St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Feast 11-13 · Canonized 1946
Patron of
About
Frances Xavier Cabrini was born in 1850 in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of thirteen children. She wanted to be a missionary from childhood, and in 1880 she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to serve orphans and the poor.
Pope Leo XIII urged her to go to the United States to care for Italian immigrants, and she arrived in New York in 1889. Over the next three decades she founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals across the Americas and Europe, crossing the Atlantic more than twenty times despite a lifelong fear of water.
She became a naturalized American citizen in 1909 and died in Chicago in 1917. In 1946 she became the first United States citizen to be canonized. She is the patron saint of immigrants.
Suggested prayer
O God, who gave Frances Xavier Cabrini courage to cross the ocean again and again to build schools and hospitals for immigrants, grant through her intercession that all who leave their homeland may find welcome, work, and faith. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.