Father Corapi's Biography

The Cabrini were a solidly religious family—everything about them was solid—and little Frances came particularly under the strict care of her sister Rosa, who had been a school-teacher and had not escaped all the dangers of that profession. But the child profited by Rosa’s teaching, and suffered no harm from her unbending discipline. There was perhaps a certain precocity about the child’s religion, but it was nonetheless real. Family reading aloud from the “Annals of the Propa­gation of the Faith” inspired her with an early determination to go to the foreign missions—China was the country of her predilection. She dressed her dolls as nuns, made paper boats and floated them down the river manned with violets to represent missionaries going to foreign parts, and she gave up sweets, for in China there would be no sweets so she had better get used to it.

   Her parents, however, had decided on Frances being a school-teacher, and when old enough she was sent to a convent boarding-school at Arluno. She duly passed her examina­tions when she was eighteen, but then came a great blow: in 1870 she lost both parents.

   During the two years that followed she lived on quietly with Rosa, her unassum­ing goodness making a deep impression on all who knew her. Then she sought admittance to the religious congregation at whose school she had been, and was refused on the ground of poor health; she tried another—with the same result. But the priest in whose school she was teaching at Vidardo had his eye on her. In 1874 this Don Serrati was appointed provost of the collegiate church at Codogno, and found in his new parish a small orphanage, called the House of Providence, whose state left much to be desired. It was managed, or rather mismanaged, by its eccentric foundress, Antonia Tondini, and two other women. The Bishop of Lodi and Mgr Serrati invited Frances Cabrini to help in this institution and to try to turn its staff into a religious community, and with considerable unwillingness she agreed.

Thus she entered upon what a Benedictine nun has called “a novitiate of sorts, compared to which one in a regular convent would have been child’s play”. Antonia Tondini had consented to her coming, but instead of co-Operation gave  her only obstruction and abuse. Frances stuck to it, however, obtained several recruits, and with seven of them in 1877 took her first vows. At the same time the bishop put her in charge as superioress. This made matters much worse. Sister Tondini’s behaviour was such that it became an open scandal—indeed, she seems to have become somewhat insane. But for another three years Sister Cabrini and her faithful followers persevered in their efforts to build up the House of Providence, patiently hoping for better times, till the bishop himself gave up hope and ordered the place to be closed. He sent for Sister Cabrini and said to her, “You want to be a missionary sister. Now is the time. I don’t know any institute of missionary sisters, so found one yourself.” And quite simply she went out to do so.
   There was an old, disused and forgotten Franciscan friary at Codogno, and into this Mother Cabrini and her seven faithful followers moved, and as soon as they were fairly settled in she set herself to draw up a rule for the community. Its work was to be principally the Christian education of girls, and its name The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. During the same year the bishop of Lodi approved these constitutions. Within two years the first daughter house was opened, at Grumello, and soon there was another, at Milan.
The above few sentences are easily written; the actuality was rather different. There were such tiresome obstructions as objection to the word  “Missionary” in the sisters’ title (“Inappropriate to women”), and the mother who invoked the law because of the  “enticement” of her daughter. But the general progress of the congregation and the trust of Mother Cabrini were such that in 1887 she went to Rome to ask the Holy See’s approbation of her little congregation and permission to open a house in Rome. Influential efforts were made to dissuade her from this enterprise—seven years’ trial was far too little: and the first interview with the cardinal vicar of the City, Parocchi, confirmed the prudence of her advisers. But only the first. The cardinal was won over; Mother Cabrini was asked to open not one but two houses in Rome, a free school and a children’s home, and the decree of first approval of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart was issued within a few months.
We have seen that from early days Frances Cabrini’s eyes had been turned towards China. But now people were trying to make her look the other way. The bishop of Piacenza, Mgr Scalabrini, who had established the Society of St Charles to work among Italian immigrants in America, suggested she should go out there to help the work of those priests.
She would not entertain the idea. The archbishop of New York, Mgr Corrigan, sent her a formal invitation. She was worried: everyone—except her old friend Mgr Serrati—was pointing in the same direction. Then she had a very impressive dream, and she determined to consult the pope himself. And Leo XIII said, “Not to the East, but to the West”. When a child Frances Cabrini once fell into a river, and ever afterwards she had a fear of water. She now, with six of her sisters, set out on the first of many voyages across the Atlantic; and on March 31, 1889, they landed in New York.
Everybody knows the huge numbers of Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks and others that have emigrated to the United States in relatively recent times. The religious history of these immigrations has yet to be properly written. It is enough to say here that at that time there were 50,000 Italians in and around New York City alone. The majority of them seem never to have learned the elements of Christian doctrine; not more than 1200 of them ever assisted at Mass; ten of the twelve priests of their own nationality had left Italy  on account of misbehaviour. It was much the same in northwestern Pennsylvania. For most of them their economic and social conditions were to match. No wonder that the third plenary council of Baltimore and Archbishop Corrigan and Pope Leo XIII were very perturbed.
Nor was the sisters’ reception in New York much more encouraging. They had been asked to organize an orphanage for Italian children and to take charge of an elementary school: but on arrival, though warmly welcomed, they found no home ready for them, and had to spend the first night at least in lodgings that were filthy and verminous. And when Mother Cabrini met Archbishop Corrigan she learned that, owing to disagreements between himself and the benefactress concerned, the orphanage scheme had fallen through, and the school consisted of pupils but no habitable building. The archbishop wound up by telling her that he could see nothing for it but that the sisters should go back to Italy. To which St Frances replied with characteristic firmness and definiteness, “No, Monsignor, not that. The pope sent me here, and here I must stay”. This straightforward little woman from Lombardy impressed the archbishop, and also by her credentials from Rome; moreover, it must be admitted he was a man of no great firmness of policy, liable to change his mind quickly and often. He now raised no objection to their staying, and arranged for them to be temporarily accommodated by the Sisters of Charity.

   Within a few weeks St Frances Cabrini had made friends with the benefactress, Countess Cesnola, reconciled her with Mgr Corrigan, found a house for the sisters, and made a start with the orphanage on a modest scale. By July 1889 she was able to revisit Italy, taking with her the first two Italo-American recruits to her congregation.
    Nine months later she returned to America with reinforcements to take over West Park, on the Hudson river, from the Society of Jesus. The growing orphanage was transferred to this house, which also became the motherhouse and novitiate of the congregation in the United States. Its work was prospering, both among immigrants in North America and among the people at home in Italy, and soon Mother Cabrini had to make a trying journey to Managua in Nicaragua where, in difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, she took over an orphanage and opened a boarding-school. On her way back she visited New Orleans at the request of its archbishop, the revered Francis Janssens. Here the scattered Italians, mostly from the south and Sicily, were in a specially sad state: they included some wild, lawless elements, and only a little time before eleven of them had been lynched by infuriated but no less lawless Americans. The upshot of St Frances’s visit was that she was able to make a foundation in New Orleans.
   That Frances Cabrini was an extraordinarily able woman needs no demonstration: her works speak for her. Like Bd Philippine Duchesne before her, she was slow in learning English and never lost her strong accent; but this apparently was no handicap in successful dealings with people of all kinds, and those with whom she had financial business (necessarily many and important) were particularly impressed. In only one direction did her tact fail, and that was in relation to non-Catholic Christians. She met such in America for the first time in her life— and that was the root of the trouble: it took her a long time to recognize their good faith and to appreciate their good lives. Her rather shocking remarks in this connection in earlier days were the fruit of ignorance and consequent lack of understanding. But she was far-seeing and ready to learn, and did not reject things simply because they were new, as her ideas about children’s education show. 
It is obvious that Mother Cabrini was a born ruler, and she was as strict as she was just. Sometimes she seems to have been too strict, and not to have seen where her inflexibility was leading. It is not clear, for instance, how she thought she was upholding sexual morality when she refused to take illegitimate children in her fee-paying schools: it would appear to be a gesture that penalized only the innocent. But love ruled all, and her strictness was no deterrent to the affection she gave and received. “Love one another”, she urged her religious. “Sacrifice yourselves for your sisters, readily and always. Be kind to them, and never sharp or harsh. Don’t nurse resentment, but be meek and peaceable.”

The year 1892, fourth centenary of the discovery of the New World, was also marked by the birth of one of the best known of St Frances’s undertakings, the Columbus Hospital in New York. Actually it had been begun in a small way by the Society of St Charles a little before, and the “take-over “ was attended by difficulties that left with some a legacy of resentment against Mother Cabrini. Then, after a visit to Italy, where she saw the start of a “ summer house “ near Rome and a students’ hostel at Genoa,*{ * On the way back Mother Cabrini went ashore at Gibraltar and recorded seeing the “English canon of incredible size”. Undoubtedly a “big gun”}  she had to go to Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, across the Andes into Brazil, and so to Buenos Aires—a very different journey in 1895 from what it is today, though Mother Cabrini’s love of natural scenery did much to compensate for its rigours. In Buenos Aires she opened a high-school for girls: and of those who pointed out the difficulties and hazards of what she was doing, she enquired, “Are we doing this? —or is our Lord?”
   After another voyage to Italy, where she had to cope with a long lawsuit in the ecclesiastical courts and face riots in Milan, she went to France and made there her first European foundations outside Italy; and the autumn of 1898 saw her in England. Mgr (later cardinal) Bourne, then bishop of Southwark, had already met St Frances at Codogno and asked her to open a convent in his diocese, but no foundation was made at this time.
   And so it went on for another dozen years. Surely were a patron saint more recent and less nebulous than St Christopher required for travellers, St Frances Cabrini would be first on the short list. Her love for all the children of God took her back and forth over the western hemisphere from Rio to Rome, from Sydenham to Seattle; by the time the constitutions of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart were finally approved in 1907 the eight members of 1880 had increased to over a thousand, in eight countries; St Frances had made more than fifty foundations, responsible for free-schools and high-schools and hospitals and other establishments, no longer working in America for Italian immigrants alone—did not the prisoners in Sing-Sing send her an illuminated address at the congregation’s jubilee ? Of the later foundations only two can be named here: the great Columbus Hospital at Chicago and, in 1902, the school at Brockley, now at Honor Oak. Nor can the attendant trials and troubles be dwelt on, such as the difficulties caused by the Bishop of Vitoria (St Frances was first invited to Spain by Queen Maria Christina) or the opposition of factions in Chicago, Seattle and New Orleans, which last the sisters later repaid with their heroic work during the yellow-fever epidemic of 1905.
From 1911 Mother Cabrini’s health was failing: she was then sixty-one and physically worn out. But it was not till six years later that she was seen to be failing alarmingly. And then the end came with extreme suddenness. No human person was present when St Frances Xavier Cabrini died in the convent at Chicago on December 22, 1917. Mother Cabrini was canonized in 1946; her body is enshrined in the chapel of the Cabrini Memorial School at Fort Washington, N.Y. No doubt there were many saints in the United States before her, no doubt there have been, and will be, many after. But she was the first citizen of that country to be canonized, to have her sanctity publicly recognized by the Church of Christ. Her glory belongs to Italy and to America, to the Church and to mankind. It is hardly conceivable that anybody should do what she did, in the way she did it, without having been a saint, one who lived with heroic goodness: Pope Leo XIII saw this, and more, nearly fifty years before her canonization, when he said, “Mother Cabrini is a woman of fine understanding and great holiness ... she is a saint”.