Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Virgin, Patron of Immigrants
(1850–1917)

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850, at Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of thirteen children. She was a premature and sickly child who was told by doctors that she would never be strong enough for religious life, but she overcame these predictions through the strength of her will and her trust in divine providence. She desired to go to China as a missionary, but when she presented herself to a congregation of missionary sisters she was rejected on grounds of health and was asked instead to help run a small orphanage.

After this orphanage failed due to mismanagement by its founder, the local bishop asked Frances to found her own missionary congregation. She founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880 with seven companions. When she asked Pope Leo XIII for permission to go to China, he told her instead to go west, to the United States, where millions of Italian immigrants were living without pastoral care or social support.

She arrived in New York in 1889 and immediately found the situation even more difficult than anticipated: the house that was supposed to be waiting for her had not been provided, and the Archbishop of New York suggested she return to Italy. She refused, found lodgings, and began her work. In the following decades she founded sixty-seven institutions throughout the Americas, including schools, orphanages, and hospitals, establishing them with a combination of practical shrewdness, personal charm, and absolute confidence in divine providence.

She became an American citizen in 1909, though she never ceased to love Italy deeply. She died on December 22, 1917, in Chicago. She was beatified in 1938 and canonised by Pope Pius XII in 1946, the first American citizen to be canonised. She is the patron of immigrants and of hospital administrators. Her feast is celebrated on November 13th.