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What she said
"It is he [Jesus] who is doing everything, not us."
What the world was like
In the 1870s and 1880s, Italy was suffering a deep economic depression. Desperate families emigrated to the United States to make a new start in life. They had a difficult time in their new country. They did not speak English. They were often discriminated against because they were Catholics in a mostly Protestant country. They were crowded together in big-city tenements. If they could find work, they were easily cheated and overworked by factory owners. They were living in dire poverty.
Who she was
Francesca Cabrini had always wanted to be a missionary, but her sights had always been set on China and the Far East. She studied with the Daughters of the Sacred Heart and became a primary school teacher. Her desire for religious life led her to request entrance to two different communities, but both refused her due to her poor health.
Her pastor then suggested that become the director of an orphanage for girls called the House of Providence. She did her best as the director, but the orphanage closed a few years later due to circumstances beyond her control. Francesca had not given up on her dream of becoming a missionary. She began to make plans for her own missionary community, which she called the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. It was a revolutionary idea. Up until that time, Catholic missionaries had always been men. After some resistance, she was allowed to found this new community of missionary women, and in 1880 her Rule of Life was approved.
She began in Italy and then, in 1887, went to Rome to explore the possibilities of mission work abroad. In an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she explained her desire to do mission work in the Far East. After listening carefully, and weighing what he already knew about the terrible conditions of Italian immigrants in the United States, the Pope gave his decision. He asked her to minister to the Italians who had emigrated to the United States and were living in "Little Italy," an Italian immigrant neighborhood in New York City. Mother Cabrini accepted the challenge. With six of her sisters, she became an immigrant to the United States herself, and later a citizen.
The Archbishop of New York had asked for Italian priests to minister to the new immigrants. When the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart arrived, he did not welcome them. There was no house ready for them and no one to meet them or to help them adjust to the chaos of New York City. Instead, Archbishop Corrigan told them to take the same ship back again to Italy! However, Mother Cabrini was not to be dissuaded. "I have letters from the Pope," she said. She found accommodations among the immigrants in Little Italy, begged door-to-door for money to help her start her mission, and began teaching the children, visiting the sick, and feeding the hungry. Other religious women helped them, and soon the shopkeepers in Little Italy were saving food for them to eat and to distribute to those in need.
Mother Cabrini's work in New York was only the beginning. She and her sisters soon spread out over the entire country -- wherever Italian immigrants could be found. She went to Cincinnati, Pittsburg, Buffalo, Chicago, Saint Louis, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and New Orleans. She even started a prison ministry, visiting prisoners on death row and caring for their relatives. She expanded her work to Central America and Argentina as well. She traveled often to Italy to oversee her houses there, where the Sisters were trained for their missionary work. On December 22, 1917, in one of her own hospitals in Chicago, she died. Working until the end, she had been wrapping little packages of candy to be given to parochial school children as Christmas treats.
What this saint means to us today
As a founder of schools, orphanages, child-care centers, and hospitals, Mother Cabrini influenced the lives of countless Italian-Americans. Through her active and courageous witness to God's love for the poor, she strengthened the Church in America and won the loyalty and gratitude of generations of Italian Catholics.
We often hear the phrase, "Take care of your own." Sometimes we can interpret this in a selfish way, as if it means, "Take care of your own and be indifferent to anyone else." But Mother Cabrini shows us that taking care of our own is part of God's plan for taking care of others, too. Mother Cabrini was very clear that her mission was to Italian immigrants. She knew them, she knew their language, she knew what they needed. They were "her own," and she was going to take care of them no matter what anybody else said. This strong sense of mission gave her courage and strength as she spent herself, day after day, in service to those in need.
In "taking care of her own" Mother Cabrini became the first naturalized citizen of the United Saints to be declared a saint. She became the patron of immigrants -- of all nationalities. She never lost sight of her dreams, and her life is a reminder that, when something ends, it may simply mean that something else is beginning.
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