Dates

• Existence: 1850 July 15 - 1917 December 22

Biographical note

Born at Sant' Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy in 1850, the thirteenth child of Augustine and Stella Cabrini. In 1874, she was asked by the parish priest to teach in an orphanage at Codogno, diocese of Lodi. In 1877, the orphanage became the motherhouse of a new institute, founded by Cabrini under the title of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. She made her own profession at the hands of the bishop of Lodi, who in 1880 officially approved the new congregation as a diocesan institute. Cabrini's dream was to send her sisters to China, but on the advice of Pope Leo XIII she dispatched them instead to the United States. In 1889, she herself accompanied the first batch of missionary sisters to New York, and from that time almost every year she crossed the sea at the head of new bands of missionaries. During her lifetime, she founded as many as sixty-seven religious houses--schools, orphanages, hospitals, etc.--in North and South America, Italy, Spain, England, and elsewhere. She died in one of the American foundations, Columbus Hospital, Chicago. She had become an American citizen. Canonized in 1946.

(paraphrased from The Book of Saints : A Dictionary of Persons Canonized or Beatified by the Catholic Church. 5th edition. New York: Crowell, 1966.)

Alternate names

Francesca Saverio Cabrini

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