A surprising thing happened on March 10, 2020. The state of Colorado declared October 2 Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini Day. Such a declaration was a first on many levels, but in our state, it is the first day dedicated to a woman, and a woman religious at that! Given her tenacity, this shouldn’t come as any surprise—she was a trailblazer. Saint Frances Cabrini, whose Feast Day is celebrated today, is a woman worth celebrating: patroness of immigrants and women’s missions, and the first American citizen to become a Saint.
A Pioneering Woman
Colorado residents are likely familiar with the Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, Colorado. However, her ministry began far from the Rocky Mountains, and it stretches even further beyond them to this day. The shrine is located on the property Mother Cabrini purchased in 1910—only a handful of years before her death—as a summer camp for orphan girls, and has been used as a retreat house since the orphanage closed in 1967.
For those who have visited the shrine, they will likely remember the spring near the grotto. When Mother Cabrini purchased the land, she got it inexpensively because it had no source of water. As the sisters began to use the property for residents and campers it became necessary to find a source of water. As Providence would have it, just as the sisters were about to give up due to thirst, a spring was found in 1912 that continues to flow to this day.
Patroness of Immigrants
Although Saint Frances Cabrini was born in Italy, she had a substantial impact on the American Church and beyond. Very often she is acknowledged as the inspiration for Saint Teresa of Calcutta. In a letter to her archbishop, Mother Teresa mused that she might have the same impact on India that she saw Cabrini had had on the United States.
Growing up, Cabrini hoped to one day be a missionary, yet her poor health was a deterrent in all of her attempts to join various religious orders. However, in 1880, she and seven sisters founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When she became a sister, she took the name “Xavier” after the famous Jesuit missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, though she was known to most as “Mother Cabrini.”
Like Saint Francis Xavier, she hoped to be a missionary in China, but when she asked the pope’s blessing in 1887, he encouraged her “not to go east, but west.” Two years later, she and several sisters departed for New York City. Upon their arrival in New York they were met with prejudice, suspicion, and an overall hostility (not to mention, they had to face extreme poverty and dire living conditions). Despite these difficult circumstances the sisters gained a foothold among New York’s Italian immigrants and began to open schools, orphanages, and hospitals.
A Woman With Grit
In the upcoming movie depicting her life story, Cabrini is remembered as a force—a woman who advocated for herself and for those she served. Whether embellished or not, stories have been passed down of Mother Cabrini entering a grocery store, shopping, and thanking clerks for their donation to her charity as she walked back out with her required supplies. In many ways, her contemporaries did not know what to make of her. All the while, she had to be tough as she experienced tremendous prejudice towards herself both as a woman amongst the male leaders of the city, as a woman serving in a new way within the Church, and as an Italian during the height of anti-Italian sentiment.
As word spread of their successful missions, the community was invited to serve immigrant communities all around the United States and, later, the world. Cabrini’s most extensive work focused on New York and Chicago, but her impact is seen as far as California and Washington state, and even China!
Mother Cabrini was ahead of her time. She loved Jesus and those whom she had been sent to serve and did so seemingly without compromise. She blazed a trail for women who wished to be missionaries with every reason to have been discouraged. Given this little sneak peak into the life of a relatively unsung hero, I hope I have whet your appetite for the upcoming movie Cabrini, scheduled to release in March 2024.
“Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.”
// St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Katie Cassady is a regular contributor to the BIS blog. She is a wife and mom to three little girls in Denver, CO. Steeped in theological reflection, beekeeping and motherhood, she is appreciative of any and all wisdom she can glean from those living intentional lives of faith. Find out more about her here. Read all of Katie's posts here.
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