 Sisters, associates and supporters. The next morning, the feast of the Epiphany as it turned out, also happened to fall this year on Jan. 4, the feast of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint. That Sunday morning, women religious of four branches of the Sisters of Charity family (New York, Convent Station, Halifax and Daughters of Charity of Albany) filled a small parish church on the tip of Manhattan island that was also concluding a special anniversary of its own that day. It would have been hard to top the choice of Our Lady of the Rosary Church, which is located right across State Street from the Staten Island Ferry terminal. After all, it was once a private residence that was home to Elizabeth Seton years before she founded the Sisters of Charity in 1809 in Emmitsburg, Md., and is now home to a shrine in her honor. Our Lady of the Rosary, which was founded in 1883 as the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls, has a proud history of its own. More of a weekday church now, with three daily liturgies for business persons and visitors to lower Manhattan, the 11 o'clock Mass is the only one offered on weekends. Father Peter Meehan, the pastor, welcomed the expanded congregation Jan. 4 to the gem of a church where he has been pastor for nine years. A beautiful golden chandelier hangs over the nave of the church's white interior. The large stained-glass window above the altar is divided into panels that illustrate the life of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Hers was a life filled to the brim for all of its 46 years. It's hard to believe that she accomplished so much in such a short time. She was a native New Yorker, wife, mother of five children, young widow, convert to Catholicism, foundress of the first active religious community in the United States, and the list goes on. Ironically, when I went to Our Lady of the Rosary for the Mass I was a few days short of my own 46th birthday. I decided it might be wise to let that be as far as I took the comparison, given that the day was going so well. I listened instead to the words of Sister Regina Bechtle, S.C., charism resource director for the Sisters of Charity of New York and co-editor of a four-volume work of the saint's writings, who made post-Communion remarks about St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. She spoke first of the light and darkness that Our Lady of the Rosary parish, and its pastors and parishioners, have faced in the past 125 years. The life of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton too was far from free of struggles. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, as Sister Regina detailed, confronted many difficult obstacles from the illness and death of her husband and two of their teenage daughters to her family's rejection of her after she converted to Catholicism and the struggles with her advisers and companions during the early days of the Sisters of Charity. She searched for a spiritual place to call home without knowing where God was leading her, Sister Regina said. The saint would find her peace in the Catholic Church "before the Blessed Sacrament which drew her mysteriously." "Once she had found the Light that was God's love, and embraced that Light, and allowed herself to be embraced by it, Elizabeth claimed it as her inheritance," Sister Regina said. "She didn't seem to fear the darkness when it came, for she knew that darkness is a prerequisite for seeing light, and that the clouds would pass in God's good time." As we mark Catholic Schools Week, Jan. 25 to 31, all of us who have been touched by the legacy of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton would do well to remember the great gifts that she and her successors have put to the service of the Church in New York and the nation.
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