Meet Elizabeth Ann Seton: She Substantiated America’s Doctrine of Religious Liberty

Meet Elizabeth Ann Seton: She Substantiated America’s Doctrine of Religious Liberty
The Basilica of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton serves as a testament and shrine to its namesake’s legacy of teaching, giving, and serving others. Courtesy of Seton Shrine
Jeff Minick
Updated:
In November 1803, the Shepherdess, the ship carrying 29-year-old Elizabeth Ann Seton, her husband William, and their 8-year-old daughter Anna, the oldest of five, docked at Leghorn, Italy. Their desperate hope that this change of climate might cure Will’s tuberculosis immediately turned into a nightmare.

Their home and their port of departure, New York, was in the throes of a yellow fever epidemic, and the Shepherdess had arrived in port without medical clearance. Consequently, mother, father, and daughter were forced to spend over a month in a lazaretto, a cold, damp quarantine center that took its name from the biblical Lazarus. In the diary she’d begun on board ship, Elizabeth called this place their “prison.”

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
Related Topics