St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Their story

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in 1850 in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of thirteen children. She was small and often sick, but she dreamed of being a missionary to China. Several religious communities turned her away because of her poor health, so in 1880 she founded her own: the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When she asked Pope Leo XIII to send her to China, he told her to go not to the East but to the West. Millions of Italian immigrants were arriving in the United States, many living in poverty and far from the Church. In 1889 Mother Cabrini sailed to New York with six sisters. She was a woman of tremendous energy and trust in God. Despite her fear of water, she crossed the ocean more than twenty times. She and her sisters founded schools, orphanages and hospitals across the United States, Central and South America and Europe, about sixty-seven institutions in all. She became an American citizen in 1909. She died in Chicago in 1917, and in 1946 she became the first United States citizen to be canonized. Pope Pius XII named her patroness of immigrants.