Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that the patron saint of immigrants will soon share a place of honor with Lady Liberty in New York Harbor.

"Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us!" His Holiness Pope Pius XII said those words as the invocation was pronounced for the first time at her canonization. On that memorable Sunday, July 7, 1946, Frances Xavier Cabrini was installed into the Vatican Basilica amidst the applause of 40,000 people. Canonization of a saint usually takes place many years or even centuries after that person's death, but Mother Cabrini's Beatific

ation took place in 1938, twenty-one years after her death. Pope Pius XII signed a decree of canonization in 1944, and the ceremony elevating her to the altars of the Church was the first one celebrated after the close of World War II.

Frances Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850, in northern Italy in Lombardy, in the town of Sant'Angelo, the Lodi region south of the Po River. Her parents, Agostino Cabrini and Stella Oldini, were peasants who were both of great faith and piety, which they instilled in their children by word and example. The tenth of eleven brothers and sisters only four of them, one Frances, survived beyond adolescence.

In later years as a nun during her work in Rome, she met the Bishop of Piacenza. The founder of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, an order dedicated to helping Italian immigrants in America. Bishop Scalabrini needed religious women to help and complement the priests of the Institute of St. Charles. He succeeded in obtaining a letter from Archbishop Corrigan of New York, formally inviting the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart to establish a house in New York. Then, shortly after that, Pope Leo XIII, in an audience with Mother Frances, asked her to make New York her mission, declaring, "You will go not to the East, but the West!" Instead of China, as she had once dreamed, in blind faith and perfect obedience with a group of her sisters, she embarked for America almost immediately.

Over the years in many of the new foundations she created, Mother Cabrini encountered discouraging obstacles, and her beginning in New York was one of them. Archbishop Corrigan was not expecting her so soon in New York. At their first meeting, he suggested that she return to Italy, to which she replied in obedience she could not since the Pope sent her to New York. To make matters worse, the Scalabrini priests had made no provisions for the sisters, not even any living quarters. The Convent that their benefactress, an Italian Countess, had prepared for the nuns had not met the Archbishop's approval. They were brought to spend the night in a forbidding shelter in the heart of the Italian ghetto with the beds so dirty that they could not sleep in them! Instead, they spent their first night in America awake, peacefully engaged in prayer. The following day, the Sisters of Charity agreed to house the missionaries as long as was necessary and helped them in their first steps through the city.

On the day of her canonization, some 60,000 people visited her shrine in New York and the room where she died in Chicago. Another place where crowds gathered was the shrine in Golden, Colorado. Even today, many pilgrims go to these same places to ask for favors or to express their gratitude for graces received: the Shrine Chapel in New York City, the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Chicago, Illinois, and Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, Colorado.

When Mother Cabrini died, she was buried in the cemetery at West Park, New York, according to a desire she had earlier expressed. In the fall of 1933, her body was placed beneath the main altar of the chapel in Mother Cabrini High School in New York City. The chapel was first located in the school until a larger chapel dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was constructed on the same grounds. It is the destination of many who go to pray at the altar and admire the mosaics that depict her life.

It should be with great pride that Italian Americans, in memory of their ancestors who came to America and faced hardships to become Americans would be the patrons of Mother Cabrini as she is the Patron Saint of Immigrants.

America is beautiful, and Mother Cabrini’s examples, work, and piety have made it so.