FD of St Frances Xavier Cabrini (d 1850) founded a missionary order to go to China. The pope told her her mission was “not in the East but in the West”—among the masses of Italian immigrants in the US who were crowding the cities with no one to care for them. She set out in 1889.
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Though told that the bishop of NY had an orphanage awaiting her she found there was no orphanage. She had missed a letter telling her not to come. The bishop wanted priests, not sisters. She replied, “Excellence, in all humbleness I must say, in America I stay.”
So she did—serving not only NY’s Italian immigrants but establishing schools and orphanages around the country. She once balked at taking over a hospital until she had a dream in which the Blessed Mother was nursing the sick. “I am doing the work you refused to do on my behalf.”
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Canonized in 1946, she was named “patroness of immigrants.” Having become a naturalized American citizen she became the “first citizen saint” of the United States.
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