A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. John, that is John the Baptist. John was at Bethany across the Jordan with two of his disciples. As he watched Jesus walking by, he said, look. There is the lamb of God.
The two disciples heard what John said and followed Jesus. When Jesus turned around and noticed the men following him, he asked them, what are you looking for? They replied, rabbi, which means teacher, where do you live? And Jesus answered, come and see. So they went to see where Jesus was lodged, and they stayed with him that day.
It was about 04:00 in the afternoon. One of the two men who had followed Jesus, after hearing John was Simon Peter's brother, Andrew, the first thing he did was seek out his brother, Simon, and say to him, we have found the Messiah, which means the anointed. He brought him to Jesus who looked at him and said, you are Simon, son of John. Your name henceforth shall be Cephas, which is rendered Peter, and, of course, in English, rock. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Today, we are celebrating in The United States Of America our first native born saint, Saint Elizabeth Zeta. As I said, her body, her remains are just up the road in near Emmitsburg, on this side of Emmitsburg in the in a beautiful basilica belonging to the Sisters of Charity, Daughters of Charity, who founded St. Joseph School College. And of course, when I say they, I mean Elizabeth Seton.
She started it. She is our native born saint, but she wasn't born a Catholic. She was born an Episcopalian about 1774, roughly about that anyway. So it's a it's a it's the last quarter of the eighteenth century. And notice she dies in 1821.
She was only about 47 or 46 years old when she died. When she died, she had been a mother, she had been a very prominent became of became of a very prominent Episcopalian, socially elite family in New York. She had married a very outstanding promising young man. She bore him five children in about eight years, and then he died, and he'd lost his fortune. And here was a woman left with five children, and above all, and worst of all, she had become a Catholic.
Because when her husband lost his fortune, he lost his health, and so it was thought that a journey to Italy might help him. So he and Elizabeth and one and their eldest child went over to it to Italy, and the family was befriended there by Falashi. And there, in in a matter of six weeks, her husband died. And the Falashi family took care of her and her eldest child. And she came back to The United States a Catholic.
But in becoming a Catholic, she practically lost her family, she lost her friends, she lost her best advisers, she was poor, she couldn't make a living Because she was a woman, there wasn't anything for her to do. And she was reduced to wanting the necessities of life, believe it or not, all because she had become a Catholic. See, people were very broad minded in those days. So she thought she'd go up to Canada where in a more Catholic environment. But here is where things happen.
Down here in Baltimore at Saint Mary's Seminary there was a very outstanding man named Father DuBourg who heard about her, and I just don't know how he got in contact. But anyway, he did invite her down to Packer Street where they had a little house. And Elizabeth Seton with her five children came down to Baltimore and took up residence in this little brick house on Packer Street. It's still there. And then, with five children with the problem of education, she opened a little school.
She practically had a built in school. And then the next thing, couple women in Baltimore volunteered to help her. And that's how the whole thing started, just like that. So they moved in. Meanwhile, the Sulphicians had founded Mount Saint Mary's College, which is just on this side of Saint Joseph College.
So they encouraged her to go up there and to found a school there, which became Saint Joseph College. And that's the story. And then she dies in 1821, only 47 years old. And she was canonized a saint in 1975 by Paul the sixth. If there's anything, it's but it's I know you get bored by saying these, but to me, you see, the hardest thing for any human being to face in life are the things that happen to us with apparently absolute absurdity.
Undeserved. Things that things over we over which we have no control or we have slight control. And in so many instances, we can't see any rhyme or reason to it. As I say, it just looks absurd. And you say, how in the world can you tell me there's a god almighty when all this kind of stuff happens?
How do you put all this together? Well, the point is in many instances you can't, so why try? Because you you don't have enough vision. Can you tell me for one tiny little minute that when this very promising, sociolite young woman, a a very beautiful girl with back with a with a very illustrious background in New York, her father was one of the outstanding surgeons, founder of King's College, which became Columbia. That when she married Seton, she could had she had any inkling of what was going to happen within the short time between when she was married and 1821.
She had no inkling of it. And almost every step was a step of failure, of tragedy, of crises, almost of despair. Can you imagine this this young woman? Remember, she's very young. She's only in her early twenties.
She comes back from Europe, a Catholic now, goes up to New York where she had a, I don't know what her thoughts were, but she she had certain amount of reason to think her family would accept her and help her, that her her faithful adviser would help her. She had no reason to doubt that, probably. They were good decent people. And she arrives there and finds herself an outcast. Do you think her faith was tried or what?
Then when she goes decides to go to Canada, she's not up there any length of time, when she's invited into an entirely new city, Baltimore, and is befriended by people she didn't even know. And then because she has five children, she needs to educate them, so she starts a school. And then one thing happens after the other. How much of this did she foresee? How much in any given instance could she say, this all makes sense.
When we look back, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. You can see how she was being pushed right step after step after step with practically no choices. She had a say of choice. Just as I said yesterday, be behold lord, here I am.
Here I am. And sometimes that's all we can say, lord, here I am. Take me. Do what you want with me. It's about the highest kind of prayer we can make.
Our blessed lord put it this way, not my will, but thine be done. The one point I wanna make is this. I'm not in the least encouraging anyone to think that in every instance of life, we can see clearly the light at the end of the tunnel. I always remember Newman, Lee Conley. You don't hear that hymn much anymore.
That's a magnificent piece of poetry. Lead down me on. I do not ask to see the distant shore. One step enough for me. You can't you can't improve on that as a philosophy of a Christian life.
What else can we do? We throw ourselves upon Christ and said you're running the show. Just give me the strength to say, Lord, here I am. Because when you look back and you see that what that woman accomplished, it's a it's really incredible. She was perfectly competent in French.
She wrote textbooks. Remember, there were no free Catholic schools. She didn't establish Catholic schools. There were plenty of Catholic schools, but they were for they were private schools. What she found it was a was a practically a free parochial school system.
She had no textbooks. She wrote books on spirituality. She was a mother to her children. She was a founders of the of a huge religious order in The United States, Daughters of Charity. And all of this in the space of forty seven years of her total life.
So I ask you here she as I say, her remainder up the road From my earliest years practically, this name was around Baltimore. Started with Cardinal Gibbons. We prayed for miracles. Bishop McNamara was one of the strong champions of it. I was involved with the International Confederation of Catholic Alumni, and that was this was one of their great projects to get her canonized.
Well, however, or whoever, she was canonized in 1975 and is a saint of the holy Roman Catholic church. But her example is what I wanna lay before you good people this morning because she's one of us in many ways. In many ways, she is one of us. She knew tragedy of the worst order, really, of the worst order. There's very little in life that can happen that will be so crushing as to have those nearest and dearest to you turn their backs on you.
Not because you did something bad, but because you did something good. That's horrible. That's awful hard to take, but that's what happened to her. And so I ask you to trust in God almighty. We have all kind look at Saint Catherine Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
Any practically any saint you can think of, you can say the same thing. All they tried to do was God's will, and in many instances, it was very opaque what it was. And it was done with suffering, with hardship, with distress, and and sometimes in blind faith. But remember, faith by definition is blind. Keep that in mind.
We say seeing is believing. There's nothing more absurd in the English language than to say seeing is believing. The fact if you see something means you can't believe it. And so today, as we celebrate this saint's day, let us take her as an example, how she lived, what she accomplished. And and remember this, she is one of us.
This isn't just a memory of a good woman, of an illustrious person. She is a living saint. She is our companion in arms, and she rests right up the road. In the name of the father, and the son, holy spirit. Amen.