Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton SC (August 28, 1774 – January 4, 1821) was a Catholic religious sister in the United States and an educator, known as a founder of the country's parochial school system.

Numerous Huguenots had emigrated to North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries at a time of religious persecution in France.

As Chief Health Officer for the Port of New York, her father attended to immigrants disembarking from ships at Staten Island.

Elizabeth's father married Charlotte Amelia Barclay, a member of the Jacobus James Roosevelt family,[4] to provide a mother for his two surviving daughters.

Other entries expressed her religious aspirations and favorite passages from her reading, showing her introspection and natural bent toward contemplation.

The younger William had visited important counting houses in Europe in 1788, was a friend of Filippo Filicchi (a renowned merchant in Leghorn, Italy, with whom his firm traded), and brought the first Stradivarius violin to America.

Socially prominent in New York society, the Setons belonged to Trinity Episcopal Church, near Broadway and Wall streets.

Along with her sister-in-law Rebecca Mary Seton (1780–1804) (her soul-friend and dearest confidante), Elizabeth continued her former stepmother's social ministry—nursing the sick and dying among family, friends, and needy neighbors.

Influenced by her father, she became a charter member of The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797) and served as its treasurer.

The couple already had their own five children: Anna Maria (Annina) (1795–1812), William II (1796–1868), Richard Seton (1798–1823), Catherine (1800–1891) (who was to become the first American to join the Sisters of Mercy) and Rebecca Mary (1802–1816).

The United Kingdom's blockade of France, and the loss of several of Seton's ships at sea, resulting in William having to declare bankruptcy.

Elizabeth and her daughter Anna Maria were received by the families of her late husband's Italian business partners, Filippo and Antonio Filicchi, who introduced her to Catholicism.

To support herself and her children, Seton had started an academy for young ladies, as was common for widows of social standing in that period.

In 1807, students attending a local Protestant Academy were boarded at her house on Stuyvesant Lane in the Bowery, near St. Mark's Church.

[10] Seton was about to move to Quebec, Canada, which had numerous French-speaking Catholics, when she met a visiting priest, Father Louis William Valentine Dubourg.

For several years, Dubourg had envisioned a religious school to meet the educational needs of the new nation's small Catholic community.

This effort was supported financially by Samuel Sutherland Cooper,[6] a wealthy convert and seminarian at the newly established Mount Saint Mary's University, begun by John Dubois, S.S., and the Sulpicians.

Her connections to New York society and the accompanying social pressures to leave the new life she had created for herself did not deter her from embracing her religious vocation and charitable mission.

The most significant difficulties she faced were internal, stemming from misunderstandings, interpersonal conflicts, and the deaths of two daughters, other loved ones, and young sisters in the community.

[11] Seton originally intended to join the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, but the embargo of France due to the Napoleonic Wars prevented this connection.

In addition to the original community of Sisters at Emmitsburg (now part of the Vincentian order), they are based in New York City;[12] Cincinnati, Ohio;[13] Halifax, Nova Scotia;[14] Convent Station, New Jersey;[15] and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

[17] Theologians approved Seton's spiritual writings on January 15, 1936, and her cause was formally opened on February 28, 1940, granting her the title of Servant of God.

The pope said on the occasion, "In a house that was very small, but with ample space for charity, she sowed a seed in America which by Divine Grace grew into a large tree.

"[1] The miracle which led to the canonization of Seton involved the healing of a man, Carl Kalin, in 1963, who was given hours to live after contracting meningitis and having encephalitis in his brain.

[20] Elizabeth Ann Seton is honored on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America on January 4.

[23] Most of the property is now the Bayley Seton campus of Richmond University Medical Center, while a portion is used by New York Foundling, a Catholic social services organization.

The first parish named in her honor, Blessed Elizabeth Ann Seton, was established in 1963 in Shrub Oak, New York, with a school opening in 1966, staffed by the Sisters of Charity.

Upon her canonization in 1975, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church was established in Crofton, Maryland,[30] in the same Archdiocese of Baltimore where she had founded Saint Joseph's Academy and Free School.