Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano on July 15, 1850, the second youngest of eleven children. She was born premature and was in fragile health all her life: that’s exactly why she was turned down twice when she asked to become a nun. She qualified as a teacher, taught, and in 1880 founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Codogno. She added the name Xavier to her own, because she wanted to go to China like him. She went to Leo XIII to ask permission. The pope answered her with words that changed her life: “Not to the East, but to the West.” In those years millions of Italians were emigrating to America, and they arrived to work in mines and on construction sites, crammed into the worst neighborhoods, without schools, without hospitals, despised. In 1889 she left for New York with six sisters. She found a situation so hard that the archbishop advised her to go back; she stayed. In twenty-eight years she crossed the ocean twenty-four times and founded sixty-seven institutions — schools, orphanages, hospitals — in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, and then in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, France, Spain and England. She bought buildings by negotiating personally with bankers, and nobody ever got the better of her. She died in Chicago on December 22, 1917. Pius XII proclaimed her a saint in 1946, and in 1950 patron saint of emigrants. If your name is Frances, today is your name day.