She is the first naturalized American citizen to be canonized.
It is likely that the recently installed flag poles at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish, in West Springfield, would meet with the approval of the woman to whom the parish is dedicated.
She is the first naturalized American citizen to be canonized. Her life was devoted to establishing schools and hospitals for immigrants in several countries, and she did not wavered from her commitments. The Rev. James W. Longe, pastor, with the help of donations, had the four poles installed on space devoid of trees by the 2011 tornadoes. The American flag, along with those of the U.S. military, now fly 24/7 in tribute to veterans, and their willingness to fight for freedom for all.
Mother Cabrini’s spiritual life was rooted in prayer and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This type of sustaining faith seemed to match well, with an intelligent and diplomatic character able to negotiate the Church’s hierarchy, to embark on a life of service to others. One feels she and Pope Francis, the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, and the first pope from the Americas, would be friends. Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was previously archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Cabrini once ministered. Bergoglio took the name Francis, in tribute to St. Francis of Assisi’s devotion to the poor, and his papacy in the last 10 months has stressed the Church’s focus on serving the needy and marginalized. Cabrini and Pope Leo XIII, who left his own pivotal mark on the Church, became friends, through the missionary work Cabrini did both in Europe and the Americas.
Born Frances Cabrini on July 15, 1850, on a farm estate in northern Italy, her circumstances — only four of her 10 siblings lived beyond adolescence, and she herself had health issues— would not have predicted her global influence.
But, apparently inspired, in part, by her father’s faith and stories of the Church’s missionaries — particularly the work of Pauline-Marie Jaricot’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith — she aspired to a life greater than her own through the Church. Her desire, like St. Francis’ Xavier, the society’s patron, was to be a missionary in China.
American and military flags fly 24/7 at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish in West Springfield. However, Cabrini’s fragile health resulted in refusals for acceptance from several congregations of women religious, so she became a teacher, like her older sister Rosa. Cabrini’s abilities in this role, it seems, prompted Church authorities to ask her to take over a girl’s orphanage. It was in making this transition from public school teacher to administrator that evolved into the 30-year-old Cabrini starting, at the invitation of a diocesan bishop, her own community of religious women, known as the Institute of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Cabrini’s vision was for a central base for her missionaries in Rome, but, in Rome, her life was again re-directed by circumstances in 1888, when she asked to go, with six of her sisters, to New York, in response to an invitation from Archbishop Michael Corrigan to minister to the needs of Italian immigrants. It was Pope Leo XIII, who left his own pivotal mark on the Church, that told Cabrini, still hoping to go to China, “Not to the East, but to the West.”
Cabrini and her sisters, who did not speak English, arrived in New York, to a chilly welcome from Corrigan, who said he had not expected them so soon, and suggested Cabrini return to Italy. Reportedly, she reminded him that they came at the bequest of Pope Leo. They stayed, spending, according the congregation’s website, the first night in a rundown tenement.
Cabrini, who went on to gain the support of Corrigan, established an orphanage for Italian children, as well as a free school and a convent. She and her sisters had to beg in the streets for additional money to support the orphanage, but their work recruited young women to join Cabrini’s order.
Cabrini went on to found a large orphanage in New York, as well as a hospital. She founded some 70 similar institutions in a number of other cities, including New Orleans, Chicago and Seattle, spending seven days on a train between those two cities in 1903, as well as in eight countries. She crossed the Atlantic some 25 times, before her death on Dec. 22, 1917, at the age of 67.
Her canonization, in 1944, by Pope Pius XII, was the first one celebrated toward the end of World War II, and by Church standards, a sainthood granted in a miraculously short time on a remarkable woman whose accomplishments remain inspirational beyond the devoted today.
Related:
http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2014/01/flagpoles_at_st_frances_xavier_cabrini_church_in_west_springfield_bring_something_good_out_of_someth.html