(Loyola Classics, 2005, reprint of Viking 1969), 656 pp., $13.95

Philippa Talbot appears to have it all: good friends, a respectable career, a pension plan. She inspires employees to walk taller, dress with style, and improve themselves. However, at age 42, Philippa decides to abandon it all to serve God as a cloistered Benedictine nun. She gives away her office possessions to her co-workers and explains, “An enclosed order is like a kind of powerhouse. A powerhouse of prayer; you protect a powerhouse, not to enclose the power, but to stop unauthorized people getting in to hinder its working.”

Archbishop John Carroll visited Emmitsburg on October 20, 1809. At age seventy-four, every clump of the horse’s hooves must have jolted his brittle backbone. He was anxious to see the foundation of the first American nuns. But he also needed to assess the spiritual problems reported to him by Mother Seton.

The sisters were largely settled by the end of July 1809. After their first community retreat, Fr. Dubourg, the first provincial, decided the sisters were too dependent upon one priest, Fr. Babade. To Elizabeth’s shock, Dubourg forbade them to correspond with Babade, nor to go to him for confession.

(Sister Louise Hembrecht is the community director of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. She holds a masters degree in Franciscan Studies from St. Bonaventure University and has taught both junior and senior high school in several states.)

When newly widowed Elizabeth Seton returned to New York in 1804, her Protestant friends and relatives tearfully greeted her at the harbor.  It was the last public display of support she received from them. Her decision to become a Catholic nearly a year later outraged them; she endured constant persecution and withdrawals of previous promises of aid.