Frances Xavier Cabrini, Religious and Missionary

Today the Greater Church commemorates Frances Xavier Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and missionary among immigrants.

Frances Cabrini was born in 1850 to a farming family in Lombardy, in northern Italy. As a girl, she listened eagerly to stories of missionaries. At her uncle’s house, she filled paper boats with flowers, called the flowers her missionaries, and sent them down the river toward China. Long before she could travel, China had taken hold of her imagination.

Frances wanted to enter religious life, but the communities she approached refused her because of her poor health. She trained as a teacher and taught in a village school. In 1874, the Bishop sent her to help govern an orphanage in Codogno, which had been badly managed and divided by conflict. Frances joined the small religious community there and took the name Xavier in honor of Francis Xavier, the great missionary to Asia.

The six years at Codogno were hard. The orphanage’s founder opposed her and her companions. Frances carried the struggle into prayer. “Give me the desire to humble myself for your love,” she wrote. In 1880, the Bishop dissolved the troubled community and asked Frances to begin anew with the women who had gathered around her. Together they founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Their name expressed their devotion to the love of Jesus, who had taken our flesh and given himself for the world.

She still hoped to lead a mission to China. Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini asked her to look west instead. Italian immigrants were arriving in the Americas in great numbers. Many worked long hours for poor wages and lived in crowded tenements. Few Priests spoke their language, and even in church they often found themselves strangers. Scalabrini showed her an invitation from Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, but Frances took the question to Pope Leo the Thirteenth. He answered, “Not to the East, but to the West.”

In March 1889, Frances and six sisters arrived in New York. The promised arrangements had not been made. They spent their first night in a filthy tenement, too uncomfortable to sleep, and prayed together until morning. The Sisters of Charity then took them in and helped them find their way through the city. Corrigan had not expected them so soon and urged Frances to return to Italy. She answered that the Pope had sent her and that she meant to stay.

The lodgings first offered to the sisters were unfit, so Frances went back to Corrigan. The Archbishop came to support the mission and approved a house offered by Countess di Cesnola, which became both a convent and orphanage. The sisters opened a free school on the Lower East Side, taught the faith at Saint Joachim’s parish, and walked the streets of the Italian district visiting families. They had more children to feed than their donations could support, so Frances and the sisters begged for alms. The work drew helpers, and young women soon asked to join the congregation.

The mission did not remain in New York. “The world is too small to limit ourselves to one point,” Frances had written before leaving Italy. “I want to embrace it entirely and to reach all its parts.” She crossed the Atlantic again and again and traveled throughout the Americas and Europe. In Dobbs Ferry, tuition from one school helped support free schools for poor families. Her sisters taught the children of miners in the Rocky Mountains and founded hospitals in New York and Chicago. By the end of Frances’s life, the congregation had sixty-seven houses in eight countries, serving children, the sick, and the poor.

In letters to her sisters, Frances urged them to ease pain, tend wounds, comfort the troubled, and help the weak. In each task, they were to bring the healing love of Jesus to those they served. She asked Christ to form that love in her own heart as well: “Jesus, strengthen my fidelity and make me great-hearted in generosity.”

Frances became an American citizen in 1909. In 1917, weakened by illness, she returned to Chicago for medical care. On December 21, she wrapped Christmas sweets for the children at the sisters’ Assumption School. The next day, December 22, 1917, she died at Columbus Hospital. The Latin Church canonized her in 1946 and named her patron of immigrants in 1950.

Frances carried her longing for China throughout her life, even as she gave herself to the people she met in the West. We bring before Christ our own hopes and the needs of those he has entrusted to us. May he enlarge our hearts, that we may love him faithfully in the work he gives us and recognize him in those who need our care.