Immigrant of the Day: Saint Frances Cabrini

Saint Frances Cabrini (1850-1917), founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, patroness of immigrants, was the first citizen of the United States to be canonized.  Born in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of thirteen children, she was fired with missionary zeal as a little girl, through family reading of the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith. She gave up sweets because she would also be without them in China, where she aspired to go.

Cabrini earned a teacher’s certificate and applied to two Orders having missionary houses, but was rejected for reasons of health. Reluctantly, at the request of her bishop, she tried to save an orphanage and make of its staff a religious community, but after six hard years the work collapsed. And Frances, by then thirty years old, initiated her own missionary community with seven of her associates from the orphanage. Bishop Scalabrini suggested they work with Italian immigrants, especially in the United States, as the Congregation of Saint Charles which he had founded was doing; but Mother Cabrini’s heart was set on China. She asked counsel of Pope Leo XIII. “Go not to the East,” he told her, “but to the West.”

Founding schools, hospitals and charitable works of every kind, Cabrini would cross the ocean thirty times, bringing bands of young Italian Sisters to North and South America. Explaining why she did not accompany some Sisters on a boat excursion she wrote, “I admit my weakness, I am afraid of the sea. And if there is no very holy motive in view, I have no courage to go where I fear danger, unless sent by obedience. For then, of course, one’s movements are blessed by God.”

In 1909, Mother Cabrini became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and in 1910 she was named superior general for life over the order she had founded.

Mother Cabrini died at sixty-seven, suddenly and alone in one of her Chicago hospitals, while preparing Christmas presents for 500 children.

In 1946, Pope Pius XII canonized her, the first American to become a Saint. In 1950, the Pope named her “the patron saint to immigrants.”

KJ