In the small chapel of the old St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, a young seminarian named Michael McGivney prayed during the 1870s. He had not yet founded the Knights of Columbus, and he could not have imagined that the Church would proclaim him Blessed more than a century later.
A few metres from that chapel, between 1808 and 1809, Elizabeth Ann Seton had lived. There she opened a school for girls and began to gather the religious community that would give rise to the Sisters of Charity.
Two figures separated by more than sixty years, two decisive projects for American Catholicism, and a single address: Paca Street.
Baltimore is remarkable not for housing the tombs of these saints and blesseds, but for preserving the places where they were formed, taught, ordained, or began their ministry. The city allows us to know them before their work acquired national dimensions.
The first capital of American Catholicism
The presence of so many religious figures in Baltimore reflects the importance the city held for the Catholic Church in the early years of the United States.
In 1789, John Carroll was appointed the country’s first Catholic bishop and established his see in Baltimore. In 1791, St. Mary’s Seminary was founded — the first Catholic seminary in the United States. A few decades later, the current Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption was built, the first Catholic cathedral erected in the new nation.
The city was also a major port of entry for Irish, German and Central European immigrants. Parishes, schools and religious congregations had to respond to concrete needs: education, pastoral care in different languages, economic support and assistance to working-class families.
It was in this context that Elizabeth Ann Seton, John Neumann, Michael McGivney and Francis Xavier Seelos carried out their work.
Paca Street: Elizabeth Ann Seton and the origins of an educational mission
The Mother Seton House forms part of the old St. Mary’s Seminary complex. Elizabeth Ann Seton lived there after passing through a succession of personal and economic difficulties.
Born in New York in 1774, she was widowed following the death of her husband, William Seton, in Italy. During her time in that country she drew close to Catholicism, and in 1805 she was received into the Church. Her conversion caused tensions with part of her social circle and reduced her ability to support her five children through teaching.
The Sulpician priests of Baltimore offered her the opportunity to open a school for girls. Seton arrived in the city in 1808 and began teaching on Paca Street. There her project took shape: to create a women’s community dedicated to education and to the service of less privileged families.
In the seminary chapel she pronounced her first religious vows. In 1809 she moved to Emmitsburg, also in Maryland, where she founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph and a free school for girls.
Her initiative had a direct influence on the subsequent development of Catholic education in the United States. When she was canonised in 1975, she became the first saint born in the country.
The Baltimore house preserves the earlier chapter: that of a widow with five children who turned teaching into a stable form of religious service.
The same chapel and the formation of Michael McGivney
Michael Joseph McGivney studied at St. Mary’s Seminary between 1873 and 1877. He had been born in Waterbury, Connecticut, into a family of Irish immigrants. His father’s death forced him to interrupt his studies temporarily in order to help his family.
That experience shaped his understanding of the economic vulnerability of working-class households. By the time he resumed his studies and arrived in Baltimore, the organisation for which he would become known did not yet exist.
The Paca Street chapel thus unites two distinct moments in American Catholic history. Seton had begun there a community devoted to education; McGivney prepared there to create, years later, an organisation designed to protect the families of Catholic workers.
The old complex today houses the Blessed Father Michael McGivney House of Propaedeutic Formation, dedicated to the initial preparation of seminarians. The site therefore retains the formative function it held during McGivney’s years there.
The basilica where he was ordained
On 22 December 1877, Michael McGivney was ordained a priest at the Basilica of Baltimore by Archbishop James Gibbons.
The church, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, had been conceived as the first great Catholic cathedral in the United States. Its construction expressed the determination to integrate Catholicism publicly into a country where strong prejudices against immigrants and against the Church of Rome still persisted.
After his ordination, McGivney was assigned to the parish of St. Mary in New Haven. There he served a community composed mainly of Irish families who depended on unstable and dangerous industrial employment.
In 1882 he founded the Knights of Columbus. The organisation was born as a fraternal and mutual aid society: its members pooled resources to support families when the principal breadwinner died. It would later become one of the largest lay Catholic organisations in the world.
The basilica marks the passage between McGivney’s formation in Baltimore and the beginning of his ministry in Connecticut.
St. Alphonsus: John Neumann and the Church of the immigrants
The National Shrine of St. Alphonsus Liguori was built to serve Baltimore’s large German Catholic community. Its history is bound up with Saint John Neumann and Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos.
Neumann had been born in Bohemia in 1811. He travelled to the United States to be ordained a priest and worked among immigrant and rural communities. His knowledge of several languages allowed him to serve the faithful who could not go to confession or receive religious instruction in English.
In 1842 he made his profession as a Redemptorist in Baltimore. He was rector of St. Alphonsus from 1851 and, the following year, was consecrated there as Bishop of Philadelphia.
As bishop he promoted the organisation of parochial schools and the education of the children of immigrants. His connection with Baltimore corresponds to a decisive phase of his life: here he consolidated his Redemptorist vocation and received his episcopal ordination.
The confessional of Francis Xavier Seelos
Francis Xavier Seelos was born in Bavaria in 1819 and came to the United States to join the Redemptorists. He was ordained a priest in Baltimore in 1844 and carried out part of his ministry at St. Alphonsus.
Seelos was outstanding as a confessor and spiritual director. The faithful valued his capacity to listen and the warmth of his manner. The shrine preserves the confessional associated with his ministry, one of the most significant objects in the visit.
It helps us understand a form of influence quite different from that of Seton, Neumann or McGivney. Seelos did not found a major institution in Baltimore, but he devoted much of his work to the individual care of immigrants who needed religious guidance and personal support.
St. James and a partially vanished memory
The former church of St. James the Less is connected to the ministry of John Neumann and the priestly ordination of Seelos.
The current building was erected after the principal events associated with both men, and it no longer functions as a Catholic parish. For this reason, a distinction must be drawn between the historic place and the structure that occupies the site today.
Part of that memory is preserved in the parish registers transferred to the archives of St. Mary’s Seminary. They contain sacramental entries made by Neumann and Seelos — documents that allow us to reconstruct their daily work among the immigrant communities of Baltimore.
An itinerary through the origins
The route can be completed in a single day. The main itinerary begins at the Mother Seton House and the St. Mary’s chapel, continues to the Basilica of Baltimore, and ends at St. Alphonsus. St. James may be added as a historical extension, bearing in mind that the current building does not correspond exactly to the period of Neumann and Seelos.
Other American saints and blesseds — among them Katharine Drexel, Frances Xavier Cabrini, Stanley Rother and Solanus Casey — have religious or commemorative ties to Maryland, but none possesses permanent sites within Baltimore that are as directly biographical as those included in this route.
The singular quality of the city lies precisely in showing these figures before their works reached their full extent. Seton was teaching to support her children; McGivney was completing his formation; Neumann was serving immigrants in several languages; Seelos was spending hours in the confessional.
Baltimore preserves the moment at which their vocations began to become institutions, schools, parishes and networks of assistance.
