Frances Xavier Cabrini

Early years Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on 15 July 1850, in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, then part of the Austrian Empire. She was the youngest of the 13 children of farmer Agostino Cabrini and his wife Stella Oldini. Only four of her siblings survived beyond adolescence. On one occasion, she fell into the river and was swept downstream. Her rescuers found her on a riverbank. Cabrini attributed her rescue to divine intervention. Cabrini's older sister Rosa was a teacher, which influenced her to follow the same career path. She later worked for three more years as a substitute teacher at a school in Castiraga Vidardo in Lombardy. After Cabrini's parents died in 1870, she applied for admission to the Daughters of the Sacred Heart at Arluno. However, the sisters rejected Cabrini because they believed her health wasn't strong enough. In 1872, while working with the sick during a smallpox outbreak, she contracted the disease and was rejected by the Canossian Sisters of Crema, again for health reasons. Cabrini bought a former Franciscan convent in Codogno. With several of the former Providence sisters, Cabrini in November 1880 founded the Institute of the Salesian Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC). At the Codogno convent, the MSC sisters took in orphans and foundlings, opened a day school, started classes in needlework, and sold their fine embroidery. ==Papal recognition==

(1887). Fresco by Luigi Arzuffi, at the Our Lady of the Assumption Church, Caselle Landi, Glogowski In September 1887, Cabrini went to Rome to meet Leo XIII. She asked him for permission to set up a convent in Rome, which he readily gave. She also asked for permission to send missions to Asia. However, Leo XIII was thinking of a different destination. During the 1880s, the pope and the rest of the Roman Curia were worried about the large numbers of impoverished Italian immigrants emigrating to New York. Leo was concerned that these Catholics would leave the Church unless they received material assistance and spiritual guidance. Instead of allowing Cabrini to go to China, Leo XIII told her, go "...not to the East, but to the West..." to New York City. In December 1888, Cabrini committed to going to New York City. The pope also recognized the MSC as a missionary institute, the first group of Italian religious sisters to receive that approval. Scalabrini promised Cabrini that his religious order, Scalabrinians would greet the MSC sisters in New York City, take care of their needs, and work closely with them. == Mission in New York ==

Arrival Corrigan wrote to Cabrini in February 1889, welcoming her to New York City, but advising her to delay her departure to allow more time for preparation. However, when the letter reached Italy, Cabrini was already gone. When they disembarked from the ship, the Scalabrinians were not there. Furthermore, they had failed to set up accommodations for them. The sisters spent their first night in the United States in a decrepit rooming house with bed bugs in the mattresses, forcing them to sleep on chairs. Cabrini and the MSC sisters started knocking on tenement doors in Little Italy in Manhattan. At that time, many Italian immigrants in New York were suspicious of the institutional Catholic Church, sentiments fostered by the government of the newly unified Italy. Their loyalties lay more with their personal saints. In addition, as most of the immigrants came from Sicily, Calabria and other southern regions, they were initially suspicious of the MSC sisters, who all originated from Lombardy in Northern Italy. Cabrini once wrote:“What we as women cannot do on a large scale to help solve grave social ills is being done in our small sphere of influence in every state and city where we have opened houses. In them we shelter and care for orphans, the sick and the poor.”Although she moved the MSC order to West Park, Cabrini continued to work in New York City. The Scalabrinians thwarted her efforts to build a school there. However, she joined with them in 1890 to build the first hospital in the city for Italians. She brought ten MSC sisters from Italy to staff the hospital, which opened in 1891. == Other missions ==

As Cabrini's reputation grew, she started receiving requests for help on Catholic projects outside New York for both Italian and non-Italian Catholics. She sailed in 1891 to Nicaragua to open a religious house. While there, she traveled by boat into a remote area to visit a settlement of Miskito people. Arriving in Chile, she traveled by mule over the Andes Mountains to found schools in Brazil and Argentina. She also went to Grenada to start a school. The final destination in her first mission trip was New Orleans in 1892, where she set up another school for Italians. The area was a hotbed of anti-Catholic sentiment, combined with racial discrimination against immigrants from Southern Italy, who locals believed did not "look White." In 1891, a large mob forcibly removed 11 Italian men in jail and killed them. The MSC sisters established a mission in the poorest Italian neighborhood in the city. Cabrini was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1909. She applied for citizenship to assure the legal foundation of the MSC order after her death and to demonstrate solidarity with the Americans that she served. In early second quarter 1912, Cabrini and several MSC sisters were visiting Naples, Italy. To return to the United States, they booked passage on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic to New York. However, after hearing about problems with the Columbus Extension Hospital in Chicago, Cabrini switched their bookings to an earlier voyage on a different ship. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic with a massive loss of life on April 15 of that year. During her lifetime, Cabrini made 24 transatlantic crossings. On one of her final trips, Cabrini visited Southern California in 1916. She constructed a chapel above the San Fernando Valley on Mount Raphael to protect the residents from wildfires. It was relocated in 1970 to Burbank, California, to become part of the Mother Cabrini Shrine. ==Death and legacy==

In failing health, Cabrini traveled to Chicago in 1917 to be cared for by the MSC sisters there. On 21 December 1917, she was wrapping sweets she bought as Christmas gifts for children at the Italian school. The next morning, she felt too ill to leave her bed. Sisters visited with her intermittently to attend to business of the order but eventually left her to rest. Shortly before noon, they discovered she had collapsed in her chair, with blood on her lips. She died suddenly, with some of her sisters around her, on 22 December, as a result of chronic endocarditis. She was 67 years old. Her remains were permanently exhumed in 1933 with the start of the campaign for her sainthood. During her lifetime, Cabrini founded 67 orphanages, schools and hospitals throughout the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean region, and in Europe. ==Veneration==

In 1921, Peter Smith was born in Columbus Hospital in New York. He was blinded when a nurse accidentally administered a 50% silver nitrate solution into his eyes. The doctors said that Smith's corneas were destroyed and that he was permanently blind. The mother superior of the hospital later touched a relic of Cabrini to his eyes and pinned a medal of Cabrini to his gown. The nurse who gave Smith the eyedrops prayed for the intercession of Cabrini to help him. When the doctors examined Smith 72 hours later, his eyes were normal. Smith then survived a severe bout of pneumonia. The Vatican cited this case as a miracle in 1938. Sister Delphina Grazioli, an MSC sister, was dying after four surgical procedures in Seattle from 1925 to 1929. She saw a vision of Cabrini and then made a miraculous recovery. The Vatican accepted this also in 1938 as a miracle from Cabrini. The thousands of letters that she wrote, particularly to her sisters, were also examined during her canonization process. Citing the Smith and Grazioli cures, Pope Pius XI beatified Cabrini on 13 November 1938. Smith, now a priest, attended the ceremony. Pope Pius XII canonised Cabrini on 7 July 1946. In 1950, Pius XII named Cabrini as the patron saint of immigrants, recognizing her efforts worldwide to build schools, orphanages and hospitals. Pope Francis has stated that Cabrini's charitable works in Argentina inspired him to become a priest. In the Roman Martyrology, Cabrini's feast day is 22 December, the anniversary of her death. This is the day ordinarily chosen as a saint's feast day. Following the reforms in Pope John XXIII's Code of Rubrics in 1960, the United States has celebrated Cabrini's feast day on 13 November, her beatification day. This change was made to avoid conflicting with the greater ferias of Advent. ==Shrines==

National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini is located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. When the shrine was founded in 1955, it was located within the Columbus Hospital complex in Chicago. Cabrini had founded the hospital in 1905, lived and worked there, and died there in 1917. After Cabrini's canonization in 1946, the archdiocese decided that it needed a shrine in her honor. When the hospital was demolished for a high rise development in 2002, the shrine closed for ten years. It was relocated next to the new development and renovated. Cardinal Francis George rededicated the National Shrine in 2012. Today, it contains gold mosaics, Carrara marble, frescoes, and Florentine stained glass,. It also preserves the hospital room from the Columbus Hospital where Cabrini died. Visitors use the shrine today for worship, spiritual care, and pilgrimage. After Cabrini's canonization in 1946, the MSC converted the summer camp into the Mother Cabrini Shrine. It contains a footpath partway up Lookout Mountain, marked with the Stations of the Cross, that ends at a statue of Jesus. The shrine campus includes a convent, visitor accommodations, a chapel and an exhibit of Cabrini artifacts. The statues and stained-glass windows in the chapel originated from the former Villa Cabrini Academy in Burbank, California. Cabrini's canonization in 1946 brought a huge influx of visitors to the school chapel. To accommodate them, the sisters in 1960 moved her remains out of the high school to a separate shrine building on the campus. They now reside in a large bronze-and-glass reliquary casket in the shrine's altar. Cabrini's body is covered with her religious habit and a sculpted face mask and hands for viewing. • The Mother Cabrini Shrine in Burbank, California is located near the site of the former Villa Cabrini Academy, founded in 1937 by her order. The shrine consists of a chapel that Cabrini erected in the San Fernando Valley in 1916. The Italian Catholic Federation relocated the chapel to St. Francis Xavier Church in 1973 to save it from demolition. The federation added a library wing to the shrine in 1993. • The Shrine of Mother Cabrini is located on the campus of the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Lewiston, New York. • Our Lady of Pompeii Church in New York city has a shrine, a statue, and a stained-glass window dedicated to Cabrini. She and her Missionary Sisters taught religious education there. • The Mother Cabrini Shrine in Peru, New York, is a stone grotto on the grounds of St. Patrick Church. It was dedicated in 1947. • St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City has an statue of "S. Francisca Xaveria Cabrini", included among saints who founded religious congregations. ==Legacy==

Churches and parishes Italy • St. Frances Cabrini Parish (Parrocchia di Santa Francesca Cabrini), Codogno • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish (Parrocchia Santa Francesca Saverio Cabrini), Lodi • St. Frances Cabrini Parish (Parrocchia di Santa Francesca Cabrini), Rome United States • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Camp Verde, Arizona • St. Frances Cabrini - Our Lady of Lavang Catholic Church in Tucson, Arizona • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Catholic Church in Crestline, California • St. Frances X Cabrini Catholic Church in Los Angeles, California • St. Frances Cabrini Parish in San Jose, California • St. Frances X Cabrini Catholic Church in Yucaipa, California • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado • St. Frances Cabrini Church in North Haven, Connecticut, now part of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity Parish • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Parrish, Florida • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Catholic Parish in Spring Hill, Florida • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Catholic Church in St. Cloud, Florida • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Savannah, Georgia • St. Frances Cabrini Parish in Springfield, Illinois • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church in Livonia, Louisiana • Former St. Frances Cabrini Church in New Orleans, Louisiana, built in 1953 and destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 • Former St. Frances X. Cabrini Church in Scituate, Massachusetts, closed in 2004 • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Allen Park, Michigan • Church of St. Frances Cabrini in Minneapolis, Minnesota • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Omaha, Nebraska, a historic landmark and former cathedral • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Ocean City, New Jersey, now part of St. Damien Parish • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Piscataway, New Jersey • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Brooklyn, New York • St. Frances Cabrini R.C. Church in Coram, New York • Cabrini Parish in Rochester, New York • St. Frances Cabrini Church on Roosevelt Island, New York, now part of East River Catholics • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Colerain, Ohio • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Catholic Church in Lorain, Ohio • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Now part of Mary Queen of Saints Roman Catholic Parish • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Community in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania • Mother Cabrini Parish in Shamokin, Pennsylvania • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Lebanon, Tennessee • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Catholic Church in El Paso, Texas • St. Frances Cabrini & St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Granbury, Texas • Saint Frances Cabrini Mission Church in Hargill, Texas • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Houston, Texas • St. Frances Cabrini Church in Laredo, Texas • Mother Cabrini Parish in Pharr, Texas • Saint Frances Cabrini Church in San Antonio, Texas • St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish in Benton City, Washington • St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Lakewood, Washington • St. Frances Cabrini Parish in West Bend, Wisconsin