Francis Xavier Cabrini was a nun and a beatified foundress of a religious community.
Background
Cabrini was born July 15, 1850, in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, in the Lombard Province of Lodi, then part of the Austrian Empire, the youngest of the thirteen children of Agostino Cabrini and Stella Oldini, who were wealthy cherry tree farmers. Sadly, only four of the thirteen survived beyond adolescence. Small and weak as a child, born two months premature, she remained in delicate health throughout her life.
Education
At thirteen Francesca attended a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. Five years later she graduated cum laude, with a teaching certificate. After the deaths of her parents in 1870, she applied for admission to the religious congregation of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart at Arluno. These sisters were her former teachers but reluctantly, they told her she was too frail for their life. She became the headmistress of the House of Providence orphanage in Codogno, where she taught, and drew a small community of women to live a religious way of life. Cabrini took religious vows in 1877 and added Xavier to her name to honor the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, the patron saint of missionary service.
Career
In 1872, while she was engaged in almsgiving and care of the sick, she fell a victim in the smallpox epidemic. Hardly recuperated, she taught in the secularized school of Vidardo, 1872-74, where despite repressive laws the mayor connived at her instruction of children in Christian doctrine. She was denied admission in the Daughters of the Sacred Heart because of her delicate constitution, but she was drafted by Father Antonio Serrati to supervise an orphanage in Codogno in 1874. Here she trained a few young women for the religious life, made her own profession, on September 14, 1877, and was appointed by Bishop Domenico Gelmini as prioress of her foundation known as the Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In 1880 she acquired an abandoned Franciscan convent as a mother house, and eight years later the rules of the society received an official decree of commendation. As her community grew rapidly in numbers, Mother Francis Xavier, as she was known in religion, founded orphanages and schools in Milan, Grumello, Borghetto, and Rome and thereby won favor from Leo XIII, who described her as "a woman of marvelous intuition and of great sanctity. " In 1887 Mother Cabrini vowed to found a convent in China, but the Pope insisted that she go to the United States, where Italian immigrants were huddled in deplorable slums and were in danger of being weaned from the Catholic faith. She sailed with six nuns for New York, where on her arrival, on March 31, 1889, she found no preparations made although Archbishop Corrigan had petitioned for religious to labor among the Italian colony of 40, 000 souls. The Archbishop had changed his mind, did not want her in his archdiocese, and urged her to return to Italy. Depending upon her papal support, Mother Cabrini determined to remain and within a few days received episcopal permission to occupy a basement and instruct children in catechism. Soon afterwards she established a day school and acquired an old estate at West Park for an orphanage and novitiate.
In 1909 she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. No disappointment deterred this frail little Italian who believed that God's work must be done and who persistently but quietly demanded the support of bishop after bishop.
So rapid was the growth of her religious society that she was able to establish convents, schools, and orphanages in as far-flung centers of the world as Granada, Nicaragua (from which her community was once banished), Panama, Peru, Buenos Aires (1895), Paris (1898), Madrid (1899), Torino (1900), London, Bilboa in Spain, Cuizo in Argentina (1901), and S030 Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
The hospitals she established in the United States included Columbus in New York City (1892), the Columbus and Cabrini Memorial hospitals in Chicago (1905, 1924), and Columbus Hospital in Seattle (1916). When Italy entered the First World War she dedicated her sisters and hospitals in Italy to military service. A shrewd woman of business acumen, of diplomatic skill in handling American ecclesiastics, and of heroic labors among the Italians, whose widespread defection from the Catholic Church was arousing concern in Rome, Mother Cabrini was duly recognized when Pius X called her "a true apostle of the Gospel. " Benedict XV thought of her as "full of the spirit of God, " and Pius XI considered her name "equal to a poem--a poem of activity, a poem of intelligence, a poem above all of wonderful charity. "
After a brief illness punctuated by charitable services, the intrepid Mother Cabrini died in sanctity at Columbus Hospital in Chicago.
After funeral obsequies at which Archbishop (later Cardinal) Mundelein officiated, her remains were entombed in the community cemetery at West Park, New York. Benefactors, associates, and beneficiaries headed by Cardinal Mundelein promoted the cause of Mother Cabrini. On November 8, 1928, the cardinal ordered an informative hearing of her merits. Pius XI introduced her cause on March 30, 1931, and commanded processes in the diocese of Lodi and the archdioceses of New York and Chicago. In the ecclesiastical court in Chicago, the alleged cures were considered and the necessary two authenticated miracles were found in the cure of a nun fatally ill of a stomach ailment and of a boy who was blind from a mishap at birth (Mary C. Young, "Mother Cabrini, " Commonweal, Jan. 26, 1934).
Her remains in fair preservation were encased in a wax form and placed in a crystal and bronze casket in a vault beneath the sanctuary of the chapel in the Blessed Mother Cabrini High School in New York.
Her case was revived on October 26, 1937, by the Congregation of Rites in the presence of the Holy Father, and she was decreed as possessed of heroic virtues on November 21, 1937. In 1938 Cardinal Mundelein led a party of pilgrims to attend the ceremonies of beatification at the Vatican Basilica on November 13. Time, no doubt, will see the canonization of the first beata from the United States.