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HTM008: The river took her at 7 years old. Francesca Cabrini was leaning over the water launching paper boats full of violets, pretending they were missionaries headed for China, and the current pulled her in. Someone dragged her out. She lived, but she was afraid of water for the next 60 years, and she crossed the Atlantic more than 20 times anyway.

Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Mother Cabrini, the first American citizen saint and the Church’s patron saint of immigrants, and it’s a story built out of the word “no.”

Two religious orders turned her down. Her lungs were too weak, they said, and in one case a priest who wanted to keep her as a schoolteacher quietly worked against her. So she was sent to rescue a failing orphanage in Codogno instead, and spent 6 years in a running war with the women who had let it rot. She came out of it knowing she was a builder, and in 1880 she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and wrote their rule herself.

She still wanted China. Pope Leo XIII had other ideas: “Not to the East, but to the West.” He sent her to Manhattan, where hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants were packed into the tenements of Five Points and Mulberry Bend, and a mostly Irish and German hierarchy had little patience for them.

The Archbishop of New York, Michael Corrigan, met her with a blunt suggestion: get back on the boat. When she refused, he told her she could raise money only from Italians, who had almost none to give. She went door to door anyway, climbing the front steps of homes that mostly turned her away, and kept a ledger of every gift. Within 3 years she opened Columbus Hospital, staffed by her own sisters, and Corrigan became one of her strongest supporters.

That became her method. When an institution wouldn’t serve the people it was ignoring, she built a new one and ran it herself. She crossed the Andes by mule. She opened a school and orphanage in New Orleans a year after a mob lynched 11 Italian immigrants there. By her death in Chicago in 1917 she had founded 67 institutions across the Americas and Europe.

She was canonized in 1946, and a huge crowd filled Soldier Field in Chicago to celebrate the frail Italian nun a New York archbishop had once told to go home.

The fear of the ocean never went away, and Dom Bettinelli argues that’s the point. Cabrini didn’t wait to stop being afraid before she went.

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Links for this episode:

• Britannica — St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
• Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — Francesca Cabrini’s Early Life
• The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini — Mother Cabrini’s Life and Legacy
• Franciscan Media — Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini
• Red Hook Star-Revue — 11 facts you might not have known about Saint Frances Cabrini
• Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — Mother Cabrini
• Catholicism.org — Not to the East, But to the West: The Saintly Adventures of Francesca Cabrini
• Cabrini Mission Foundation — Mother Cabrini
• St. Frances Cabrini Shrine, New York City — How accurate is the Cabrini movie?
• My Catholic Life! — St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
• Wikipedia — Cabrini Medical Center
• Italian Sons and Daughters of America — Tenements, Toil and the Founders of the ‘Old School’
• L’Italo-Americano — The Infamous Five Points District in Lower Manhattan
• Wikipedia — Frances Xavier Cabrini
• National Endowment for the Humanities — Mother Cabrini, the First American Saint of the Catholic Church
• St. Frances Cabrini Shrine, New York City — Mother Cabrini Honors St. Rose
• New Orleans Historical — Madre Francesca Cabrini
• St. Frances Cabrini Shrine, New York City — Why Mother Cabrini Came to New Orleans
• Catholic Review — Mother Cabrini: First U.S. citizen canonized a saint
• National Catholic Register — Mother Cabrini: The First American Citizen to be Named a Saint
• Encyclopedia.com — Cabrini, Frances Xavier (1850–1917)

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