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Since the nineteenth century, a legend has been passed down regarding an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to a Native American at what is now Emmitsburg, Maryland. This legend, while often repeated, has never received critical attention. This article provides a transcription of the legend's earliest surviving manuscript along with critical analysis and a history of the legend's subsequent transmission. While the story presents itself as an historical account, further analysis reveals it to be a fictional work that discloses more about the legend's transmitters and readers than about an event in early American Catholicism. Generations of American Catholics have repeated the story, indicating the persistence of a medieval approach to legend in which the veracity of an account is less relevant than the supernatural insight it communicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daughters of Charity in California founded the Seton Institute for International Development in 1985 to support the efforts of Catholic sisters striving to improve the health of those struggling in poverty in Latin America. The institute offered training, disaster relief, medical equipment, and grants for capacity-building projects. Positioned as a fundraising and grant distributing entity, Seton Institute solicited funds from government sources, corporate sponsors, and individual donors. Leaders sought to balance their need for funds with the commitments of their charism. As the expectations and priorities of U.S. government-funded programs and Latin American sisters did not always align, Seton Institute chose to put the desires of Catholic sisters first and shifted efforts towards private aid. These Daughters of Charity prioritized building transnational relationships that reinforced their community's mission to serve those in poverty rather than accept funds from any available resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]