Cabrini, Frances Xavier (1850–1917)

Italian saint, nun, charity entrepreneur, and champion of Italian immigrants to the United States. Name variations: Francesca Maria Cabrini (1850–1874); Sister Saveria or Xavier Angelica (1874–1879); Mother Francesca Saveria or Frances Xavier Cabrini (1879–1917). Born Francesca Maria Cabrini on July 15, 1850, at Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in the Lombardy region of Italy; died in Chicago, Illinois, on December 22, 1917; daughter of Agostino Cabrini (a Lombard farmer) and Stella Oldini Cabrini; never married; no children.

Taught school in Lombardy (1868–74); became orphanage worker and novice in Codogno (1877); took vows as a nun and promoted to superior (1877); founded Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart (1881); immigrated to New York (1889); founded a school in Nicaragua (1891); opened Columbus Hospital in New York City (1892); naturalized as U.S. citizen in Seattle (1909); named superior for life of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart (1910); beatified (November 1938); became first American citizen to be elevated to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church (July 7, 1946).

In 1946, Pope Pius XII made Frances Cabrini a saint, the first American citizen to be honored in this way. Her work as a guardian angel to Italian immigrants in New York, Chicago, and other American cities bred tales of her supernatural virtues during her lifetime, and they have proliferated ever since. It is not always easy to untangle the history from the hagiography, but the extensive documentation of her life enables us to describe its principal features.

Francesca Maria Cabrini was born in 1850 at Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy, the rich farm country of northern Italy, to a prosperous farm family. She was one of only four among her parents' 13 children to survive into adulthood, and her frail health caused them constant worry. At age seven, she fell into a stream and for several years suffered from bronchitis. She overcame this and a succession of other illnesses in growing to adulthood. Frances began her education at the village school where her sister Rosa was the schoolmistress. When she was 13, her parents sent her on to be educated by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, a teaching order of nuns established earlier that century and dedicated to humane education in an unrepressive Christian atmosphere.

Cabrini was a good pupil and graduated at age 18, head of her class, to become an elementary schoolteacher in her own right in small towns near her birthplace. Inspired by tales of missionary daring, she declared her intention of becoming a nun and requested admission to the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, but her request was denied, possibly because of her health. In 1870, the year of the First Vatican Council, when the doctrine of papal infallibility was officially defined, both her parents died, leaving Frances and her sister Rosa to look after the family. In the same year, Frances suffered in a smallpox epidemic but recovered, unscarred. The newly unified and secular state of Italy forbade the teaching of religion in schools, but she did it anyway after negotiating with the mayor, who was impressed by her ability. Cabrini continued to nurse the ambition of becoming a nun.

Between 1889 and her death at Chicago in 1917, the small nun crisscrossed America, seeking out Italian immigrants and establishing for them and their children a network of educational, health care and social service institutions.

—Mary Louise Sullivan, MSC

The first 20 years of her life had witnessed a succession of wars against Austria and the piecemeal unification of Italy. According to some tales, Austrian soldiers were billeted with the Cabrinis during one campaign. The family was pulled in two directions by the conflicts of the era. Frances' cousin Agostino Depretis was a prominent anticlerical politician who favored Italian unification and opposed papal political power, and, in 1876, when she was in her mid-20s, he became prime minister. Her parents, by contrast, had been devout upholders of the old papal tradition and opponents of the secular republicans, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Camilla di Cavour, who unified Italy. Her career showed that she too would be a staunch papal loyalist.

Local church officials were impressed by Frances Cabrini's organizational powers and pleaded with her to sort out an administrative muddle at an orphanage in nearby Codogno. She went there and joined the Sisters of Providence, an order of charitable working sisters who ran the orphanage, taking the name of Sister Saveria Angelica in 1874. Three years later, just after she had taken her vows, the local bishop appointed her superior of the community, even though its founders and benefactors, Antonia Tondini and Teresa Calza , were still active in the group. These two women, apparently well-meaning at first but idle and undisciplined, had neglected their orphanage and spent some of the money they had pledged to its upkeep on bailing out dissolute relatives. Furious at Cabrini's promotion over their heads, they declined to follow her instructions and even made threats against her. Finally the local bishop enabled her to separate from the orphanage and its troublesome founders. Seven other young women, orphans who had grown up in her care and become novices under her inspiration, stuck with Cabrini, who now resumed her given name and became Mother Frances Xavier (Francesca Saveria) Cabrini. She learned from this bitter experience to assert her authority, govern with a firm hand, and make sure of dependable finances in all her subsequent charity work.

They renamed themselves the Institute of the Salesian Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. Mother Cabrini wrote a rule for the group in 1881, emphasizing modesty, humility, and daily silence except where speech was necessary in the work. For the next few years, these sisters were teachers in Lombardy despite Cabrini's eagerness for a more arduous field of endeavor—she dreamed of a mission to China. On a visit to Rome in 1888 where she opened another school, she won the attention of Bishop Giovanni Scalabrini of Piacenza, who ran a mission to prepare priests to minister to Italian immigrants in the New World. Economic conditions in Italy were forcing large numbers of peasants off the land, and the growing cities suffered periodic unemployment. America, which Italians believed to be a land of boundless wealth and opportunity, attracted thousands every year, and Scalabrini feared that their faith was endangered in a largely Protestant land so far from home. In his diocese, he founded a seminary to train priests who would emigrate to help the growing Italian-American community. He recognized in Mother Cabrini, with her mixture of piety and administrative ability, an ideal character to join in this effort and wrote a letter recommending her to Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York.

With the approval of Scalabrini and Corrigan, and with a blessing from Pope Leo XIII who had told her that her missionary future lay "not to the East, but to the West," Mother Cabrini set out for America in 1889, her fare paid by the Congregation of Propaganda. Like Scalabrini, she knew that Italian immigrants to America faced severe hardships. They often had to take the hardest and lowest-paying work, and were frequently deceived and cheated by labor-bosses, padrones, in collusion with employers. Italian men were often used as strike breakers because they were willing to work for low wages, which they hoarded in order to buy boat tickets for their wives and children's emigration. American streets, alas, were not paved with gold. Steady employment was hard to find, especially for those slow to learn English, and the danger of unemployment hovered over every immigrant family. They crowded together in "little Italys," like New York's Italian Harlem, where they were packed into unhealthy tenement buildings, surrounded by dirt and smoke, always vulnerable to epidemics. It was a way of life totally different from that of rural southern Italy, from which many had come.

In addition to these problems with work and housing, Italian Catholics were often at odds with the American Catholic Church hierarchy. Most of the bishops were of Irish descent (the big Irish immigration had come 50 years earlier), and the Irish style of devotion was quite different from the Italian. Irish priests and bishops saw the church as the center of religious life, but for Italians the center was the home. Italians attended church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals but preferred the exuberant annual festivals in which they paraded statues of their favorite saints through the streets to the cooler worship services going on inside. Unable to pay pew rents, those Italians who did attend regularly were often relegated to church basements. Most of the American Catholic bishops in the late 19th century wanted the Italians to change their ways, conform to Irish-Catholic traditions, speak English, send their children to parochial schools, and give up devotional practices that seemed barbaric, such as some Italian women's custom of approaching a saint's altar on their knees, dragging their tongues along the church floor. Pope Leo XIII was aware of these ethnic tensions. Himself an Italian, upset at the Irish-Americans' high-handedness, he warned them not to get too carried away by "Americanization," and he signaled his faith in the New York Italians by turning their shrine at 115th Street into a Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He also welcomed Italian Catholics' efforts to set up Italian-language parishes whereas the American hierarchy had decided, at its Baltimore synod of 1884, to discourage cultural and linguistic fragmentation. These disagreements augured trouble for Mother Cabrini, and it is a measure of her skill and diplomacy that she was able to navigate through them and win a wide degree of support from both Italian and Irish Catholics.

Her first meeting with Archbishop Corrigan was not auspicious. He told her he had nowhere to put her at present, that a proposed orphanage

was not yet built and had no proper funding, and that she should take her sisters back to Italy. Cabrini countered respectfully, showing him her letter from the pope and declaring that she would not return, so he put her group to work teaching Italian children at St. Joachin's Church on Mulberry Street. Other Catholic orders helped her out with donations, some of the Missionary Sisters went begging door to door, and they were able to establish a convent in the notorious Five Points district, then famous as a criminal slum. In the following years, the Missionary Sisters' hard work and conciliatory attitude, their willingness to learn English and become American citizens, mollified Corrigan. They visited Italians in prison, acted as interpreters for immigrants negotiating with the authorities, and opened an orphanage on 59th Street similar to those they had built back in Italy. Cabrini, always alert to the need for money and influence, befriended some of New York's richest Italians, such as Count di Cesnola, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and induced them to subsidize this and other charitable projects.

She soon realized that Father Felice Morelli, leader of the Scalabrinian priests in New York, was an incompetent administrator and severed her connection with his group in a dispute over a charity hospital. Next she acquired a pair of old houses in Manhattan and built her own hospital around them. From then on, her life became a long succession of charitable successes as she was invited by overstretched priests to help out in their parishes. First in New York, then in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Denver, and Seattle, she filled in the gaps of a society, which as yet had no welfare system or social security and in which Italian-speaking immigrants (especially those from the south and Sicily) were cursed and despised by most other Americans. She was driven by the fear that Italians, without the support of Catholic schools, charities, and hospitals, might fall into the arms of the Protestant missionaries who challenged Catholicism in every city. Collaborating closely with the clergy, her sisters first helped in schooling, then established orphanages, hospitals, and cultural centers for adults. Cabrini wanted to adapt the Italians to American life, but she was also eager to preserve their Italian cultural traditions and, of course, the Catholic faith in which they were based. She had no medical training but understood basic principles of public health and led a fumigation campaign against the New Orleans yellow fever epidemic of 1905. She became an American citizen in 1909.

Mother Cabrini did not confine her activities to aiding the Italians, though they were always her first priority. Two of her first new novices were Irish-Americans and from then on Catholics of all ethnic groups joined the sisters. The newcomers learned Italian just as the Italian members were learning English, so that they could be of use in the "Little Italys" where much of the teaching and medical work was going on. Cabrini was not welcomed by every immigrant. Italian anticlericalism and atheism had crossed the ocean as surely as Catholicism. Italian radicals, of whom the best known were the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, had no love for the Missionary Sisters' message of humility and Christian charity. Some Italian government consuls, anticlericals, also tried to thwart her work. In New Orleans, 1905, for example, she persuaded a retired merchant marine sea captain, Salvatore Pizzati, to fund an orphanage. Fearful that he might change his mind under the influence of his anticlerical friend the local consul, she persuaded him to sign an ironclad contract committing his support. It held up under legal scrutiny and showed the consul that Cabrini's piety was very much this-worldly even if it was also supernatural.

As the years went by, more orders of teaching and nursing sisters joined in the work on behalf of immigrants, though few had an entrepreneurial flair to match Cabrini's. Historians Luciano Iorizzo and Salvatore Mondello note that by 1918, the year after Cabrini's death, "twenty six religious orders had founded schools, churches, and aid societies for the immigrant Italians." Cabrini always remembered that there was no surer friend for a Catholic leader than the pope. As a result, she was in constant correspondence with the Vatican and made more than a dozen trips back to Rome, shoring up her support, strengthening lines of influence and finance, and returning with batches of new recruits to the order.

When her American foundations were thriving, Cabrini, always a restless spirit, set out for other parts of the Americas. She trekked through tropical Nicaragua, preached to Mosquito Indians, and almost died of yellow fever. Later, she made a mule-back ride across the Andes from Chile to Argentina, and established foundations among the large Italian immigrant communities in Buenos Aires. In the first two decades of the 20th century, she began a long series of visits back and forth across the Atlantic, not only to Rome where she was already admired but also to London, Paris, and Madrid. In each place, she tried to make another foundation, school, hospital, or orphanage. Like Mother Teresa , Cabrini mixed a saintly, charismatic presence with a hard head for business. When necessary, she could be a tough negotiator and drive a hard bargain, enabling her order to grow by leaps and bounds and to run on solid business principles. The original group of seven Missionary Sisters had grown to over a thousand by the time of her death.

Mother Cabrini died on December 22, 1917, at age 67, from the worsening of a chronic heart condition. Her body was preserved and put on display in the chapel at Mother Cabrini High School, New York, where it still rests. Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago convened an investigation, ten years later, of alleged miracles being attributed to her intercession. The order she had founded campaigned hard for her canonization, and their work was rewarded with her beatification in 1938 and elevation to sainthood in 1946. By then, there were 3,700 Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in the United States alone, and a thousand more in eight other countries around the world, running a wide array of educational and charitable institutions. Most of the writing about Mother Cabrini has been drenched in uncritical piety. Only recently have more rigorous historians begun to take a more impartial view of her life and work, and some of the stories about her still need to be taken with a pinch of salt. As Mary Louise Sullivan notes: "Cabrini was a modern woman. Her interests were extensive. She certainly did not adapt readily to the role expected of late nineteenth and early twentieth century women religious. She was an entrepreneur and world traveler, keenly aware of the currents of thought in the world of her time," who "foresaw the twentieth century as one of revolution."

sources:

Borden, Lucille P. Francesca Cabrini: Without Staff or Scrip. NY: Macmillan, 1945.

Gallo, Patrick. Old Bread, New Wine: A Portrait of the Italian-Americans. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1981.

Iorizzo, Luciano, and Salvatore Mondello. The Italian-Americans. NY: Twayne, 1971.

Maynard, Theodore. Too Small a World. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1945.

Sullivan, Mary Louise, MSC. Mother Cabrini: Italian Immigrant of the Century. NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1992.

collections:

Cabriniana collection, Cabrini College, Radnor, Pennsylvania; Centro Cabriniano, Rome; Archives of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Rome; Archives of the Archdiocese of New York.

Patrick Allitt , Assistant Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia