Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was an Italian religious sister, the foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She gave her whole life to the care of emigrants. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on December 22, the day of her death; in the United States her memorial is kept on November 13.

She was born on July 15, 1850, in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy, the youngest of the thirteen children of Agostino Cabrini and Stella Oldini. At baptism she received the names Maria Francesca. Even as a child she dreamed of the missions in China. She earned her teacher’s diploma at the school of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart in Arluno. At about the age of twenty she lost both her parents. She asked to be admitted to a religious congregation, but without success; her poor health is given as the reason. For nearly two years she taught at the school in Vidardo.

In 1874 the parish priest of Codogno, Father Antonio Serrati, called her to work in an orphanage known as the House of Providence. She directed it for six years, and there, in 1877, she made her religious vows. Out of devotion to Saint Francis Xavier, patron of the missions, she took the name Xavier. When the bishop of Lodi, Domenico Gelmini, dissolved the community there, he himself advised Frances to found an institute of missionary sisters. On November 14, 1880, in Codogno, in a former Franciscan friary, she began the Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

She wanted to set out with her sisters for China. But the bishop of Piacenza, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, drew her attention to the plight of Italian emigrants in America, and Pope Leo XIII advised her to go “not to the East, but to the West.” On March 31, 1889, she arrived in New York with six sisters. The Italian laborers she met there lived in poverty and were looked down upon, often without a church, a school, or a hospital.

For nearly thirty years she founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals for them, and visited the sick and prisoners. She crossed the ocean many times. Her works arose in Italy, France, Spain, and Great Britain, in the United States, Central America, Argentina, and Brazil; at the time of her death the congregation had 67 houses. She took as her motto the words of Saint Paul: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” In 1909, in Seattle, she became a citizen of the United States.

She died suddenly on December 22, 1917, in Chicago, in the hospital she herself had founded. She was 67 years old. Her body was moved to New York, where it rests to this day.

Pope Pius XI beatified her on November 13, 1938, and Pius XII canonized her on July 7, 1946, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. She was the first citizen of the United States to be declared a saint. In 1950 Pius XII named her the heavenly patroness of all emigrants. On the hundredth anniversary of her death, in 2017, Pope Francis wrote that in the face of today’s great movements of peoples her figure remains very timely.