Saint’s Life Story

Her Early Life

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850, in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Lombardy, Italy. Frances was the youngest of the 13 children born to Agostino and his wife Stella, in a devout Catholic farming family. Born two months prematurely, she was small and weak as a child and remained in delicate health throughout her life. Frances was raised on a farm and received a convent education. Cabrini made her first holy communion at age nine.

Frances 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.

During her childhood, Frances visited an uncle, Don Luigi Oldini of Livraga, a priest who lived beside a canal. While in Livraga, she made little paper boats, dropped violets she called “missionaries” in the boats. She launched them in the stream to sail to India and China.

On one occasion, she fell into the river and was swept downstream. Her rescuers found her on a riverbank. Frances attributed her rescue to divine intervention.

Teacher

Frances’ older sister Rosa was a teacher, which influenced her to follow the same career path. At age 13, Frances attended a school in Arluno, Lombardy, that was run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1868, she graduated cum laude from the school with a teaching certificate. Then, Frances returned to Sant’Angelo Lodigiano to teach at the parish school. Later, she worked for three more years as a substitute teacher at a school in Castiraga Vidardo in Lombardy.

Rejected Religious Orders Twice

After her parents died in 1870 along with 10 of her siblings, Frances attempted to join a religious order, the Daughters of the Sacred Heart at Arluno. But, her poor health prevented her from taking the veil. Two years later, Frances was rejected by the Canossian Sisters of Crema, again for health reasons, since she had contracted smallpox.

Orphanage Educator

However, Frances’ life took a different direction when a priest asked her to teach at the poorly run House of Providence Orphanage in Codogno, Italy. After arriving in Codogno, Cabrini took her religious vows with the Sisters of Providence, finally achieving her goal of becoming a religious sister. Frances added Xavier (Saverio in Italian) to her name to honor Saint Francis Xavier, the patron saint of missionary service. She dedicated six years of her life to this school for girls, displaying her deep commitment to education and caring for children. Frances tried to save an orphanage and make of its staff a religious community, but after six hard years the work collapsed.

Foundress

Now, at the age of 30, Frances initiated her own missionary community with seven of her associates from the orphanage since no one would train her. In November 1880, Frances founded the Institute of the Salesian Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC). At the Codogno convent, the MSC sisters took in orphans and foundlings, opened a day school, started classes in needlework, and sold their fine embroidery. Over the next five years, the MSC sisters established seven homes, a free school and a nursery in Lombardy.

Missionary

Bishop Scalabrini founded the Scalabrinian Missionaries, an order of priests to perform missionary work with Italian immigrants in New York City. So, he suggested they work with Italian immigrants, especially in the United States, asand open an orphanage in New York. However, Frances’ heart was set on China. She went to Rome and asked Pope Leo XIII. Instead, the Pope told her “Go not to the East, but to the West.”

Off to New York City

The Bishop promised Frances that his religious order, Scalabrinians would greet the MSC sisters in New York City, take care of their needs, and work closely with them. At age 38, Frances sailed for the United States. She arrived in New York City on March 31, 1889, with six other MSC sisters.

However, when Frances and the NSC sisters disembarked from the ship, there were no Scalabrinian priest there to greet and they had no accommodations. The sisters spent their first night in the United States in a decrepit rooming house with bed bugs in the mattresses, forcing them to sleep on chairs.

The day after arriving in New York, Frances and the other sisters walked into Archbishop Corrigan’s office. Totally surprised that they were in New York, Archbishop Corrigan told Frances that the archdiocese was unready for them. He told Frances that they should immediately return to Italy. Frances refused to go back, simply saying, “I have letters from the pope”, and gave her letters of introduction to Archbishop Corrigan.

Mission Work

The Sisters of Charity in the Bronx gladly provided temporary residence for Cabrini and her entourage at their convent. After much delay, the Scalabrinian priests provided a rundown convent for the MSC sisters in the Five Points area of Manhattan.

Soon after their arrival in the city, the MSC sisters started experiencing degrading, anti-Italian slurs and insults. Frances wrote back to the sisters in Italy, asking that they send over fabrics for the making of additional veils and habits. She wanted her sisters to be cleanly dressed, “otherwise they will call us ‘guinea-pigs’ the way they do to the Italians here.”

Life in NYC 

Frances and the MSC sisters started knocking on tenement doors in Little Italy in Manhattan. At that time, many Italian immigrants in New York were suspicious of the institutional Catholic Church. With the help of sisters from the other religious orders in New York, the MSC sisters started tending the sick, teaching children and feeding the hungry. They set up a makeshift school for 200 children in the balcony of a local Catholic church. Soon, the merchants in Little Italy started providing the sisters with food and funding to support their mission.

With Archbishop Corrigan’s blessing and funding from DiCesnola, Frances opened the Sacred Heart Orphan Asylum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was her first orphanage in the United States. However, the high cost of running the orphanage in the city, plus increasing friction with Corrigan, soon prompted Frances to move it to the countryside.

First Orphanage in the United States

In 1890, Frances purchased a property from the Jesuits in West Park, New York, where she relocated the orphanage. She also established an MSC novitiate on the property. The West Park campus became St. Cabrini Home, the MSC headquarters in the United States and a boarding school.

Other Missions

As Frances’ reputation grew, she started receiving requests for help on Catholic projects outside New York for both Italian and non-Italian Catholics. In 1891, she sailed to Nicaragua to open a religious house. Arriving in Chile, she traveled by mule over the Andes Mountains, she founded schools in Brazil and Argentina. Frances also went to Grenada to start a school.

The final destination in her first mission trip was New Orleans in 1892, where she set up another school for Italians. Frances and the MSC sisters established a mission in the poorest Italian neighborhood in the city.

Refuge Center and Hospital

Later, in 1892, Frances returned early to New York from New Orleans because the new hospital there was facing closure. The Scalabrinians had mismanaged the hospital and were trying to transfer its debts to MSC. After pulling the sisters from that hospital, Frances spent $250 to found the Columbus Hospital in Manhattan. Tired of the conflicts with the Scalabrinian leadership, she cut all ties between them and MSC that year.

Other US Missions

In 1899, Frances arrived in Chicago to work with the large Italian population in that city. Her next stop in 1902 was in Denver, Colorado, followed by a trip to Seattle, Washington, in 1903.

Meeting with Saint Katherine Drexel

In 1907, Frances stopped in Philadelphia to have dinner with Saint Katherine Drexel, who had established numerous Catholic missions and schools through the United States for African-Americans and Native Americans. Frances had wanted to personally thank Katherine for her helping an MSC sister in Philadelphia. In a very amiable conversation, Katherine told Frances that the Vatican bureaucracy was stymieing her religious order on a legal matter. Believing in direct action, Frances told her to personally go to Rome and stay there until the Vatican resolved the problem. Katherine took her advice and succeeded in her mission.

U.S. Citizen

In 1909, Frances was naturalized as a United States citizen. She applied for citizenship to assure the legal foundation of the MSC order after her death and to demonstrate solidarity with the Americans that she served.

Trouble in Chicago

In 1911, Frances opened a second Columbus Hospital in the Italian neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago. However, some neighbors were unhappy with the new hospital, fearing that it would lower property values. During its construction in the winter, a vandal cut the water mains, flooding the construction site. When the Columbus Extension Hospital was being built on the Near West Side, an arson attack on its grounds was thwarted.

In early second quarter 1912, Frances and several MSC sisters were visiting Naples, Italy. To return to the United States, they booked passage on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic to New York. However, after hearing about problems with the Columbus Extension Hospital in Chicago, Frances switched their bookings to an earlier voyage on a different ship. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic with a massive loss of life on April 15 of that year. During her lifetime, Cabrini made 24 transatlantic crossings.

Mother Cabrini Shrine

On one of her final trips in 1916, Frances visited Southern California. She constructed a chapel above the San Fernando Valley on Mount Raphael to protect the residents from wildfires. It was relocated in 1970 to Burbank, California, to become part of the Mother Cabrini Shrine.

Her Death

In failing health in 1917, Frances traveled to Chicago to be cared for by the MSC sisters there. On December 21, 1917, Frances was wrapping sweets she bought as Christmas gifts for 500 children at the Italian school. The next morning, she felt too ill to leave her bed.

In one of her own hospitals, on December 22 1917, Frances died in Chicago, Illinois, United States as a result of chronic endocarditis at the age of 67 years old. Her body was originally buried at the Saint Cabrini Home in Chicago, but was exhumed in 1931 and moved to New York. Now, her remains are laid to rest in Mother Cabrini High School at 701 Fort Washington Avenue in the Bronx, New York. It is now a place of pilgrimage.

During her lifetime, Mother Cabrini founded sixty-seven missions including schools, hospitals, orphanages and child-care centers throughout the United States and England, France, Spain, and South America.

Born:                  July 15, 1850, in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Lombardy, Italy

Died:                  December 22 1917 at age 67 in Chicago, Illinois, United States

Beatified:          November 13, 1938 by Pope Pius XI

Canonized:       July 7, 1946 by Pope Pius XII

Feast Day:        November 13 (U.S.), December 22 (elsewhere)

Patron Saint:    Against Malaria; Emigrants; Hospital Administrators; Immigrants; Orphans

Source:

• • All Saints & Martyrs: Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini
  • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini: Patron of hospitals, immigrants, and orphans – Catholic Fire
  • CatholicSaints.Info » Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini
  • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini – “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me” | Heralds of the Gospel Magazine
  • Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini – Saint for a Minute: Saints & Blesseds
  • Frances Xavier Cabrini – Wikipedia

Prayers

Video Link

St. Frances Cabrini – YouTube (Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network – USA)