Immigrant Saint

Francesca Maria Cabrini was born in 1850 in a small village on the Lombard Plain of Italy. At the moment of her birth, a cloud of snow-white doves appeared and circled the village, an augury of her future sanctity. Tiny frail and sickly, she was enthralled as a child by tales of the adventures of missionaries to faraway lands, and grew up with one burning desire: to join a religious order and tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the people of China. But no order would have her-her health was deemed too precarious. But her dream remained, and she set out to see it realized. Her first step, a formidable one, was obtaining an audience with His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII. This she did, after overcoming many obstacles. It was a meeting that would change her life, and the lives of so many in America. Mother Cabrini was granted her wish to start an orphanage abroad-but not in China, as she had requested. "Not East, but West, my child," said Pope Leo, and her path was set.