Feast Day: October 5th | Patronage: Immigrants, Missionaries | Iconography: Wearing Cassock with Rosary (as priest and redemptorist), Holding Crucifix or Bible (as preacher), Surrounded by Immigrants
During his papacy, the Great Pope St. John Paul II canonized 482 saints, and beatified some 1344 individuals. A constant theme of his papacy was not only the call, and genuine capacity, for every one of us to become saints, but also to put before our eyes countless examples of sanctity: that there is no single recipe for holiness! God’s grace can work in any life! During the Great Jubilee of 2000 (heads up, we have another jubilee year coming up in 2025!), JPII continued this rampant pace of canonizations and beatifications, listing among the saints individuals you may know like St. Faustina Kowalska, Katherine Drexel, and Josephine Bakhita as well as beatifying humble characters like the little shepherds of Fatima, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, as well as great world-shapers like the Popes Pius IX and John XXIII.
One of the first to beatified during this tremendous year was the Redemptorist priest, Francis Xavier Seelos. Born in Germany in 1819, as a young man he was moved by stories of redemptorist fathers who had given their lives to be missionaries serving throughout the young country of the United States, and so as a seminarian he embarked on a ship that would bring him across the Atlantic and onto American soil at New York in 1843. (I should mention that the famous immigration center at Ellis Island would not begin operations for almost 40 years, and the Statue of Liberty would not welcome poor and tired masses until 1924.) Fr. Seelos was ordained a priest in the famous St. James the Less Church in Baltimore (sadly, much destroyed in a fire in 2020), and went on to serve at St. Philomena’s in Pittsburg (where St. John Neumann was pastor and where Fr. Francis Seelos would follow him as pastor until 1854). He devoted energy and attention primarily to preaching – constantly honing his craft with a grace-filled engaging and relatable style – and hearing confessions – welcoming “German, English, French [and] whites and of blacks” (as he wrote about it) with tenderness, attentiveness, and empathy.
He thus worked at various parishes throughout Maryland – enduring the cross of being moved like so many other parish priests – and then in formation-work in the Redemptorist seminary in Annapolis. There, in June of 1863, we come to one particularily famous moment of his life, when he traveled to Washington DC to meet with the President Abraham Lincoln to ask that his seminarians not be drafted to fight in the Civil War. Lincoln, in his conscription act, had not exempted clergy or religious, and Fr. Francis was committed to convincing him otherwise. He wrote to his sister of the gravity of the situation:
If one is chosen in the draft, he has either to go, or to pay $300.00. Because we have so many young members, that would have amounted for us to the gigantic sum of $25,000 or more. I decided then, with the permission of the provincial, to go to Washington with another father and to present personally to the President and other officials our situation. … If I do not succeed in obtaining a release from that unjust injunction, we will rather go to prison than to take up arms.
Seelos would later recall that “I liked President Lincoln very much when I went to see him. He spoke to us in a sincere, free, and friendly manner.” Though the President did not grant an official exemption he must have assured the good father that he would personally protect his seminarians for few if any were ever drafted and Seelos would happily write his sister that “the storm passed over thanks to God and the intercession of Mary.” He had less enthusiastic words regarding the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, “If the feast of rough characters should ever be celebrated in the Church, Stanton will get an octave added to it.” (all these quotations from Sincerely, Seelos: The Collected Letters of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos.)
He actually suffered being removed from his position as Prefect in the Seminary for being too obliging and happy towards the men under his care. Though it must not have tarnished his overall character for he was soon recommended to become Bishop of Pittsburg. Entreating Pope Pius IX to instead let him become an itinerant preacher, he began some years of traveling throughout Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri (including a two-week parish mission at St. Mary of Victories in St. Louis in October, 1865), New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. He finally made his way south to New Orleans in 1866, there prophetically telling the New Orleanians that “I have come here to pass the rest of my days and find a last resting place.” And so he did, in the end caring for victims of yellow fever in 1867, eventually contracting the painful disease himself and dying on October 4th of that year, at the age of 48.
– Fr. Dominic simply notes that Fr. Seelos took for his religious name and patron the great missionary St. Francis Xavier. And though he followed that famous evangelist in his travels and preaching, in so many other areas he could have easily been discouraged by his dissimilarity to the great Jesuit. His travels may have seemed comfortable in comparison, and certainly he did not baptize tens of thousand for Christ. Yet he was called to a different sanctity: that of the confessional, of the complexities of war and American politics, of lots of miles on horseback throughout the American Midwest. Our sanctity can also be found in the humility of the confessional, in enduring our own era’s messiness, and even in the daily miles we have to cover.