A tiny dynamo powered by a heart of love

A couple of weeks ago, Pope Leo visited two saints. On a pastoral visit to Pavia, not far from Milan, he venerated St. Augustine’s relics, not a surprising move for an Augustinian friar. Yet more remarkable was his visit to the small town of Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, the birthplace of the USA’s first canonized saint, Mother Francesca Cabrini (1850-1917). Mother Cabrini was a tiny woman, barely 5 feet tall, but was a powerhouse who channeled grace and generosity across our nation and across the world. In 1946 she was canonized and Pope Piux XII proclaimed her as patron saint of immigrants for the universal church.

Her road was fitful but determined. Her poor health discouraged two convents from accepting her. She nevertheless powered ahead, founded her own missionary community dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and begged our present pope’s namesake Pope Leo XIII to send her and her sisters to the missions in Asia. Pope Leo, preoccupied for the underserved throngs of Italian immigrants who streamed into America at the end of the 19th century, told her simply, “not East, but West.”

With 6 sisters she sailed to New York in 1889, and began a peripatetic life that saw the foundation of 67 schools, orphanages, and hospitals from Buenos Aires to Seattle before she died at 67 in our present pope’s native Chicago (1917). In the course of her 28-year ministry she crossed the Atlantic 23 times to seek European support of Italian immigrants who were the victims of nativist prejudice and discrimination here in America. Pope Leo XIII described their plight as “having all the characteristics of a white slave trade.”

She begged from door to door and crusaded for her victimized immigrant countrymen and women here. Her loving and forceful personality attracted wide support and opened many doors. Her marching orders were clear and simple: “I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus to those who do not know Him or have forgotten Him.”

Small wonder that our present pope finds in her commitment to immigrants a powerful sign. Her willingness to read the signs of the times gave her freedom, and tremendous energy in work for the good of the oppressed and afflicted. The Pope asked the congregation, “What could be more timely than a missionary charism dedicated to the service of migrants?” He declared that migrants looking for a safe harbor “cannot and must not be received with the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination!” While he acknowledged that the global situation is different from the late 19th century, he insisted that immigration remains one of the most pressing realities facing society and the Church, and he asked his listeners—and us— a challenging question. “If Mother Francesca were living today,” he asked, “what would her missionary soul say? What would the Heart of Christ say to her heart?”

Her countless journeys, schools, hospitals, orphanages and charitable institutions, were not simply social works but expressions of a profound encounter with Christ’s love. Quoting the saint’s own words, he recalled her conviction that “ ‘no work would be too difficult, no land too distant, and no person too wounded’ for the love of the Heart of Jesus.”

The Holy Father decided not to come home to the US to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence, but rather to travel that day to Lampedusa, the treacherous island stop-off for African immigrants midway between Tunisia and Sicily. Pope Francis made his first apostolic visit there after his election in 2013. I suspect his fellow Chicagoan Madre Francesca and his predecessor Papa Francesco would approve of Leo’s choice.

P.S. Two Cabrini anecdotes gleaned from my years in Seattle: On arriving in Seattle in 1903, she wrote “Here we are, not far from the North Pole.” She also has a special devotional mantra there: “Mother Cabrini, Help me park my machinie.” It also seems to work in Sacramento, at least sometimes.