A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint John. John, that of course is John the Baptist. John was at Bethany across the Jordan with two of his disciples. As he watched Jesus walk by, he said, look. There is the lamb of god.
The two disciples heard what John said and followed Jesus. It's very mysterious. When Jesus turned around and noticed them following him, he asked them, what are you looking for? And they said to him, rabbi, which means teacher, where do you live? And Jesus answered, come and see.
So they went to see where he lived and stayed with him all of that day. It was about four in the afternoon. One of the two who had followed Jesus after hearing John was Simon Peter's brother, Andrew. The first thing he did was to seek out his brother Simon and tell him, we have found the Messiah. Now what happened in between there?
Which means the anointed in. He brought Simon then to Jesus, who looked at him and said, you are Simon, son of John. Your name shall be Cephas, which we render Peter. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. If you think this passage is loaded with the unknown, you're right. It is for me. There's so much there that we do not know what something had to happen there. As I said, we mustn't treat these men as a bunch of fools.
See, that's the first thing we ought to get in their head. They weren't a bunch of primitive naive people who weren't experienced with life, and and the and the responsibilities of life, and the difficulties of life. These men were hard headed guys. And for them to act the way where it's reported here, there had to be some reason for it. So we'll let that rest.
An equally mysterious situation involves the saint that we whose feast we are celebrating today, mother Elizabeth Ann, Seaton, our next door neighbor up the road a bit. As a matter of fact, she's not only buried there, but as you know, she spent a major part of her life as a Catholic, which was only about fifteen years. Keep that in mind. Fifteen or sixteen years or so. She was she became a Catholic in about eighteen o five, and she's dead, I think, in 1821.
I stand corrected on that. But it her lifetime was very brief. And when you read even a brief summary of what the woman accomplished, and remember she didn't have a 07/27 or July to be running around in, she didn't have all the means of communication and of travel we had, and The United States, by the time of her death, wasn't exactly at the peak of the industrial revolution. It's just absolutely astonishing. And she accomplished all of this from this little wayside village called Emmitsburg.
Now, the thing I I really don't think for a minute that all of this is on the top of my head, but I spent a couple days just reading about her. And if you read what the New Catholic Encyclopedia says, well, what it says is very true. No doubt about it. But it's so inadequate. The point that I say this year after year, and the thing that that strikes me the more I come into contact with the the real life of the Christian living the people occupy those pews.
The people go to work in the morning or run their families who have all the responsibility people, sick children, who themselves get old and wonder what life is all about. Remember, they're the people we preach to, including myself. Now, the thing that strikes me is this, is to recognize Jesus in our lives. As I say, that's not always easy. As a matter of fact, in lots of times, we don't recognize him at all.
And he never said we would. Matter of fact, he said you won't. You see, I mean, you see how funny we are. We're comical. He said you you won't recognize me for the most part, but we see we think we ought to see Jesus.
That we have all the euphoria and the joy and the emotional the emotional richness of an experience. Now, this is wonderful. It's gorgeous. It's heavenly if you have it, and if it's the authentic article. Point number one, most of us don't get it.
Secondly, if you have it, you can you sure it's authentic? And third, we have no reason to expect it. So I practically eliminated. When I when I read reread her life and and some of the things I've collected on her, she's her her canonization went through quite a quite a bit of ups and downs. And when I was going to the seminary and coming along, this was very much part of what we were trying to do under the well, one of the great champions was Bishop McNamara.
Now, the point I want to make and make absolute as clearly as I can, is the way the lives of people who are profoundly Christian, how they affect other people. In other words, we're gonna celebrate the feast of Epiphany this weekend, Sunday. What does that mean? It means to means to make known Christ, to to show Christ. That's all it means.
It's a Greek word. That's all it means is to display, to make known. And if there's anything I'll say for Vatican II, there's something to be said for it, you know. I'll say this, it emphasized the role of the laity in Christianizing the world. It's the laity, the people occupy those pews who are out there in the world, who are meeting people, who are carrying the light.
If I stand up here in this pulpit, how many people who are non Christians, non Catholics are gonna swarm into this church? And the Vatican two they they call it the priests of the clergy. That's the reason I often emphasize my sacrifice and your sacrifice because you're out there. You're bearing the cross in your own world, and you are carrying the light in your own world where And if you don't have it brilliantly flaring, it won't be flared. Now you just take this good lady.
Just take She came from a very aristocratic, colonial family, born about in 1774, around there. She was a she was a Bailey, her father was a Bailey, her mother was a Bailey, her her grandfather was a a very respected Episcopalian clergyman. They were the cream of the cream society in New York City. And New York City, of course, was The United States Of America. We all know that.
It's still the big apple. But anyway, she came into a family highly regarded and respectable. And the point I wanna make is this, I've said this many times. In her as a child, she had a very definite yin towards the spiritual, which she your love of God, which she expressed in her care of the poor, with just as a kid. That's what the encyclopedia says anyway.
Now, she marries. She makes a very socially accepted marriage, marries a fine young man. She's about 20 years old. He is wealthy. She came from a good family.
Her father was a doctor in what was then called King's College, which then became Columbia. She married into a very wealthy family, the Bay and the Seaton, William Seaton. They produced five children, four or five children, in quick order, and then he lost his fortune. And he lost his health, So somebody said, You better go to Italy and get some of that good air over there, maybe that'll help you. So with their eldest child, William and Elizabeth Ann took off for Italy.
Now here is the point. There's a family over in a town called Leghorn, or Livorna. Livorna is the Italian. It's up in it's just a little South of Pisa, just West of Florence, on the coast. Now, all that that good man Filicky knew was he had some kind of commercial relationships with a man in or in a company in Philadelphia named Seaton.
That's all he knew about him. But here was a anyway, he and his wife invited the Seatons to be their guests. And at six weeks, William is dead. And Elizabeth is a widow. And Signor Delicchi invites her to stay in his home.
William is buried in Pisa. She stays there, and for the first time in her life, she began to see a Catholic family for the first time. And that was her downfall. That was you gotta be careful if you wanna keep your you know, gotta be careful. Anyway, she came back to New York and expressed her desire to become a Catholic.
Well, that was really that was really an earthquake. The pastor of a church really practically threw her practically threw her out. I'm not this is no exaggeration. Her family practically disowned her, that she became a Catholic, and then they did disown her. She actually needed the necessities of life.
This is no joke. This is well, I mean, this is not myth at all. We're not talking about a third century saint. We're talking about someone who just recently became a saint and buried up the road. So she thought she'd be better off, at least she'd keep her health.
So she took her kids and went up to to Canada. Now in Canada, she met she didn't know anything about the Sulpicians, but she happened to meet a a Sulpician named Du Bourg. And the saints, the Sulpicians were priests dedicated to the education of young men for the priesthood, and they got the name Sulpician because of Saint Saupice in Paris where they started under Jean Jacques Olier. Olier had no idea that he'd ever have anything to do with Mother Seaton. Alright.
So now down here in Baltimore, you have a seminary named Saint Mary's, or you did, on Packet Street, and that was the foundation of the Sophicians in The United States, the first seminary in The United States. So the DuBourg from Canada sends her down to the to Baltimore because this is her country. And the sufficient in Saint Mary's on Packet Street give this good lady a little house that happened to be vacant. You see how all this thing runs around? She has five children to educate, so she says, might just as well take in a few more kids.
If you got five, you might just as well have 10, it's like raising horses. So, she opens up a school in this little house, it's still there. And she a number of young ladies volunteer to help her, and the first thing you know, she's got a school running. Then the next thing, under the under the encouragement of the Sophicians and remember, the Sophicians had founded Mount Saint Mary's near Emmitsburg, so they she opened up a a school up near Mount Saint Mary's seminary, which became, of course, Saint Joseph College, and is which has now ceased to be. But the basilica is still up there, and so is that's where she's buried.
Now we come to a very interesting part of this thing. She's John Carl is the bishop archbishop or bishop of Baltimore. So would do with some of the sufficients who became her spiritual advisors, they suggest a rule. What rule do they suggest to this lady and her? The rule of Saint Vincent de Paul.
Saint Vincent de Paul is 1,600 over there in France. He's been long dead. And yet it was his rule that started them off as the daughters of charity. Now, Saint Vincent de Paul, where did he come from? Back of him there's a man named Berule, b e r u l l e, who gave Saint Francis who gave Saint Vincent de Paul his impetus.
You see how this goes and goes on and on? Can you see that God's working in all of this? It's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And how many of these people, when all of this was happening, saw what was happening?
Not one of them. Not one of them. Not a single one of them. They just did what seemed to be needed doing, and they did it. But you see how one one life touches another and changes it, and changes it radically, without any knowledge or notice I didn't I was going to say preparation, but I take that back, because there is preparation.
Now, what I want I I know this is all hastily done, but this impresses me tremendously. And it ought to impress our people. When you have your you live your lives, and it's not a bed of roses. As I say, the way to heaven for a Christian is not on a very soft mattress, a feather bed. And we say we're living for Christ, but where in the world is Christ?
Well, don't look around. Don't look on the far horizon. Look on your threshold. Look very carefully right next to you. But what you see may not be what you want.
Can you imagine mother Seton wanting to be a widow with five children? Do you think she wanted to go through what she had to go to abandon everything she loved and cared for and esteemed, and and and was part of her very life when she left New York? Do you think she wanted to do that? Did C. S.
Lewis want to become a believer in God? Did Carlson want to become a believer? Of course, they didn't. They fought it. Now, I don't know what she how she did it.
But if if she had seen what was going to happen, you'd you'd think she'd have said, oh, this is just great. This is fun and games. Oh, this is lovely. Oh, yeah. I love all of this.
Look at the cross. You can't escape it. But we can miss it. We can miss it. The We make our biggest mistakes in thinking that we can evaluate what's, as we say, happening to me, happening.
Because in many in some instances, I'm a passive person in this. I am being acted upon. Let's face it. The the Fellicki family, did they know what they were doing when they offered that invitation to the Setons to come over and spend some time with them in La Verno? Did they know see all that this that this woman was going to become a founders of schools, of orphanages, of a of a huge congregation of women religious, which would have a tremendous influence upon, I say, the cultural development of The United States?
Did he see anything like that? No. All he saw was somebody that needed a hand. Not money, but friendship. Seton could pay his way, he wasn't that poor.
That's to me. Now this good lady is up there. She's right up the road. Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, certainly one of us. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit.
Amen. The lord