Feast day: November 13
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Frail Italian sister who wanted to be a missionary to China; the pope sent her west instead — and she built 67 institutions across the Americas for immigrants.
Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in 1850 in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of thirteen children, a small and frail girl who dreamed from childhood of being a missionary to China. Poor health kept her out of the convents she first applied to, but she persevered, and was eventually asked to take charge of a struggling orphanage, out of which she founded her own community, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
She longed to go east to China, but when she brought her plans to Pope Leo XIII, he turned her gaze in the opposite direction: 'Not to the East, but to the West.' Millions of poor Italian immigrants were pouring into the United States, crowded into slums, exploited, and largely abandoned by both the old country and the new. To them the pope sent Mother Cabrini.
Arriving in New York in 1889, she met poverty, prejudice, and obstacles at every turn, but she possessed an extraordinary combination of deep prayer and shrewd practical genius. Over the next decades she crisscrossed the Americas, founding an astonishing network of orphanages, schools, and hospitals — some sixty-seven institutions — to serve immigrants and the poor, from New York and Chicago to New Orleans, and down into Central and South America.
Tiny, often sick, and afraid of water though she crossed the ocean dozens of times, she drove herself tirelessly until her death in Chicago in 1917. A naturalized American citizen, she was canonized in 1946 — the first citizen of the United States to be declared a saint — and was named the patron saint of immigrants, whose hardships she had spent her life trying to ease.
Rejected by two religious orders for poor health and terrified of water her whole life, she crossed the ocean 30+ times and became the first U.S. citizen canonized.
“I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus.”
— St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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