"Many customs and manners": Transatlantic Influences in the Life and Work of Elizabeth Seton

The celebration of Elizabeth Seton as the first native-born American citizen to be canonized has obscured the transatlantic influences evident in her spirituality and the religious community she founded. The recipient of an ambitious education—occurring in an American context but cosmopolitan in its content—Seton developed habits of inquiry that allowed her to explore and adopt a faith that many Americans found incompatible with those very habits. After her conversion, she found a way to make a life and career within the American Catholic Church only with the help of French exiles and within a template of religious community forged amid the sectarian competitions and social crises of early modern Europe, a template that proved startlingly well suited to the early American Republic.