Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on 15 July 1850 in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, in Lombardy, the youngest of thirteen children of the farmer Agostino Cabrini and his wife Stella Oldini. Only four of her brothers and sisters lived beyond adolescence. She arrived two months early and was small and frail as a child, and her health stayed delicate all her life. On visits to an uncle, a priest named Luigi Oldini who lived beside a canal in Livraga, she folded little paper boats, set violets she called her missionaries inside them, and sent them floating toward India and China.

Orphaned of both parents, Francesca wanted to enter a convent, but she was turned away because of her poor health. She had just qualified as a teacher, and she accepted instead the care of an orphanage at the request of the parish priest of Codogno. She did far more than keep house. She persuaded some of her companions to join her, and in 1880 they became the first core of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. When she took her vows she chose the name Francis Xavier, after the great missionary she admired.

Cabrini dreamed of going to China, but the pope pointed her toward America, where thousands of Italian emigrants were living in harsh conditions. She sailed in 1887. In New York she met anti-Italian prejudice and even opposition from within the Church, yet she built orphanages, schools, and a large hospital for poor Italian immigrants. She went on to Chicago and California, and later carried the work as far as Argentina. Over the years she made twenty-four ocean crossings, and on the first she shared the discomfort and uncertainty of the emigrants around her. By the end of her life she had founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and other institutions in Italy, the United States, and other countries, and in 1909 she became a naturalized American citizen.

When people congratulated her on so much success, Mother Cabrini would answer with plain humility, asking whether the Lord had not done all these things. She died in the midst of her work on 22 December 1917, during yet another trip to Chicago. Her body was brought to New York, to the church attached to the Mother Cabrini High School, so that she would rest near her children. In her travel notebooks she had written that the time had come for love to stop being hidden and become active, alive, and true.

She was beatified in 1938 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 7 July 1946, the first American recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint. In 1950 the Vatican named her patron of immigrants.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.