St. Frances Cabrini, founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was born in 1850 in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, in the southern outskirts of Milan: irrigated fields and lean-to’s signal an farming culture and a nascent industrialization, in a time of great cultural transformation in which the Church was present with her social and educational works. Frances Cabrini perfectly expressed the Lombard spirit: concrete, creative, direct, attentive to the essential. She was a woman without frills, with an interior fire that devoured her. Without a burning fire, she could not have done what she did: intercontinental missionary voyages by boat and on the backs of mules, charitable and educational works of which she had seen an image in her own land. Of Frances Cabrini, I have always admired the certainty that animated all of her life and that allowed her to face great difficulties: the clear perception of being called by God to complete a great work.
Her original dream was to go on mission in the Extreme East, to the point that she added to her own name that of Xavier, in honor of St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary saint. But the will of the Holy Father was different. Pope Leo XIII thought of the immense stream of Polish, Irish and Italian populations who were emigrating to the United States and into Latin America and asked her for this reason to go across the ocean. St. Cabrini adhered completely to this invitation involving her congregation in an all-encompassing missionary project: they were not interested only in the immigrants, but beginning with them, they wanted to evangelize the entire continent.
The driving force of her action was love for Christ.
Evangelizing the immigrants meant growing the Christian faith in them so that they could become themselves the evangelizers of America. Frances, although she returned often to Italy, considered herself American full stop and, after only two months from her arrival in the United States, asked for American citizenship and asked the same for all of her sisters. She was, in fact, the first American citizen to be canonized by the Church.
Judged to be crazy by many, both by those in the Church and those outside, in reality, she was a wise woman, tireless. No objective was enough for her. Her saying is famous: the world is too small to satisfy my desires.
The driving force of her action was love for Christ. The heart of Jesus was the symbol, the visible image of the love of Christ for man. In all of the houses of her congregation she wanted statues that depict the sacred Heart.
Her aim, as superior of her Congregation, was to elicit in the women entrusted to her the gift of their life so that the men and women of their time could surmount the wall of indifference and solitude. During a voyage, she wrote to a sister: “Today it is time that love not remain hidden but become living, operative and true. How much must I be grateful to that heart of the most beloved Jesus and how every weight appears light to me, every suffering sweet, if it means procuring for Him a bit of glory. With the vow of charity, you satisfy the desire that you feel to suffer for love of your Jesus because it unites us in a completely special way to the interests of the most lovable heart of Jesus, who will do with us all that He wants for the conversion of sinners and for the other interests of His glory.”
