By Sr. Regina Bechtle and Sr. Mary Mc Cormick, originally published in Vision Magazine’s Summer 2025 issue
All religions celebrate those whom their tradition regards as saints. In the Catholic community, there has evolved a process known as canonization. Certain men and women are acknowledged to have lived lives of heroic virtue and are designated as Saint with a capital S.
Such is Elizabeth Seton, the first one to have been born in the United States.* When it happened fifty years ago, in 1975, it was a huge honor for our country that she, a native New Yorker, wife, mother, widow and foundress, had been named a saint for all people and all cultures. (The truth is, that of the ten thousand or so saints recognized by the Church, many more men than women have been canonized, and of the women, many more are religious than members of the laity.)
Here are some myths about saints that might give us the wrong ideas concerning sainthood:
1. “Saints are special, not like me.” No! “Each person,” says Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, “makes God present; each face reveals God’s face, each voice resounds with God’s word.”
Saints grow in the everyday soil of ordinary life — in the home, at work or in school, in the day-to-day exchanges with family, relatives, neighbors and friends, in times of joy and sadness, illness and good health.
Such was Elizabeth Seton’s life. Born into a loving family, she knew the heartbreak, at age three, of her beloved mother’s death. Later on, as part of a blended family, she experienced misunderstanding and aloneness.
But as a wife and mother she was blessed with the great joy of a loving husband and five children. She knew these were God’s gifts to her, and her spiritual life became one of gratitude and blessings for what she had been given.
Later, as a widow with her children to support, she found solace in becoming a member of the Catholic Church. Her decision to say “yes” to the invitation to become the foundress of the first community of religious started in the United States brought her — and us — into a new place of loving God and serving God’s people.
2. “Saints are born that way.” No! Author Paula D’Arcy says, “God comes to you disguised as your life.” Every day we have choices to make — choices to open our eyes, our hands, our heart, choices that help us stretch beyond ourselves, risk loving just a bit more, or, conversely, stay within our comfort zone — choices to let the broken places, our hurts, keep us down or lift us up.
Elizabeth Seton, like us, had many choices to make about how she would spend her life. For her, relationships were the defining experiences of her life. As a young woman she decided that marriage and family were the ways she could fulfill the yearnings of her heart. Within that life, she made time for prayer, reading Scripture, taking part in the offerings of her church. After she became a Roman Catholic, her spiritual life, with its emphasis on the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, deepened.
She made choices every day to grow toward holiness — trying to be all that she could be, all that she was called to be, all that God created her to be. For Elizabeth and for us — that’s holiness.
3. “Saints are miracle workers.” Not really — rather, saints point us toward the goodness and power of God who works through humans in mysterious ways. It is true that, for someone to be declared a saint, the Church requires proof of miracles attributed to that person’s intercession.
In Elizabeth Seton’s case, one of those miracles happened at St. Joseph’s Hospital (now Medical Center), Yonkers, in October, 1963. Carl Kalin, a Con Ed engineer and Yonkers resident, was admitted with an extremely rare brain disease. Only five cases had been documented, and no one survived. Sisters of Charity who served at the hospital prayed for a miracle through Mother Seton’s intercession. After five days, Carl awoke from a coma; five days after that, he left the hospital, completely cured.
God acts in our midst in a thousand ways every day. Miracles happen all around us, if we just have eyes to notice and hearts to believe.
*Mother Frances Cabrini was born in Italy, emigrated to America in 1889 and became a citizen in 1909. Canonized in 1946 by Pope Pius XII, she is considered the first American citizen to become a saint.
