Saint of the Day for 4 January

“My place is in the world.” This conviction accompanied Angela da Foligno throughout her life: from the years of her youth, characterized by worldliness and an apparent indifference to God, to those of her spiritual maturity, which followed, in which she realized that she was called to better things: to serve and imitate the Lord, to live a life of holiness in the concreteness of the everyday. Born in Foligno on January 4, 1248 to a well-to-do family, she soon lost her father, and received little supervision from her mother. Thus, did she spend youth far from faith.

Beautiful, intelligent, passionate, she married a notable local man, by whom she had several children.

Conversion and the fear of hell

The frivolity and light-heartedness of her youth were upset by a series of events in quick succession: the violent earthquake of 1279, an impetuous hurricane and then the long war against Perugia led her to question the precariousness of life and to feel the fear of hell. The desire to approach the Sacrament of Penance was born in her. Nevertheless, the chronicles narrate, “shame prevented her from making a complete confession and for this she remained in torment.” In prayer she obtained from St. Francis of Assisi the reassurance that she would soon know God's mercy.

The encounter with the merciful love of God

Angela then returned to the confessional and this time she was fully reconciled with the Lord. At the age of 37, despite the hostility of her family, conversion began in the sign of penance and renunciation of things, affections, and herself. After the premature death of her mother, husband and children in close succession, the woman sold all her goods, distributing the proceeds to the poor. She went on a pilgrimage to Assisi in the footsteps of the Poor One, and in 1291 entered the Third Order of St. Francis, relying for spiritual direction on the friar Arnaldo, a fellow citizen and blood relation,, who later became her biographer, author of the famous Memorial. In this text, the stages of Angela's vocation and her constant ecstasies and mystical experiences, culminating in the dwelling in the soul of the Holy Trinity, are divided into thirty “steps” or stages. “I saw something full,” she told her confessor, regarding the vision of the Triune God, “an immense majesty, which I can not say, but it seemed to me that it was all good. (...) After his departure, I began to scream aloud (...) Oh, unknown Love, why do you leave me?”  The youthful fear of damnation soon gave way to the awareness of not being able to save oneself by one’s own merits, but, with a repentant heart, only through the infinite merciful love of God.

Assiduous in prayer and tenderness towards the least

In addition to constant prayer, especially expressed in Eucharistic adoration, Angela of Foligno always conducted charitable activity, assisting lepers and all the sick with a tenderness in which they saw Christ Crucified. Known already in life as Magistra Theologorum, she promoted a theology based on the Word of God, on obedience to the Church and on the direct experience of the Divine in its most intimate manifestations.

Fruitful in her spiritual motherhood

Passionately involved in the controversies that tore the Franciscan order, Angela drew around her person a cenacle of spiritual children, who saw in her a guide and a true teacher of faith: for this reason her figure embodies one of the models of the feminine genius in the Church. Even before her death, which occurred on January 4, 1309, the title of saint was attributed by the people, unofficially. On 9 October 2013, Pope Francis completed what had already been started by his predecessors by canonizing Angela da Foligno, using the process of “equipollent” canonization.

The New York socialite

Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born into a prosperous New York Protestant family in 1774, on the cusp of the American Revolution. As she quickly learned, material prosperity cannot fill the heart. After her mother’s death, her father remarried, but Elizabeth’s father and stepmother separated. Her stepmother rejected her and her sister, who were sent to live with her uncle. The child was deeply hurt by the rejection. The darkness lifted for a while in 1794, when Elizabeth married William Seton, a merchant who had a trading partner, Filippo Filicchi of Livorno, Italy. The Setons had five children. They were a fashionable, well-to-do Episcopalian family, but their good fortune did not last.
In 1801 William’s company went bankrupt. The couple lost their home, and William was struck with tuberculosis. In the hope that warm weather would help him, the couple and their oldest daughter set sail for Italy. William died shortly after their arrival, and Elizabeth found herself a widow at the age of twenty-nine. Suffering had opened the young woman’s heart, and she began to seek as one groping in the dark.

“If I seek God in the simplicity of my heart…”

Filippo Filicchi’s family was moved with pity for this young woman who had just landed in their country, only to be left widowed in a foreign land. They invited her to live with them for a time. As she grieved, they spoke to her of the consolation that their Catholic faith gave them in moments of suffering. Elizabeth was moved by their faith and began to ask questions. What did Catholics believe about the Eucharist? The Mass? The Mother of God, who seemed to them to be so near and tender a mother? Was there really an unbroken link between the Church now and the apostles? Her heart and her mind were in turmoil, but the turmoil soon gave way to peace. By the time she returned to New York in 1804, she had made her decision. In 1805, she entered the Catholic Church.

“…I will surely find him.”

That decision was not without cost. Her family disapproved. Elizabeth had started a small school in Baltimore in order to support her children, but once word got out that she had become Catholic, parents withdrew their children from the school.
The single mother of five would not have known where to turn, were it not for the Lord, whose will she sought in everything that happened to her. In 1806, she met Fr. Louis Dubourg, a Sulpician priest. The Sulpicians in Maryland had been discussing the possibility of a congregation of American religious sisters, modeled on the French Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, to help with the education of children in the small but growing Catholic community. They invited Elizabeth and her children to Baltimore. Soon other young women joined her. In 1809, Elizabeth became the first of them to take vows.

Mother Seton

The small group of women, led by “Mother Seton,” arrived in Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1809. There, in that year, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States, had their beginning. The sisters opened a free Catholic school for impoverished girls – the beginning of Catholic education in that new country. The school was followed by an orphanage and countless other works of religious, educational and cultural formation for the poor. Mother Seton remained the sisters’ superior until her death at the age of forty-six. She had sought God, as she said, in the simplicity of her heart. He found her and drew her into the service of his Church. Her last words to her sisters, on January 4, 1821, were, “Be children of the Church, be children of the Church.”
Elizabeth Ann Seton was canonized in 1975, becoming the first person born in the United States to be declared a saint.