Life Story: Mother Cabrini, aka Maria Francesca Cabrini (1850-1917)

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850 in Lombardy, Italy. She was the youngest of thirteen children. Only three of her siblings survived to adulthood, and Maria Francesca herself struggled with poor health throughout her childhood 

Maria Francesca was raised Catholic. As a child she loved to hear stories of the good works that Catholic missionaries were doing all over the world. Maria Francesca dreamed of someday becoming a missionary herself. At thirteen, she joined a school run by the nuns of Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She graduated at eighteen with her teaching certificate and applied to become a nun with the Daughters. They  turned her down, saying her poor health would prevent her from leading the active life their order required. 

A local bishop asked Maria Francesca to take over as headmistress of a struggling orphanage instead. She taught at the orphanage for many years but did not give up on her dream of becoming a missionary nun. She took her first step towards this goal in 1877, when she took vows to become a nun. To mark the beginning of her new life, Maria Francesca took the name Frances, in honor of the founder of a famous missionary order.

Now that she was a nun, Frances turned her attention to pursuing the other half of her dream. In 1880 she and seven other young nuns founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Their new order was dedicated to missionary work, education, and caring for suffering people, including the sick and the imprisoned. Frances was chosen to be the first head, or Reverend Mother, of the order. From this point on, she was known as Mother Cabrini in public.

Frances asked the pope to send her new order to China, but he asked her to go west to the United States instead. The pope told Frances that thousands of Italian immigrants were moving to the US, and they needed spiritual leadership and support. Frances complied with his order. After raising the money they needed to fund their journey, she and six of her Missionary Sisters set sail for New York City on March 23, 1889. 

The trip across the Atlantic took eight days. When she arrived, Frances found that the local church leaders had not arranged a place for her to stay. Frances soon discovered that many American Catholics were prejudiced against Italians. Italian immigrants were relatively new arrivals, and they were viewed with suspicion by the wider American population. One American Archbishop told Frances to go back to Italy. Another church leader told her missionary work was not appropriate for women. Frances and her sisters did not let this stop them. They rented rooms in a dirty boardinghouse and got to work. 

Frances focused on providing comfort and support to Italian immigrants as they navigated life in their new country. She made herself visible and accessible by frequently visiting tenement neighborhoods, moving from home to home to demonstrate that she was willing to enter any location, no matter its condition. Some immigrants were initially skeptical, but Frances’s steady dedication to her work won the community over. She opened an orphanage and a free school for Italian immigrant children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When the population of the orphanage swelled to 400, Frances and her sisters took to the streets to beg for money to keep it running. Frances also founded a hospital for the treatment of people with contagious diseases that were not treated at other hospitals. 

Under Frances’s leadership the Missionary Sisters attracted many new nuns, and soon she was able to expand their work. In 1899 she traveled to Chicago to help the growing population of Italian immigrants in the West. Like in New York, she founded an orphanage and school for the city’s Italian immigrant children. She also founded a hospital that became so well respected that soon more than half of the patients were wealthy Chicagoans. Frances used the fees they paid to open a second hospital in the heart of a poor Italian neighborhood.

Frances returned to New York in 1890 and started work on a new, larger orphanage. She was able to purchase cheap land on the banks of the Hudson River because the owners believed it had no good water supply. After making the purchase, Frances and her sisters conducted their own thorough search and discovered a plentiful underground water source. 

By this point, Frances’s accomplishments and resourcefulness had earned her worldwide fame. The Missionary Sisters continued to grow, and she was called to assist immigrant populations all over the globe. Over the next twenty-seven years she crossed the Atlantic more than twenty times, traveling all over the US and the world, to places such as New Orleans, Denver, Newark, Philadelphia, Scranton, Colorado, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Central and South America, England, France, and Spain. Everywhere she went, Frances founded institutions for those most in need, similar to the social settlement house that Jane Addams founded in Chicago. She founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and hospitals over the course of her career. 

Frances had a particularly big impact in Denver, Colorado. In Denver, the majority of the Italian immigrant community worked in the mines. The work was very dangerous, and many workers died in mining accidents. Frances started by opening a school in North Denver in 1902. The school served several hundred Italian immigrant children, many of whom had never been to school before. Frances also founded the Queen of Heaven Orphanage to care for children left orphans by mining accidents. She then purchased land and opened a summer camp for the girls from the orphanage. Today, the land she purchased is home to a Mother Cabrini shrine, a testament to her impact in the area.

Frances continued her travels and good works until the end of her life. In 1909 she took the oath to become a US citizen, signaling that the country she had been sent to serve as a young woman had become her true home. Frances passed away in Chicago on December 22, 1917. In 1946 she was canonized by Pope Pius XII, making her the first US citizen to become a Catholic saint. The Catholic Church typically does not even begin to consider canonizing a person until fifty years after their death, but the pope made an exception in the case of Frances because she had led such an exemplary life. Today, Mother Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants, and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus carries on her work in fifteen countries around the world.

• archbishop: Local leader of a Catholic community.
• bilingual: Able to communicate in two languages.
• boardinghouse: A house where people rent bedrooms to live in.
• canonize: The Catholic Church’s process for making someone a saint.
• Catholic: A Christian who follows the pope in Rome.
• Catholic Church: A Christian church that is led by the pope in Rome.
• Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: A group of nuns dedicated to missionary work, education, and caring for the sick.
• Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: The order of nuns founded by Mother Cabrini.
• missionaries: People who travel around and try to convert people to their faith.
• nun: A woman who dedicates her life to serving the Catholic Church. 
• patron saint: A saint who protects or guides believers through a particular experience.  
• saint: A person whose life and holiness are honored by the Catholic Church.
• sisters: Name used for nuns who belong to the same religious order.
• tenement: Poor-quality, unregulated apartment buildings that housed the majority of immigrants in New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s.