Who is Frances Xavier Cabrini?

The first American citizen canonized a saint in 1946 by the Catholic Church, Frances Xavier Cabrini was above all a remarkable humanitarian.  The patron saint of immigrants and one of Colorado’s most significant Italian Americans, Frances Xavier Cabrini was born in Italy in 1850.  In 1880, she founded the order of The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Rome with the purpose of serving the poor, vulnerable, and those on the margins of society in Europe and America.  In 1889, Mother Cabrini came to the United States to help immigrants in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Thirteen years later, she arrived in Colorado to help Denver’s poor Italian immigrants. 

In Denver, The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart opened a convent and school that welcomed more than 200 students: primarily the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants.  This school would eventually become the Mount Carmel grade school and high school.  The convent and school were followed by an orphanage later known as the Queen of Heaven Orphanage.  Located in Denver, Queen of Heaven opened in 1905 providing 160 children a home.

In 1910, Mother Cabrini founded a summer camp for the Queen of Heaven orphans in Mount Vernon Canyon, west of Denver.  Today known as Mother Cabrini Shrine, the site attracts thousands of visitors yearly.  A place of prayer and meditation, the Shrine is also a pilgrimage site for those seeking healing. Colorado’s shrine is one of three in the United States with a second in New York and the third in Chicago.

In addition to her works in Colorado, New York, and Chicago, Frances Xavier Cabrini established institutions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi, Washington State, and California. She was a champion of immigrants and the poor. During her lifetime, there were many orphaned children and sick people with no place to turn and she cared for them. Many were uneducated and she established schools for them. Her social service and outreach programs included industrial arts lessons for young women, visits to city hospital wards, jails, prisons, mines, and plantations. Cabrini did this primarily with volunteers and private donations.

Frances Xavier Cabrini died in 1917; at the Columbus Hospital in Chicago that she helped open in 1896 to address the needs of Italian immigrants.  In 1973, the Columbus Hospital merged with Chicago’s Italian Hospital and was renamed Cabrini Health Care Center after Frances Xavier Cabrini.  In keeping with the spirit of Cabrini’s legacy, the hospital was one of the earliest to treat and serve those suffering and dying from the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.