Plot
Elizabeth Bayley Seton (1774-1821) is a happily married New York Episcopalian socialite and mother of five whose life gets turned around after her husband, William Seton, dies of consumption in Italy after his shipping business went bankrupt. As a widow of five children, she opens a small school in an effort to support herself and family.
She decides to convert to Catholicism, much to the protest and distaste of her friends and family. As a social outcast, she is left with nothing so she and her daughters took refuge in Baltimore. Under the wing of John Carroll, the first American Catholic bishop, she opens a school, establishes a religious routine and takes religious vows, thus becoming `Mother Seton.' Eventually she, her daughter, and a band of young women who have joined her rattle west in a covered wagon into the countryside, to Emmitsburg, Maryland., where, on an initial diet of salt pork and carrot coffee, she sets up a school and a convent for her growing sisterhood, Sisters of Charity. She dies from consumption at 46.
Though not meeting the four miracle requirement to become a saint, Mother Seton was canonized in 1975.
Read more about this topic: A Time For Miracles
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)