Influences in her early life
Frances Cabrini was born in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano in the province of Lombardy, northern Italy, two months prematurely, on July l5, 1850. Her father, Agostino, was a farmer and her mother, Stella, stayed at home with the children. Frances was the tenth of eleven brothers and sisters, only four of whom survived beyond adolescence. Small and weak as a child, these characteristics influenced her entire life.
Her Spirituality
Her parents’ strong faith was transmitted to her by word and example. Her father would read to the family from the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, telling stories of the great missionaries. The stories of the missions in China made a particularly strong impression on Frances and at an early age, she desired to travel there as a missionary.
At the time of her youth, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was at its peak and provided a spiritual foundation to the work of the missions.
When she was old enough she applied for, but was refused, admission to several religious orders because of her frail health
Frances Cabrini was born in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano in the province of Lombardy, northern Italy, two months prematurely, on July l5, 1850. Her father, Agostino, was a farmer and her mother, Stella, stayed at home with the children. Frances was the tenth of eleven brothers and sisters, only four of whom survived beyond adolescence. Small and weak as a child, these characteristics influenced her entire life.
Her Spirituality
Her parents’ strong faith was transmitted to her by word and example. Her father would read to the family from the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, telling stories of the great missionaries. The stories of the missions in China made a particularly strong impression on Frances and at an early age, she desired to travel there as a missionary.
At the time of her youth, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was at its peak and provided a spiritual foundation to the work of the missions.
When she was old enough she applied for, but was refused, admission to several religious orders because of her frail health
In 1863, Frances registered as a boarding student at the Normal School in Arluno, some distance from Sant’ Angelo. Her purpose was to graduate as a school teacher. The school at Arluno was run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart who prepared and educated future teachers. Frances lived there for almost five years until 1868, the year she graduated. According to the custom of the time, boarding students lived in the convent with the religious sisters. For Frances, this was like a dream come true: for all practical purposes she was living as a religious among religious. Moreover, she shared the Christian life of a convent where the Sacred Heart was the center of devotion.
Upon completing her coursework, she petitioned to join the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. Although Mother Giovanna Francesca Grassi saw in Frances a chosen soul full of virtue, she decided not to accept her fearing that her poor health would not permit her to endure the rigors of religious life. Nonetheless, perhaps to soften the blow, or perhaps out of intuition, Mother Grassi encouraged her saying “You are called to establish another Institute that will bring new glory to the Heart of Jesus.” Her words were prophetic indeed.
In 1868, Frances received her teacher’s diploma and returned to Sant’Angelo where she taught in the private school established by her sister, Rosa, and dedicated herself to works of charity and to serving the poor. In 1871, at the request of her pastor, when a substitute teacher was needed immediately, she moved to the nearby village of Vidardo to teach in the public school.
A Crucial Move
In 1874, the diocesan authorities asked Frances to move to Codogno, a larger town further away from home to take over the direction of the House of Providence, a girls' orphanage, being unsuccessfully administered by Antonia Tondini and Maria Calza, in order to organize it with the structure and spirit of a religious institute. In complying with this request, Frances renounced forever the position of public school teacher and entered on a path of consecration to God. Five young women who were teaching at the House of Providence wanted to become religious sisters. She and the five women began their novitiate with Frances Cabrini as their novice mistress.
At the age of 27, in 1877, when she and her companions made their profession of religious vows, Frances added Xavier to her name, in tribute to the Jesuit, Francis Xavier, who evangelized the Orient. The bishop named her superior of the community. In 1880, due to many difficulties, the diocesan authorities recognized that the House of Providence could not be formed into a religious community.
Founding of the Institute.
At this same time, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, as she was now known, received a mandate from the bishop to found a new religious institute with the help and support of the young women who had professed their vows with her. In a short time, she found an ancient Franciscan convent in Codogno. This is where the Institute of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was founded on November 14, 1880. It was established as a diocesan congregation in 1881, with a simple Rule written by Mother Cabrini, and approved by the bishop. There were some objections to the term missionaries, which implied a mission abroad. The bishop thought primarily of a service within the diocese, or at most, in the Province of Lombardy. However, Mother Cabrini, the 30 year old foundress, had no intention of restricting the congregation to the boundaries of Lombardy.
In Pursuit of the Goal
She set out for Rome in September, 1887. Her goals were to have a universal missionary Institute with a central house in Rome and pontifical approval of the young Institute. Since the ecclesiastical authorities moved at a slow pace and with caution, it was surprising that on March 12, 1888, the Institute was granted permission to open two missions in the Eternal City. While there, she met the bishop of Piacenza, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, who had just founded the Missionary Institute of St. Charles to minister to Italians abroad.
The Italian Immigrants in U.S.A.
Italian immigrants faced many hardships in the United States. They worked at the most menial labor and experienced discrimination. Uprooted, without pastoral care, they were as strangers in their own church and the systematic targets of Protestant proselytism. Despite all, the great majority of Italians maintained an eagerness to return again to their Catholic faith and devotions. Seeking the help of religious women, Bishop Scalabrini asked Mother Cabrini to go to New York to work with the Italian immigrants. She hesitated because she planned to go to the Orient to evangelize.
Scalabrini was persistent and showed her a letter from Archbishop Corrigan of New York, formally inviting the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart to establish a house there.
Westward!
Mother Cabrini sought an audience with Pope Leo XIII and posed her missionary dilemma to him; his response was: “Not to the East, but to the West.” Exchanging her dreams of going to China for the reality of going to New York, she embarked with six of her Missionary Sisters almost immediately for New York. Upon arrival, she learned that Archbishop Corrigan did not expect her so soon. When they first met, he suggested that she return to Italy. She refused, saying that the Pope had sent her. She and her companions spent the first night in a dingy tenement in the heart of the Italian ghetto. They could not sleep and stayed awake, tired, yet peacefully engaged in prayer. Afterwards, the Sisters of Charity gave them hospitality and guided their first steps through the city.
Beginnings in America
In a new world, another culture, without contacts, not knowing the language, Mother Cabrini set out to establish her mission. She went back to Archbishop Corrigan and gained his support and friendship. He approved the house in which the Countess di Cesnola wanted the new missionaries to live. On Palm Sunday of 1890, an orphanage for Italian children was inaugurated on the property, part of which the missionaries occupied as a convent.
A free school was established in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the poorest Italians lived. The sisters taught catechism in the Italian parish of St. Joachim. All the while, Mother Cabrini with the sisters, constantly traversed the streets of the Italian district, visiting families, trying to help and guide them, and bringing God nearer to them. To support themselves and the orphanage, the sisters had to beg for alms because the help they received from other women’s religious congregations and donations from the wealthy were not enough to support the growing number of orphans. Young women soon offered their help and some asked to join the Institute.
In July, when everything was in order in New York, Mother Cabrini went back to Italy with the first North American postulants for the novitiate in Codogno. She returned to Rome for an audience with Pope Leo XIII, who was fast becoming her good friend.
Continuing the work
At the request of Archbishop Corrigan, Cabrini founded a larger orphanage in West Park, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River. It was an ideal, healthful site for the orphans and for the North American novitiate which opened in 1891. The land was formerly owned by the Jesuits, who sold it at a very low price, because it lacked sufficient water. However, to the surprise of the Jesuits, the ever resourceful Cabrini soon discovered an underground spring on the property to that provided ample water even to this day.
In 1892, at Mother Cabrini’s direction, her Missionary Sisters traveled to New Orleans and quickly established a school and an orphanage in “Little Palermo” an Italian enclave of the French Quarter.
Back in New York, the Italian immigrants needed hospitals. Care of the sick, until this time, was not one of the ministries of the Institute nor was it an inclination of Mother Cabrini to do this type of work.
Archbishop Corrigan begged Mother Cabrini to take on hospital work. However, it wasn’t until Cabrini had a dream where she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary tending to a hospital patient, that she considered working in the healthcare field. In the dream, Cabrini asked the Virgin Mary what she was doing; the Blessed Virgin Mary responded, “I am doing the work you refuse to do.” Mother Cabrini moved quickly to establish a hospital for the Italian sick poor in New York City.. New to this work, the sisters turned out to be excellent healthcare providers and administrators. Mother Cabrini later went on to establish other hospitals in Chicago and Seattle.
Beyond the American shores
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had been in America only two years. They were hardly well established and yet, Mother Cabrini sought to extend their missions to Latin America. Her objective was Nicaragua and in ensuing years, Argentina, where she opened a school, Colegio Santa Rosa, at the invitation of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
She returned to Europe, and in 1898, she established a students’ residence in Paris and spent time exploring London with the prospect of founding a mission there. In 1899, she initiated a school in Madrid.
Expanding Horizons in the United States
At the turn of the 20th century, Mother Cabrini traveled to Chicago where there was a large Italian colony and established a parish school. From Chicago, she traveled to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the Italian immigrants asked for schools. From Scranton, she proceeded to Newark, New Jersey, where she accepted the task of establishing and running a parish school there.
She looked for solutions which would afford her the means to subsidize free schools. In Dobbs Ferry, New York, on the Hudson River, she founded Sacred Heart Villa a school for daughters of now well-to-do Italian families who paid tuition, monies which in turn were utilized to fund the free schools.
Cabrini headed to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where a needy colony of Italian immigrants worked mostly in the mines under very harsh conditions. Her Sisters staffed a parish school and later, an orphanage.
In 1903, Mother Cabrini traveled seven days by train from Chicago to Seattle where she founded a school and an orphanage for Italian immigrants. She dreamed of establishing missions in Alaska and had she lived longer, this may have come to pass. Her dream of going to China persisted throughout her life. Her works on the western coast of the United States brought her closer to the Far East.
She extended her educational and childcare missions to California where there were settlements of Italian as well as Mexican immigrants. By September 1905, a school and an orphanage had been opened. Later, a preventorium for tubercular children, would be started in the Santa Monica Mountains north of the city.
While in Seattle in 1909, Frances Cabrini fulfilled a long-desired plan and became a citizen of the United States of America. The ensuing years were times of constant movement: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, Colorado, California, Washington State, Central and South America and Europe.
It was in the spring of 1917 that Mother Cabrini undertook her last mission. Her health was compromised. In spite of this, she traveled to Chicago where the now two hospitals there needed her presence. On December 22 of that year, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini died in her private room at Columbus Hospital as she was preparing Christmas candy for the local children. She was 67 years of age.
Her Legacy
For twenty-eight years of her missionary life, Mother Cabrini traveled regularly across the Atlantic Ocean. A prolific writer, it was during her second voyage, that she began the custom of writing letters to her sisters in the form of a travel diary. These letters are preserved today as valuable biographical documentation.
In conformity with the Heart of Jesus, the Institute she founded has responded compassionately and efficiently to the needs of all, immigrants, as well as the native-born worldwide. Education, pastoral ministry, and religious instruction and outreach to those in need spiritually and materially flourishes on six continents. Responses to the “signs of the times,” to needs as they presented themselves continue.
When Mother Cabrini died December 22, 1917, at the age of 67, 67 missions of the Institute had been established, ministries of healing, teaching, caring, giving and reaching out, in cities of the United States, Italy, France, England, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, and Nicaragua.
Upon completing her coursework, she petitioned to join the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. Although Mother Giovanna Francesca Grassi saw in Frances a chosen soul full of virtue, she decided not to accept her fearing that her poor health would not permit her to endure the rigors of religious life. Nonetheless, perhaps to soften the blow, or perhaps out of intuition, Mother Grassi encouraged her saying “You are called to establish another Institute that will bring new glory to the Heart of Jesus.” Her words were prophetic indeed.
In 1868, Frances received her teacher’s diploma and returned to Sant’Angelo where she taught in the private school established by her sister, Rosa, and dedicated herself to works of charity and to serving the poor. In 1871, at the request of her pastor, when a substitute teacher was needed immediately, she moved to the nearby village of Vidardo to teach in the public school.
A Crucial Move
In 1874, the diocesan authorities asked Frances to move to Codogno, a larger town further away from home to take over the direction of the House of Providence, a girls' orphanage, being unsuccessfully administered by Antonia Tondini and Maria Calza, in order to organize it with the structure and spirit of a religious institute. In complying with this request, Frances renounced forever the position of public school teacher and entered on a path of consecration to God. Five young women who were teaching at the House of Providence wanted to become religious sisters. She and the five women began their novitiate with Frances Cabrini as their novice mistress.
At the age of 27, in 1877, when she and her companions made their profession of religious vows, Frances added Xavier to her name, in tribute to the Jesuit, Francis Xavier, who evangelized the Orient. The bishop named her superior of the community. In 1880, due to many difficulties, the diocesan authorities recognized that the House of Providence could not be formed into a religious community.
Founding of the Institute.
At this same time, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, as she was now known, received a mandate from the bishop to found a new religious institute with the help and support of the young women who had professed their vows with her. In a short time, she found an ancient Franciscan convent in Codogno. This is where the Institute of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was founded on November 14, 1880. It was established as a diocesan congregation in 1881, with a simple Rule written by Mother Cabrini, and approved by the bishop. There were some objections to the term missionaries, which implied a mission abroad. The bishop thought primarily of a service within the diocese, or at most, in the Province of Lombardy. However, Mother Cabrini, the 30 year old foundress, had no intention of restricting the congregation to the boundaries of Lombardy.
In Pursuit of the Goal
She set out for Rome in September, 1887. Her goals were to have a universal missionary Institute with a central house in Rome and pontifical approval of the young Institute. Since the ecclesiastical authorities moved at a slow pace and with caution, it was surprising that on March 12, 1888, the Institute was granted permission to open two missions in the Eternal City. While there, she met the bishop of Piacenza, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, who had just founded the Missionary Institute of St. Charles to minister to Italians abroad.
The Italian Immigrants in U.S.A.
Italian immigrants faced many hardships in the United States. They worked at the most menial labor and experienced discrimination. Uprooted, without pastoral care, they were as strangers in their own church and the systematic targets of Protestant proselytism. Despite all, the great majority of Italians maintained an eagerness to return again to their Catholic faith and devotions. Seeking the help of religious women, Bishop Scalabrini asked Mother Cabrini to go to New York to work with the Italian immigrants. She hesitated because she planned to go to the Orient to evangelize.
Scalabrini was persistent and showed her a letter from Archbishop Corrigan of New York, formally inviting the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart to establish a house there.
Westward!
Mother Cabrini sought an audience with Pope Leo XIII and posed her missionary dilemma to him; his response was: “Not to the East, but to the West.” Exchanging her dreams of going to China for the reality of going to New York, she embarked with six of her Missionary Sisters almost immediately for New York. Upon arrival, she learned that Archbishop Corrigan did not expect her so soon. When they first met, he suggested that she return to Italy. She refused, saying that the Pope had sent her. She and her companions spent the first night in a dingy tenement in the heart of the Italian ghetto. They could not sleep and stayed awake, tired, yet peacefully engaged in prayer. Afterwards, the Sisters of Charity gave them hospitality and guided their first steps through the city.
Beginnings in America
In a new world, another culture, without contacts, not knowing the language, Mother Cabrini set out to establish her mission. She went back to Archbishop Corrigan and gained his support and friendship. He approved the house in which the Countess di Cesnola wanted the new missionaries to live. On Palm Sunday of 1890, an orphanage for Italian children was inaugurated on the property, part of which the missionaries occupied as a convent.
A free school was established in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the poorest Italians lived. The sisters taught catechism in the Italian parish of St. Joachim. All the while, Mother Cabrini with the sisters, constantly traversed the streets of the Italian district, visiting families, trying to help and guide them, and bringing God nearer to them. To support themselves and the orphanage, the sisters had to beg for alms because the help they received from other women’s religious congregations and donations from the wealthy were not enough to support the growing number of orphans. Young women soon offered their help and some asked to join the Institute.
In July, when everything was in order in New York, Mother Cabrini went back to Italy with the first North American postulants for the novitiate in Codogno. She returned to Rome for an audience with Pope Leo XIII, who was fast becoming her good friend.
Continuing the work
At the request of Archbishop Corrigan, Cabrini founded a larger orphanage in West Park, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River. It was an ideal, healthful site for the orphans and for the North American novitiate which opened in 1891. The land was formerly owned by the Jesuits, who sold it at a very low price, because it lacked sufficient water. However, to the surprise of the Jesuits, the ever resourceful Cabrini soon discovered an underground spring on the property to that provided ample water even to this day.
In 1892, at Mother Cabrini’s direction, her Missionary Sisters traveled to New Orleans and quickly established a school and an orphanage in “Little Palermo” an Italian enclave of the French Quarter.
Back in New York, the Italian immigrants needed hospitals. Care of the sick, until this time, was not one of the ministries of the Institute nor was it an inclination of Mother Cabrini to do this type of work.
Archbishop Corrigan begged Mother Cabrini to take on hospital work. However, it wasn’t until Cabrini had a dream where she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary tending to a hospital patient, that she considered working in the healthcare field. In the dream, Cabrini asked the Virgin Mary what she was doing; the Blessed Virgin Mary responded, “I am doing the work you refuse to do.” Mother Cabrini moved quickly to establish a hospital for the Italian sick poor in New York City.. New to this work, the sisters turned out to be excellent healthcare providers and administrators. Mother Cabrini later went on to establish other hospitals in Chicago and Seattle.
Beyond the American shores
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had been in America only two years. They were hardly well established and yet, Mother Cabrini sought to extend their missions to Latin America. Her objective was Nicaragua and in ensuing years, Argentina, where she opened a school, Colegio Santa Rosa, at the invitation of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
She returned to Europe, and in 1898, she established a students’ residence in Paris and spent time exploring London with the prospect of founding a mission there. In 1899, she initiated a school in Madrid.
Expanding Horizons in the United States
At the turn of the 20th century, Mother Cabrini traveled to Chicago where there was a large Italian colony and established a parish school. From Chicago, she traveled to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the Italian immigrants asked for schools. From Scranton, she proceeded to Newark, New Jersey, where she accepted the task of establishing and running a parish school there.
She looked for solutions which would afford her the means to subsidize free schools. In Dobbs Ferry, New York, on the Hudson River, she founded Sacred Heart Villa a school for daughters of now well-to-do Italian families who paid tuition, monies which in turn were utilized to fund the free schools.
Cabrini headed to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where a needy colony of Italian immigrants worked mostly in the mines under very harsh conditions. Her Sisters staffed a parish school and later, an orphanage.
In 1903, Mother Cabrini traveled seven days by train from Chicago to Seattle where she founded a school and an orphanage for Italian immigrants. She dreamed of establishing missions in Alaska and had she lived longer, this may have come to pass. Her dream of going to China persisted throughout her life. Her works on the western coast of the United States brought her closer to the Far East.
She extended her educational and childcare missions to California where there were settlements of Italian as well as Mexican immigrants. By September 1905, a school and an orphanage had been opened. Later, a preventorium for tubercular children, would be started in the Santa Monica Mountains north of the city.
While in Seattle in 1909, Frances Cabrini fulfilled a long-desired plan and became a citizen of the United States of America. The ensuing years were times of constant movement: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, Colorado, California, Washington State, Central and South America and Europe.
It was in the spring of 1917 that Mother Cabrini undertook her last mission. Her health was compromised. In spite of this, she traveled to Chicago where the now two hospitals there needed her presence. On December 22 of that year, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini died in her private room at Columbus Hospital as she was preparing Christmas candy for the local children. She was 67 years of age.
Her Legacy
For twenty-eight years of her missionary life, Mother Cabrini traveled regularly across the Atlantic Ocean. A prolific writer, it was during her second voyage, that she began the custom of writing letters to her sisters in the form of a travel diary. These letters are preserved today as valuable biographical documentation.
In conformity with the Heart of Jesus, the Institute she founded has responded compassionately and efficiently to the needs of all, immigrants, as well as the native-born worldwide. Education, pastoral ministry, and religious instruction and outreach to those in need spiritually and materially flourishes on six continents. Responses to the “signs of the times,” to needs as they presented themselves continue.
When Mother Cabrini died December 22, 1917, at the age of 67, 67 missions of the Institute had been established, ministries of healing, teaching, caring, giving and reaching out, in cities of the United States, Italy, France, England, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, and Nicaragua.
Mother Cabrini