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Mother Cabrini’s America: The Immigrant Nun Who Built a Country of Refuge
She arrived in New York in 1889 with six sisters, little English and no welcome. By her death, Frances Xavier Cabrini had built dozens of schools, orphanages and hospitals across the Americas — and become the first U.S. citizen named a saint. On the last day of March 1889, a slight woman in a black habit stepped off a steamship in New York with six fellow sisters behind her. She was 38 years old, fragile since childhood and, by most accounts, afraid of the water she had just crossed. She spoke almost no English. The archbishop who was meant to receive her suggested, politely, that she get back on the boat. She stayed. Over the next 28 years, Maria Francesca Cabrini would cross the Atlantic again and again, founding schools, orphanages and hospitals from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to Denver, Seattle to Buenos Aires. By the time she died in 1917, her order counted some 67 institutions on three continents. Three decades later, she became the first citizen of the United States to be declared a saint — an Italian immigrant, canonized as an American. A Missionary Who Wanted the East She was born on July 15, 1850, in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, a farming town in Lombardy, the youngest of 13 children. Small and often sick, she was turned away by more than one religious order that doubted she could survive the life. So she made her own. In 1880, in the nearby town of Codogno, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and added “Xavier” to her name in honor of Francis Xavier, the Jesuit who carried the faith to Asia. Asia was where she meant to go. China, specifically. But Italy in the 1880s was emptying out — hundreds of thousands of people a year, most of them poor and from the South, were boarding ships for the Americas, and the Church back home was hearing alarming reports about what became of them. Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini of Piacenza, who had already organized priests to serve emigrants, urged Cabrini to follow them. When she finally put the question to Pope Leo XIII, his answer settled it: not to the East, but to the West. “Not to the East, but to the West.” — Pope Leo XIII, directing Cabrini to the Americas Unwanted in Two Directions The New York that greeted her had little room for Italians. They crowded the tenements of Mulberry Bend, dug the city’s tunnels, laid its sewers and paved its streets, and were paid less than nearly anyone else for it. Labor bosses known as padroni skimmed their wages. Newspapers described them as criminals and anarchists. Two years after Cabrini landed, a mob in New Orleans dragged eleven Italian men from a jail and lynched them, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. Even inside the Church, they were outsiders. American Catholicism was run largely by Irish-born clergy who often regarded the newcomers’ saints, street festivals and spotty Mass attendance with suspicion, and Italian families were sometimes sent to worship in church basements. Archbishop Michael Corrigan told Cabrini the arrangements made for her sisters had fallen through. She refused to leave, found lodging, and within months had opened a school and an orphanage for Italian children. Building, City by City What followed was less a mission than a construction campaign. In 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, she opened Columbus Hospital in Manhattan to treat immigrants who could not make themselves understood — or were not welcome — elsewhere. Another Columbus Hospital followed in Chicago. Her sisters went door to door begging for funds, walked into Sing Sing to visit Italian prisoners, and descended into the mining camps of Colorado, where Italian laborers worked the coal and silver seams. In Denver, she opened an orphanage for the children of those miners, and on a mountainside west of the city near Golden she acquired land for a summer camp — today the Mother Cabrini Shrine, where pilgrims still climb a stairway of stations to a statue of the Sacred Heart. She went on to Seattle, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and south to Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina and Brazil, often crossing the Andes by mule. Those who dealt with her remembered a shrewd negotiator as much as a pious one. She bought distressed properties at a discount, argued down contractors, and read real-estate surveys herself. In 1909, in Seattle, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Saint of the Immigrants Frances Xavier Cabrini died on December 22, 1917, at her Columbus Hospital in Chicago, at 67. She was beatified in 1938 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on July 7, 1946. In 1950 the Vatican named her patron saint of immigrants. Her remains rest at the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan, a few miles from where she was once told to go home. Her place in the city’s civic memory took longer to secure. In 2019, when New York asked the public to nominate women for new monuments, Cabrini drew the most votes — and was left off the list. The outcry, led largely by Italian American New Yorkers, ended with the state commissioning a statue of its own. It was unveiled in Battery Park on Columbus Day 2020: Cabrini in a small boat with two children, facing Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It is a fitting place for her. The Italian American story is often told through its famous sons — the crooners, the ballplayers, the mayors. Cabrini’s legacy is quieter and more durable: the hospitals, schools and orphanages that caught a generation of newcomers before they fell, and the conviction that people who arrive with nothing are owed more than suspicion. More than a century later, her sisters are still at it, serving migrants in the same spirit that brought a seasick nun across the Atlantic in 1889.