The unexpected Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini
What I learned from Cabrini's letters about her life, her holiness, and her ability to inspire others
Reading other people’s letters is always awkward. You aren’t always certain why the letter-writer wrote the letter in the first place, and you only rarely have access to the other person’s side of the literary conversation. Details about political events that were occurring at the time often have to be investigated and inferred, and the style of the letter-writer doesn’t always translate easily into other languages. Perhaps that’s part of the reason that the letters of Saint Paul—which make up almost half of the New Testament—cause so much controversy among Biblical scholars.
Frances Cabrini (1850-1917) was an intelligent, literate woman and a trained teacher, so she knew how to communicate effectively through her writing. In her nineteenth-century world, the telegram was the fastest mode of long-distance communication, but it was far too expensive for a poor religious sister to use very often. So she wrote letters. Thousands of them.
As a native of Italy, Frances wrote primarily in Italian. She did learn to speak and write in English but did so only when necessary. Of the thousands of letters she wrote, which are preserved by her religious order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, only a few hundred have been translated into English. And those translations have long been out of print.
When Ignatius Press asked me to edit a new collection of her letters, I thought I knew a good deal about Cabrini. I knew that she founded a religious order of sisters in Italy. I knew that she and her sisters lived in poverty among Italian immigrants in America and that her order quickly expanded to teach children all over the world. I knew that she was considered a formidable and holy woman by those who knew her, even though she was small in stature and suffered from poor health. But I discovered so much more as I read her letters that I became convinced that Saint Frances Cabrini is an overlooked treasure among Catholic saints.
The first remarkable thing about Frances was her decision to become a missionary sister. In 2024, a movie about Cabrini’s life was released, and studio publicity stated that she was the first woman founder of an order of missionary sisters. Some Catholics scoffed, pointing out that there have been many Catholic women, including saints, who formed religious orders and served in missionary territories before Cabrini. While that is certainly true, I believe it is a fact that Cabrini was the first woman to found a religious order of missionary sisters that spread all over the world during her lifetime.
Yes, Saint Walburga of Heidenheim was an eighth-century English nun who traveled as a missionary, but she evangelized German pagans as an abbess from her abbey, not as an active religious sister teaching children and wiping kids’ noses. Yes, Saint Angela Merici founded an order of (what eventually became) teaching sisters in the sixteenth century. Yes, while most orders of religious sisters have been founded by men, quite a few have been founded by women, such as the Daughters of Charity, founded by Saint Louise de Marillac.
One could argue that Cabrini was only able to personally establish sixty-seven communities and institutions throughout Europe, North America, and South America because of the existence of trains and steamships. After all, modern transportation methods made it possible for her travel so far and so fast. News of her success also traveled fast. When Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu (1910-1997), now known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was founding her own religious order of missionary sisters, she specifically modeled many things after Cabrini’s example.
Another surprising lesson from Saint Frances’ letters is her ability to communicate all that she saw and heard during her travels. Many of her letters contain detailed, evocative descriptions of faraway, often beautiful places. Through her fascinating travelogues, readers find out what it was like to travel on a steamship during a hurricane, narrowly escape death from an iceberg, endure torrential heat at the equator, and almost fall off a cliff on a snow-covered mountain. Frances conveys this information matter-of-factly, cheerfully, and without complaint, precisely because she knows that she (and her sisters) are doing everything out of love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
When you think about it, these were exactly the sorts of letters that the leader of an order of missionary sisters would have to write. How else could she—even with the assistance of the Holy Spirit—inspire hundreds of women to leave their families and become consecrated religious for the sake of Jesus Christ? In this way, Frances is much like Saint Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), the Frenchman who fell in love with the African desert, wrote an award-winning description of the land and its people, and then returned to serve as a missionary priest until his martyrdom. Frances, who always had a great love for geography, shared that love with her sisters as a means of inspiring them to persevere in the many sacrifices they made in their vocations.
Did you ever think about the fact that a religious founder must also be a sort of spiritual director? While Frances wrote letters to communities of sisters, she also wrote to individual sisters, and she repeatedly encouraged them to write to her. She wasn’t able to respond to every letter because of the demands on her time, but she responded to many sisters personally.
These letters make it clear that Mother Cabrini had an affectionate, maternal relationship with her spiritual daughters and that she wanted to provide them with spiritual direction even when she was on another continent. But her motherly care was that of a true mother, neither overly indulgent nor too strict. She encouraged sisters in their suffering and forgave them when they made mistakes, but she was also merciless in pointing out their faults. In this way, she was much like the Apostle Saint Paul, who was perfectly willing to confront and correct his Christian disciples when they failed to act in Christian charity.
But there was another side to Frances, one which she did not share with her sisters out of humility. Unknown to them, she kept a personal journal in which she recorded the spiritual gifts she received during prayer. These journal entries reveal the life of a mystic, including visions of our Lord and His Blessed Mother. Her writings in her journal remind us that sanctity is not demonstrated by what we accomplish with our hands but by what is in our hearts, particularly in terms of our relationship with God. Having these journal entries in a collection of her letters makes it possible for us to learn about her deep interior life, as well as her exterior works.
Fortunately, with the release of All Things are Possible: The Selected Letters of Mother Cabrini, English speakers can once again learn about this famous woman through her writings. With a foreword from a religious sister and an introduction to her life (which I wrote after reading hundreds of her letters and multiple biographies), these letters can help us better understand a great American and a modern saint. And we can be surprised by the unexpected insights found in her life, her faith, and her love of Jesus Christ.
