Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

13 November  ·  Memorial in the United States  ·  White

She looks straight at the camera with the beginning of a smile, a dark veil tied under her chin in a large bow and a white cross on a cord at her breast. The photographer is unknown. The woman is Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, who wanted to be a missionary in China and was sent by the Pope to New York instead.

Photograph, photographer unknown, before 1917

Her life

She was born and baptised on 15 July 1850 at Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy. In 1880 she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with seven sisters from the house of Providence at Codogno, and the institute was approved by its bishop the next year. She hoped for the missions of the East, and Leo XIII turned her round: not to the East, he told her, but to the West. With a group of sisters she sailed for New York, to the Italian immigrants of the Americas.

Her sisters ran homes for the aged and the sick, orphanages, industrial schools and sewing classes, and by 1912 they had convents in Brooklyn, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Newark, Scranton and Seattle and the congregation spread rapidly in Europe and America. She chose to become an American citizen. She died in Chicago on 22 December 1917. Pius XI beatified her in 1938, Pius XII canonised her in 1946, and in the Holy Year of 1950 he named her patroness of emigrants. Her memorial is kept in the United States on 13 November. She went where she was sent, west instead of east; the stranger at our own door is the same errand.

Andrew MacErlean, “Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (1912): newadvent.org; John Paul II, message for the 150th anniversary of her birth (2000): vatican.va

In Scripture

¹And the Lord said to Abram: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father's house, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.

³⁵For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in:

Genesis 12:1 · Matthew 25:35, Douay-Rheims (Challoner).

In painting

The day in the next three years

Near this day

• Saint Josaphat
• Saint Albert the Great
• Saint Elizabeth of Hungary

The saints of the year  ·  The feasts  ·  The Rosary

Written and checked by the Monstrance editors; sources cited. Scripture in the Douay-Rheims (Challoner). Every painting is in the public domain, and each caption follows the record of the institution that holds it.