St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Born in 1850 in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, the youngest of thirteen children, Frances was small and often unwell. She trained as a teacher. More than one religious community turned her down on grounds of health.

In 1880 she founded her own: the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She had wanted to go east to China.

Pope Leo XIII redirected her: not to the East, but to the United States, where millions of Italian immigrants were arriving into poverty, exploitation, and open prejudice. She landed in New York in 1889 to find the promised accommodation had fallen through.

Over the following decades she and her sisters founded roughly sixty-seven institutions (schools, orphanages, and hospitals) in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. She crossed the ocean repeatedly, negotiated with bishops and bankers, bought property, and ran budgets.

She became a United States citizen in 1909 and died in Chicago on 22 December 1917. Canonised in 1946 by Pope Pius XII, she was the first citizen of the United States to be declared a saint, and is widely honoured as patron of immigrants.

Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century were frequently housed in tenements, employed in dangerous work, and depicted in the press as criminal and diseased. Catholic parishes were sometimes segregated by nationality in practice.

Cabrini's institutions existed because the public ones would not serve these families adequately.

Her sanctity looks like leases, ledgers, and train timetables. The Church does not reserve holiness for contemplatives; competence exercised for the poor is a form of love.