Homily: November 12 - Mother Cabrini - Inexhaustible Energy for Serving God

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was known during her life as Mother Cabrini, and was the first American citizen to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. 

As a young girl, Francesca dreamed of being a missionary.  She would dress up her dolls like nuns and put them in paper boats pretending to send them to China to spread the faith.  

She was rejected by several religious communities because of her frail health.  But she was advised by her bishop to start her own religious community.  So she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1877.  Within a few years she and her sisters had opened six orphanages.

Early in 1889 Pope Leo XIII asked her to go to the United States to care for the Italian Immigrants who came to the US.  Within a few years, she opened a Catholic school in New York City, founded an orphanage and hospital for the immigrants which had wards which were free to the poor.    She built other hospitals in Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans, and Chicago.

Her thirty-seven years as a missionary sister saw her constantly on the move, her energy for the kingdom of heaven seemed inexhaustable.  When she died in 1917, she left behind sixty-seven convents in Europe, the United States, and South America housing 1500 Sisters.   

Mother Cabrini’s relics are enshrined in the Church’s altar at her shrine in Manhattan, where she served so many Italian immigrants. 

At her canonization in 1946, Pius XIII said in his homily:

Where did she acquire all that strength and the inexhaustible energy by which she was able to perform so many good works and to surmount so many difficulties?  She accomplished all this through the faith that was always so vibrant in her heart; through the divine love that burned within her; and, finally, through the constant prayer by which she was so closely united to God…She never let anything turn her aside from striving to please God and to work for his glory for which nothing, aided by grace, seemed too difficult or beyond human strength.

Mother Cabrini lived deeply the mission of the Church to bring Christ’s compassion and care to all people.  May we find through prayer and Sacraments and Mother Cabrini’s intercession, that same inexhaustible energy for serving God’s kingdom for his glory and the salvation of souls.