CATHOLIC CHURCH

The altar at Seton Parish holds small reliquaries containing first-class relics (bone shavings) of our patroness, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, and of Pope St. Pius X, the patron of our mother parish in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Mother Seton is one of the keystones of the American Catholic Church. She is the first American-born saint. She founded the first American religious community for women, the Sisters of Charity. She opened the first American parish school and established the first American Catholic orphanage. All this she did in the span of 46 years while raising her five children.

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was a true daughter of the American Revolution, born August 28, 1774, just two years before the Declaration of Independence. By birth and marriage, she was linked to the first families of New York and enjoyed the benefits of high society. Raised a devout Episcopalian by her mother and stepmother, Elizabeth learned the value of prayer, Scripture, and a nightly examination of conscience. Though her father, Dr. Richard Bayley, did not have much use for churches, he was a great humanitarian who taught his daughter to love and serve others.

The early deaths of her mother in 1777 and her baby sister in 1778 gave Elizabeth a feel for eternity and the shortness of life on earth. She faced each new "holocaust," as she put it, with hopeful cheerfulness.

At 19, Elizabeth was a belle of New York and married a handsome, wealthy businessman, William Magee Seton. They had five children before his business failed and he died of tuberculosis. At 30, Elizabeth was a penniless widow responsible for five small children.

While in Italy with her dying husband, Elizabeth witnessed Catholicism in action through family friends. What led her to become a Catholic were belief in the Real Presence, devotion to the Blessed Mother, and the conviction that the Catholic Church led back to the apostles and to Jesus Christ. Many of her family and friends rejected her when she became a Catholic in March, 1805. To support her children, she opened a school in Baltimore. From the beginning, her group followed the lines of a religious community, which was officially founded in 1809.

The countless letters of Mother Seton reveal the development of her spiritual life from ordinary goodness to heroic sanctity. She suffered great trials of sickness, misunderstanding, the death of loved ones, and the heartache of a wayward son. She died January 4, 1821, and became the first American-born citizen to be beatified (1963) and then canonized (1975). She is buried in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She is the patron saint of widows, children near death, and teachers.

Pope St. Pius X

The "Pope of the Blessed Sacrament," the 257th Roman Pontiff in the line of St. Peter, was born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto on June 2, 1835, in the province of Treviso, near Venice. He was ordained a priest in 1858, raised to the episcopate as bishop of Mantua in 1884, and named Cardinal Patriarch of Venice in 1893. Following the death of Pope Leo XIII in 1903, Cardinal Sarto was elected pope, after the early favorite, Cardinal Rampolla, Leo XIII's Secretary of State, was vetoed by Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.

The new pope took the name Pius. One of his first acts was to abolish the veto by heads of state. A few months later he issued a Motu Proprio on sacred music, which ordered the reinstatement of Gregorian Chant in all Catholic churches, ending a century of "operatic" church music.

Pope Pius placed renewed liturgical emphasis on the Eucharist, encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, and made the sacrament available to children who had reached the age of discretion (about seven years of age).

Pope Pius took aggressive measures against what he recognized as a growing trend of accommodating the traditional faith to modern secular philosophy and the rationalist humanism of the Enlightenment. In his July 1907 decree Lamentabili sane exitu ("A Lamentable Departure Indeed"), Pius identified and condemned sixty-five modernist propositions concerning the nature of Christ, the Church, revelation, biblical exegesis, and the sacraments. His encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis ("Feeding the Lord's Flock"), issued in September 1907, called Modernism the "synthesis of all heresies". In 1910 he imposed an anti-Modernist oath on all clergy and seminary professors. The oath continued to be required until 1967.

Pope Pius died August 20, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, and was buried in the crypt of St. Peter's basilica. He was beatified in 1951, and canonized 29 May 1954 by Pope Pius XII at St. Peter's, before a crowd of 800,000. He is the first pope to be named a saint since Saint Pius V (1566-1572) was canonized in 1712. In 1969, his feast day was changed from September 3 to August 21.