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MOTHER SETON: ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN
PAGE 2—The Southern Cross, September 11,1975
LAMY OF SANTA FE, A Biography,
by Paul Horgan. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux (New York, N. Y., 1975). 523
pp., illustr., $15. -
REVIEWED BY
FRAY ANGELICO CHAVEZ
(NC News Service)
The names of Archbishop John
Baptist Lamy and Paul Horgan will be
forever linked together, as were long ago
those of Bishop Joseph Machebeuf
(Lamy’s vicar-companion and first
bishop of Denver) and his biographer
Father W. J. Howlett. But the difference
is enormous as regards both the subjects
and their respective biographers.
While here Machebeuf also comes
into the picture from the beginning, and
his pioneer physical activities in some
ways surpassed those of Lamy, he
wholly lacked the latter’s personality -
so beautifully portrayed in poetic prose
almost 50 years ago by Willa Cather in
her American classic, “Death Comes for
the Archbishop.” Howlett’s dry
pedestrian account is now but a very
limited if valuable source on western
Church history, while Horgan’s has that
rare combination of infinite research
and exquisite literary presentation that
sets it far above American Catholic
biography, past or present.
More than two decades of painstaking
research, ranging back and forth
between all available American sources
and those in Lamy’s native France - and
most especially that richest of fonts, the
Vatican Archives -- get the distinctive
literary treatment of other books that
have gained their author a most enviable
reputation, along with the highest
national awards, as a master of
belles-lettres and interpretative history.
As for Archbishop Lamy himself, he
is turning out to be one of the foremost
pioneer prelates of our country, now
that American Catholic interest has
expanded westward, as has American
interest in general, from a once
provincial eastern outlook.
This in no way diminishes the
personages or high accomplishments of
the Carrolls and the Neumans and other
great prelates when our nation was new.
But while these men labored heroically
in a closed familiar ambience of
countryside, people and customs, Lamy
had to contend with an altogether novel
situation.
His was an endless expanse of harsh
mountains, plains, and deserts with only
the most primitive means of travel and
communication. His widespread flock
consisted of the most varied of peoples
with the strangest of customs - Indian,
Spanish, Mexican, not to mention a
peculiar American element
characterized by the “Wild West” at its
height. However, he met the challenge
as perhaps no other man of his day
could have done.
Lamy’s portraits somehow remind
one of the air and features on the
combined faces of Washington and
Lincoln, having the refined look but
dogged determination of the one and
the rugged human compassion of the
other. All this, no doubt, both the
character of the man and the entire
pioneer southwestern scene, made it so
much the easier and interesting for
Horgan to compose this most colorful
panorama of person and background.
But his thorough knowledge and love of
scape and lore had to be there, as also
his deep appreciation of the French
character, to complement what we
might call the purely literary gift.
“Death Comes for the Archbishop”
remains a beautiful and fanciful saga at
best; “Lamy of Sante Fe” will long
outshine it as definite biography of the
finest.
(Fray Angelico Chavez, a priest and
Southwest historian and poet, is the author of
17 books and archivist of the Archdiocese of
Santa Fe.)
Seton Canonization
Broadcasting Highlights
A SAINT FOR AMERICA ... an
historic broadcast. NBC Television
Network 2:00-3:00 PM (EDT).
September 14th from 2:00-3:00 PM
(EDT) on the NBC Television Network
the United States Catholic Conference
will present A SAINT FOR AMERICA,
an hour-long television Special on the
canonization of Mother Seton.
The canonization ceremonies are
scheduled to begin at 9:30 AM (Rome
time) in Saint Peter’s Square. With the
cooperation of RAI, the Italian
Radio-Television Organization, NBC will
cover the entire event. The Broadcast
will be received by satellite at the
network studios in New York between
3:30 and 5:30 A.M. There it will be
edited into an hour television Special
with Philip Scharper writing the script
and commentary.
Mr. Scharper, who is editor of Orbis
Books, has been a distinguished writer
of religious television specials for NBC
over many years. Currently he is writing
two NBC Specials for the U.S. Catholic
Conference, one on Mary and the other
on our Spanish-American heritage. Two
of Mr. Scharper’s sisters are Daughters
of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul.
In Rome Sister Irene Fugazy, S.C. who
is director of the New York
Archdiocesan Instructional Television
Center, will assist the RAI television
team in the broadcast production.
The canonization ceremonies for
Mother Seton were originally scheduled
to take place in Saint Peter’s Basilica
beginning at 9:00 AM Rome time (3:00
A.M. EDT). All NBC broadcast plans
were made to meet this schedule,
including reservation of the satellite,
allocations of the 2:00-3:00 P.M. hour
in the network’s schedule, and
notification of affiliate stations. Because
of the tremendous number of requests
for tickets to attend the canonization
Vatican officials recently decided to
transfer the ceremonies to Saint Peter’s
Square and to change the time to 5:30
P.M. Rome time.
“This decision, had it stood”
reported Rev. Patrick Sullivan of the
USCC Office for Film and Broadcasting,
“would have effectively killed all our
broadcasting arrangements.” “But
thanks to the intercession of Mother
Seton and to the reported personal
concern of Pope Paul VI for American
television audiences,” Father Sullivan
states, “the time for the beginning of
the canonization ceremonies was moved
back to 9:30 A.M. Rome time.” Since
the ceremonies will be held in Saint
Peter’s Square, “all we pray for now is
that the weather will be favorable,”
Father Sullivan added.
Doris Ann, Manager of Religious
Programs for the NBC Television
Network, is the Executive Producer for
A SAINT FOR AMERICA.
Awardwinning producer Martin Hoade
will produce for NBC.
SAINT ELIZABETH SETON -
AMERICAN ABC Television Network
1:00-1:30 P.M. (EDT).
The ABC Television Network will
launch its Fall DIRECTIONS series with
a half-hour special commemorating the
canonization of Mother Seton.
Entitled SAINT ELIZABETH
SETON - AMERICAN, this Special will
present a short film on the life of
Mother Seton accompanied by
highlights of the canonization
ceremonies. ABC News Correspondent
Bob Young, assisted by Sister Patricia
Noone, S. C., of Mount Saint Vincent,
will narrate.
Produced in cooperation with the
United States Catholic Conference,
SAINT ELIZABETH SETON -
AMERICAN is produced by Paul Wilson
with Sid Darion as Executive Producer.
ELIZABETH ANN SETON,
AMERICAN AND SAINT CBS
Television Network 10:00-10:30 A.M.
(EDT)
On its LAMP UNTO MY FEET series
the CBS Television Network will present
a documentary dramatic essay on the
life of Mother Seton. Some of the
canonization highlights will also be
included.
ELIZABETH ANN SETON,
AMERICAN AND SAINT is written by
Lee Hayes, directed by Richard Knox
and produced by Chalmers Dale. Pamela
Ilott is Executive Producer.
Liberty And Justice For All:
American Catholics 1776-1976
BY FATHER JOSEPH I. DIRVIN, C.M.
(NC News Service)
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was bom
Aug. 28, 1774, just a few days before
the first Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia to talk about social justice.
She was nine years old when the
colonists had done something about it
by wresting their independence from
Great Britain. Many other social
injustices remained, even in the
idealistic young nation, such as slavery,
poverty, and inequity of income, but
they were either not recognized as such
or ignored. It was too early a point in
history.
Elizabeth acquired early, however, a
spirit of social compassion - which is a
great step toward social justice - and
her efforts to alleviate human misery
and ignorance were steps leading
inevitably to the present common
concern with uprooting their causes.
Her first lesson was the example of
her grandfather, Father Richard
Charlton, who as a young curate of New
York’s Trinity Episcopal Church was
catechist to all the black slaves of the
city and truly their friend. He was even
an early practitioner of integration,
instructing his black and white converts
side by side in the same class.
Then there was the example of her
father, first health officer of New York,
who tended the poor more than the rich
and actually laid down his life for the
sick poor, dying of yellow fever
contracted from Irish immigrants.
In 1797 she founded, along with
other charitable Protestant matrons, the
Widows’ Society in New York, to sew
for and feed and nurse poor widows and
orphans. She and her sister-in-law
Rebecca Seton became so identified
with good works that they were fondly
and prophetically nicknamed
“Protestant Sisters of Charity.”
She had married William McGee
Seton, a wealthy young merchant, in
1794, and had five children by him
before he died in 1803. When
Elizabeth’s father-in-law died in 1798
she unhesitatingly added his six young
orphan children to her own growing
brood, and at times took in the large
family of an ailing sister-in-law with a
ne’er-do-well husband. When relatives or
friends fell ill, Elizabeth was the first
called. She sat long hours by many a
sickbed, closed many a dying eye,
prepared many a corpse for burial.
Charity indeed began at home for her, a
charity and compassion that would, in
God’s good time, reach out across the
years to all.
She became a Catholic in 1805,
largely as a result of her contacts with
the Filicchi family in Italy with whom
she stayed for several months after her
husband died.
Her first public social concern was
with moral ignorance. The school she
founded in Baltimore in 1808 was not
just a refuge from the ostracism of New
York because of her conversion, nor a
means of livelihood for herself and her
five fatherless children. She told her
pupils that her object was “not to teach
you how to be good nuns or Sisters of
Charity but... to fit you for that
world in which you are destined to live:
to teach you how to be good. .. .
mothers of families.”
The establishment of her religious
community in Baltimore and later at
Emmitsburg, Md., was the time-honored
means for giving stability and
permanence to this practical apostolate
and to the others that called her. The
scope of her compassionate vision was
evident in a letter to a Philadelphia
friend, Julia Scott: “To speak the joy of
my soul at the prospect of being able to
assist the poor, visit the sick, comfort
the sorrowful, clothe little innocents
and teach them to love God! - there I
must stop!”
It was not, therefore, by accident
that Mother Seton adopted the rule of
St. Vincent de Paul, the great Father of
the Poor, for her infant community,
since her ideals were truly Vincentian.
These ideals were not realized at once.
She was forced by financial
circumstances, for example, to shift the
emphasis of her school from poor to
paying pupils, although as many
nonpaying pupils were admitted as the
budget could afford, and the little knot
of pupils who came daily from St.
Joseph’s parish in the village of
Emmitsburg formed in reality the first
free parochial school in the United
States, the cell of the future far-flung
parochial school system. But Elizabeth
Seton was a patient woman who always
waited on the will of God.
She had not long to wait. From the
beginning she had “the entire charge of
the religious instruction of all the
country round” and made sure that the
sick were visited. In 1814 she sent three
Sisters to take charge of an orphanage in
Philadelphia, and three more to staff a
second orphanage in New York in 1817.
These were the only foundations made
outside Emmitsburg in her lifetime, but
they began the pattern of universality in
charitable social works which she so
much desired. From them sprang the
bewildering network of hospitals, child
care centers, homes for the aged, clinics,
social welfare centers, mental
institutions, etc., that her thousands of
Religious daughters maintain today.
This universality of works is the
reflection of Elizabeth Seton’s
universality of mind and soul. She
strove like St. Paul to be all things to all
men. Thus she could advise her son
William: “Love your country, yet also
all countries . . .” and, making a choice
of Sisters for the New York orphanage:
“So much must depend, as say the good
gentlemen who write about it, on who is
sent to my ‘native city,’ they say, not
knowing that I am a citizen of the
world.” But the sincerity of her
all-embracing love is perhaps best stated
in a letter describing her daily life to her
friend Eliza Sadler:
“You know I am as a mother
encompassed by many children of
different disposition, not all equally
amiable or congenial; but bound to love,
instruct and provide for the happiness
of all, to give the example of
cheerfulness, peace, resignation, and
consider individuals more as proceeding
from the same origin and tending to the
same end than in the different shades of
merit and demerit.”
Such a universal love of neighbor, if
widely practiced, would make social
justice inevitable.
(Suggested reading: “Mrs. Seton:
Foundress of the American Sisters of
Charity,’ by Joseph I. Dirvin. New
York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.
(Vincentian Father Dirvin is vice president
for university relations and secretary of the
university at St. John’s University, Jamaica,
N. Y., and author of the biography, “Mrs.
Seton. ”)
MOTHER SETON -- Father Joseph I. Dirvin is
author of this bicentennial article for NC News Service.
He discusses the life of Elizabeth Bayley Seton, who
was born a few days before the convening of the
Continental Congress in Philadelphia. A daughter of
New York as celebrated on the bronze doors of St.
Patrick’s Cathedral there, she gained fame by starting
America’s Catholic school system in Baltimore in
1808. She will be canonized as a saint on Sept. 14. (NC
Photo)
Isn’t it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
You in mid-air.
Where are the clowns?
Isn’t it bliss?
Don’t you approve?
One who keeps tearing around
One who can’t move.
Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
SEND IN THE CLOWNS music envelops you in very private, warm recollections of a poetic past. They are
filled with moors and nightingales, cold moons, silver ribbons and cathedral
bells. Her songs go even further, conjuring up the images of your very own past
as surely as does silent rain outside your solitary window. To my mind, this is
Judy’s unique and cherished gift. What memories this time? It is the lovers’
farce. It is the dance of two people who obviously love each other, but somehow
cannot do the same steps at the same time. When the boy wants to be with the
girl, she is running around busily. When she wants to talk, he is nowhere to be
found. “One who keeps tearing around, one who can’t move ... Me here at last
on the ground, you in mid-air.” As painfully foolish as it is, the two lives are not
in step with each other.
It is not exactly a time for tears. It is not time for the two to confront each
other in the circus-center-ring. And so, thinking these thoughts, each one
swallows private frustrations in hopes that tomorrow the timing of love will get
better.
Just when I stopped opening doors
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again
With my usual flair
Sure of my lines
No one is there.
Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear.
But, where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.
Don’t bother, they’re here.
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career.
But where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.
by Stephen Sondheim
(c) 1973 Beautiful Music, Inc. (Revelation Music Pub. Co. (ASCAP)
Judy Collins always seems to sing plaintive songs of haunting memories. Her
What is happening? The key comes in the fourth verse of this beautiful song.
Judy sings: “My fault I fear. I thought that you’d want what I want, sorry my
dear.” The simplicity of the idea crashes around their heads. The other person
was not seeing or hearing or feeling the same things as the first. The reason that
they misunderstood each other was that they were different persons with
different feelings. And they had not thought about talking out what was
seemingly so obvious. You can hear them saying, “I thought you knew when I
needed tenderness, so when you were silent I heard you saying ‘no.’ Our scanty
words never communicated what was really going on. It never occurred to me
that you didn’t understand how much I hurt over my mother’s death. And I had
no idea that your work was falling apart and making you depressed. I was sure
that you could see my love in my daily work. Isn’t it a farce? We were looking
for clowns and we find today that we were the clowns.”
Judy Collins’ song is an exquisite comment on the melancholy farce that can
come in communication. It stirs the lover to realize that his world is not the
same as the world of his loved one. The song cries out about how easy it is to
miss the other’s real meanings and needs unless we speak out clearly and with
trust. When lovers fail to communicate daily, they become painted and mute
clowns playing out their lives in silent scenes far away from the center ring.
Today I give you a truly fine song with a most needed message. I pray that
serious lovers will be haunted by the memory of clowns who cannot talk. I pray
that Judy Collins touches you as deeply as she does me so that you, too, will be
moved to learn the steps of trusting openness.
(All correspondence should be directed to: The Dameans, P. O. Box 2108 Baton Rouge
Louisiana, 70821)