In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. This reading is not the reading appointed for the feast of Saint Elizabeth Ann C. There's no special reading for it. So, I thought this one would do as well as any other.
This is the reading for the Tuesday after the feast of the Epiphany. So, you had the feast of the Epiphany, is the revelation of God to the world. Now, we're already in the midst, you might say, of our Lord's ministry. With Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose maiden name was Bailey. She was a Bailey from New York City, And that was a well known name up there.
First of all, in mind she's buried in Emmitsburg. You can't miss it if you drive up the road. There's a basilica been raised there that you see from all around. Saint Joseph College is gone by the board, but the basilica is still there, and that's where Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton is buried. We have a close relationship with this lady.
And from my earliest youth, I can remember how we were praying, making novenas that she would show that she was truly a saint, but doing a miracle or two. It was quite a problem to get her to get to get going. She must have been very anxious to become a saint. I know. I'll take that up with her when I see her the next time.
What do you say about this lady? She died in 1821. She was only 47 years old when she died. She was married when she was 19. In about seven years she had five children.
Two years later she was a widow. In two more years, she was thrown out by her family. And according to one article I read recently, she was there was so much prejudice against her when she became a Catholic that she couldn't even get employment. And here was a lady, a young woman who had started at the peak of society in New York and now couldn't even get a job. The first thing that struck me was a parallel between her and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was a widow before she was 20. When her and her husband's family threw her out with her children. She had a babe. This was Anne Seaton. It was reduced almost to that as far as I can make out.
Now, I think the one point I would like to make, which I've mentioned many times is this. First of all, it regards the problem of evil. Now, sounds academic, but it isn't academic at all. Problem of evil sits in those pews and up in this pulpit. We're all victims of it.
You can't escape it. If you admit there's a benevolent God, then how do you account for this terrible evil in the world? How the good get clobbered and the evil prosper? Say the Reader's Digest has an article, the last issue on it. The one word we ought to remember is how do you judge something that's good or bad for you?
Now, look at this look Look at this good lady. Here she is at the peak of society, everything going for her. Her grandfather was a well known minister. Her father was a well known surgeon at King's College, which then became the University of Columbia. She she herself was well-to-do.
Then she married Pesetin. And here was a most promising young man from a wealthy, very well established family. Life just was open for her right down the road. She had it made. And in two years, after he lost his fortune, he died in Italy.
And she was lost She was alone in Italy. Absolutely alone with her oldest child. When she was befriended by an Italian family in Leghorn, where her husband died of tuberculosis. And there she was. That seemed to be the end of that.
How the world must have seemed to her to be completely collapsing. Then, because of her relation with that family in Lakorn, when she comes back to New York, where she was received by her family and by her minister and all the rest, lo and behold, she drops the bombshell that she's going to become a Catholic. Well, that was worth than worse than dying. So, her family throws her out. Her her The Episcopalian minister that she was very much attached to as her counselor, he didn't go along with it at all.
She couldn't get a job because, as this article says, of prejudice. So, what did she do? She didn't give up the idea of becoming a Catholic. So, she thought, well, I'll go to a country where I'll be more accepted. So, she bamboozles up to Canada.
And lo and behold, in Canada, she learns about the Sulphicians. And the Sulphicians had established Saint Mary's seminary on Patton Street. This is beginning of the nineteenth century now. And she gets in contact with a French salvation named DuBourg. He had a lot to do with founding Mount Saint Mary's College.
So DuBourg says, come back down here. We'll give you a house. You see the little house on Packet Street still. It's over there, a little brick house. She said, we need someone to run a little school here for the Catholic children.
She had five of herself to begin a school with. So, she comes down from Canada, opens up this little school beside Saint Mary's seminary. You see, here's what every time she moved it was because of a crisis, because of something terrible that had happened to her. And yet each move, as we see it now, fits into a perfect pattern. Into a perfect pattern.
If you look at the end and then retrace the steps. Because when she gets into this little house on Packet Street, a few other young Catholic ladies join her to become teachers and they say, well, we like to live a we like to live a more of a religious life. So, they form a little community. Archbishop Carroll was up up the road, just up up This is Packet Street, and the cathedral was just down on Charles. And so, they said, okay, you can wear this habit, and we'll even make you a mother superior.
See, was a little odd to have a mother superior running a religious group with five children. But that's what they did. Notice the part that the children played because she wanted their education. So, when you had five in those days and you wanted them educated, that was about the best thing, was open up your own school. You could do it.
She was a well educated young lady. Her father saw to that. Incidentally, mother died when she was very young. Her father raised her. So, then the thing prosperity took off.
And then you know the story. She goes up to Emmitsburg and then establishes a group, then her Then this religious family that had accumulated around her, and I use the word accumulated, just sort of gravitated towards her. Became recognized and she affiliated then with the sisters of charity. They visited Paul. And then she was extremely active.
She opened up several orphanages, New York, Philadelphia. Remember, those cities were way way away from Baltimore and Emmitsburg. And she died at the age of 47. This was all accomplished within about twenty some years. But the one point I want to make is, how are we to judge?
Now, I'm not talking about moral evil. Because in most instances when people talk about the problem of evil, they're not even thinking about moral evil. And yet, Immanuel Kant said that's the only real evil in the world. What most people talk about when they talk about the problem of evil and God and how do you reconcile it, they're talking about physical evil, disease, war, catastrophes, tragedies, landslides, hurricanes, terrible flooding, massacres, a holocaust, world war. These are all physical evils.
Every one of them is a physical evil. There's nothing immoral on the surface about any of them. And most of them are apparently the acts of God or somebody. There's the problem. And here you have a life and it's not in norm I mean, she's just close to us.
And look at this life, how step by step, every step seems to be a tragedy. But when we look back from and she can look back on it too. When you look back, it's not a tragedy at all. It was it was the motivation. It was it was what launched her into the next step.
And the next step seems to be a tragedy. And lo and behold you, that step turns to be out another launching ramp. And she keeps going up. And you can see this in so many lives. I'm not saying in everyone.
I'm not saying you can always see this. I'm saying you can see it very translucently in Herlock, perfectly clear. You take Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, the same thing. It's absolutely fantastic. But you see, when you're in the midst of it, when you're in the midst of When you're the afflicted one, it's very difficult to take an academic view and say, well, fifty years from now, it'll be different.
Although, even Virgil has this in his Aeneid. When all Aeneid is having the time of his life, he thinks the end of the world is coming, the goddess says, look, he says, one day you're going to look back upon this with with pleasure. And the words are, That if the day will come when you'll look back upon these trials which seem so desperate with pleasure. Even that's in the Aeneid, Virgil's Aeneid. So, anyway, she's a saint.
She's a saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. She's right up the road from us. Her life is a marvelous example. Here she is a young girl with everything going for her. She becomes a wife of a very fine young man, becomes a loving mother of five children, it becomes a widow, becomes ostracized, she's thrown out, then she has a whole new life.
That's fantastic. Fantastic. There's something in there for all of us. She's a saint. She's given to us not merely as an example.
She is a companion with us, to lead us, to encourage us, to let us see the light when it's very dark sometimes. Name of the father, son, and the holy spirit. Amen.