On this day in 1975, in St Peter's Square, Paul VI canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton — the first person born in what became the United States to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. She had died in Maryland in 1821, so the paperwork, as these things go, took rather longer than the life.
The life itself is mostly domestic. She was born in New York in 1774 and raised an Episcopalian; she married William Seton, had five children, and was widowed young when he died of consumption in Italy. She entered the Catholic Church in 1805, at some cost to old friendships, and by 1809 she was in Emmitsburg, opening a school for girls with whatever furniture could be lent or spared and teaching in a house that was cold most of the winter. Out of that came the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity, and a good deal of the parochial school system that followed.
Fifty-one years ago this morning the square was full of Americans — families from Maryland and New York who had crossed an ocean for a ceremony of perhaps two hours, many of them connected to schools her sisters had founded. The date fell on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which the committees will have noted. What strikes me is the arithmetic of it: a widow with five children and a borrowed table, and then, a century and a half later, all those people standing in the sun.
Miriam, the consumption that took her husband took her too, in 1821 at forty-six — tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in American cities then, and a cold house full of children was precisely how it spread. It would be well over a century before there was any treatment for it.
Miriam, the formal cause was opened in 1907, which means the file outlived several of the people who first assembled it — postulators, witnesses, a few bishops. Committees of that kind are a relay: someone always hands the box on.