Mrs. Seton’s doubts were finally set at rest, and on Ash Wednesday, 1805, she was received into Catholicism in old St. Peter’s Church, New York city. The embarrassed state of her husband’s finances at the time of his death had involved her, and she opened a boarding house for some of the boys who attended a neighboring school. Some months later Miss Cecilia Seton, the youngest sister-in-law of Mrs. Seton, followed her into the Catholic Church. The one thought of Mrs. Seton was now to devote her life to the poor and to the Church. The opportunity came sooner than she anticipated. The co-operation of the Church authorities, and financial resources being forthcoming, a little Community was formed in St. Joseph’s Valley, Emmittsburg. Vows were taken in accordance with the rules of the institute of the Sisters of Charity, of France, and in a few months ten Sisters were employed with the instruction of youth and the care of the sick. They were poor but happy. The first Christmas day, for instance, “they rejoiced to have some smoked herring for dinner.” Rigid regulations were adopted for the government of the new order, and its growth was remarkable. Mother Seton had the satisfaction of receiving her eldest daughter into the Sisterhood.
Mrs. Seton’s youngest daughter lived into the nineties and died recently in the Mercy Convent, New York, where she had lived as a Sister of Mercy for over forty years. The sons of Mrs. Seton were prosperously launched in business enterprises.
Mother Seton died on the 4th of January, 1821, in the forty-seventh year of her age. Her bedside was surrounded by the dark-robed Sisters of Charity and her only surviving daughter, Josephine. Her end was happy and tranquil. Her career was one of great piety and usefulness. She has gone but her memory will live forever through the perpetration of the great order that she planted in the United States, and which has already grown to proportions far beyond the most sanguine expectation of its tender and affectionate founder.
This beautiful poem, descriptive of a Sister of Charity, written by Gerald Griffin, has taken its place among those precious bits of literature that never die. The author was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1803, and began his literary career as a reporter for a London daily. He wrote many novels, a tragedy and various poems. He died in Cork, in 1840.