St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Who they were

Francesca Cabrini was a small, chronically frail Lombard schoolteacher, rejected by two religious orders for her health, who founded her own, took the name Xavier for the missionary to the East, and asked Leo XIII to send her to China. His answer redirected her life: not to the East, but to the West, to the Italian immigrants pouring into America and living, in the tenements of New York, in conditions that scandalized even that era.

She landed in 1889 with six sisters and a housing arrangement that had already collapsed, and simply out built every obstacle: orphanages, schools, and hospitals, sixty seven institutions across the United States and South America by her death, financed by a businesswoman's head for real estate and a negotiating manner that banks learned to respect. Afraid of water her whole life, she crossed the Atlantic roughly thirty times. She became a United States citizen in 1909 and, in 1946, the first American citizen canonized.

Why people turn to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Immigrant families first, since she is their patron by name, and everyone navigating a new country's systems. Hospital and nonprofit administrators have a patron who could read a balance sheet.

How to ask their intercession

For a family by name and for the paperwork by name. Cabrini's method was never the immigrants in general. It was this family, this lease, this hospital wing.