We propose an article written some years ago by Sister Maria Barbagallo, MSC Former General Superior, about the Beatification of Mother Cabrini, November 13th 1938.
Below you can find some initiatives organised in our Cabrinian World for this important Feast day.


On 13th November 1938 Francesca Saverio Cabrini was proclaimed Blessed
by Sister Maria Barbagallo

In recent decades there have been so many beatifications and canonisations that we find it hard to remember them all. In fact, we only remember the most important figures and what strikes us most is the fact that we have known many of these blesseds and saints personally. We feel great joy in seeing that the Church can truly speak well of itself. And they especially enjoy those nations, parishes, congregations that are directly interested in that blessed or beatified, that saint or saint. And it is true, these blesseds and saints do honour to the Church, especially in difficult times like these.
Perhaps it is surprising that we remember a beatification of eighty years ago, that of Frances Xavier Cabrini, but at that time – we are in 1938 – blesseds were not so easily proclaimed and the processes very long and tiring. In the case of Mother Cabrini, the event was also extraordinarily felt by politicians, writers, journalists, artists and theologians who wrote hundreds of texts about her.

Reading the documents of the beatification, one is truly surprised by the affective participation not only of the people – thousands of letters attesting to some grace received arrived at the mother house of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart founded by Mother Cabrini – but above all of cardinals, bishops, prelates and nuncios who came from all parts of the world to venerate a new blessed who had not had an easy life during her life. When she was alive, they almost ran away from her. John XXIII once recounted that in the Curia of Bergamo some priests saw Mother Cabrini waiting to speak to the bishop and murmured that “she always had one”. A South American prelate who had given her a hard time, invited to the inauguration of a missionary work, was surprised, perhaps out of a sense of guilt. But with great feminine tact, Mother Cabrini took the opportunity to make him reflect on the evil he had done to her and in no uncertain terms invited him to “convert and change his life”.

There are countless long waits in the bishop’s curias that Mother Cabrini made without any result, indeed with negative results. Yet in Cabrini’s many letters, while not hiding the reality, when speaking of those moments – with regard to bishops she often declares herself confident “that the Sacred Heart would have changed his heart” – she always repeats: “That holy bishop was very good, he seems like a real father”.
After her death, however, when the nun was proclaimed blessed, cardinals and bishops, nuncios and priests wanted to be present from major cities in the United States, Europe and South America. Perhaps they understood that Mother Cabrini had never doubted that the path God had shown her could only be followed in faithful, sincere obedience to the Church. A Church that she loved and respected even though she saw its less good sides. In fact, she had not moved a step until the many prelates with whom she had to deal gave their consent, even if she was often forced to present her plans with different strategies. For her this meant the confirmation that she was in God’s will. And these clerics in their speeches extolled Cabrini’s humility despite having experienced her determination.

Giuseppe De Luca, the intellectual priest who was among the first to write about Mother Cabrini, observed on the occasion of her beatification: “She had the Church as her teacher, with those eternal teachings and those temporal peculiarities that were of her time. She accepted and borrowed expressions and directives, just as the Church offered them between 1880 and 1910, recognising the divine and not rejecting the human (…) She made her earthly voyage on the ship of the Church, accommodating herself without sublime disdain or critical intelligence to the colour of her time. He said: “We are in the bosom of the Catholic Church, and we always rest our heads on the mysterious and dear stone that is Jesus”.
Even without the means of communication we have today, Mother Cabrini’s beatification aroused the interest and love of many who did not know who she was. In Honolulu, prisoners built a church in honour of Blessed Cabrini. In China, nuns found a church named after her. In Germany, a noblewoman donated her castle to a congregation of religious who cared for disabled children and named the building after Mother Cabrini. After her beatification, young priests from the United States went to celebrate their first Mass at one of the Cabrini sites, now shrines.

Comics and magazines were published telling the story of the Blessed. Lorenzo Perosi composed a Mass in honour of the Blessed as well as setting to music a cantata written by Fr De Luca. Silvio D’Amico, the famous theatre critic and historian, gave a memorable lecture in Rome in the Aula Magna of the Gregorian University in the presence of Princess Maria of Savoy, members of the diplomatic corps and other personalities, and concluded his long speech as follows: “Even a learned priest from Lombardy, who had known Mother Cabrini from close up since the end of the last century because he had been a catechist in her house in Milan, once saw her from a window crossing the courtyard, called his housekeeper to point out to her the worn nun with the big sweet eyes, and said to her: “Look well, she is a saint”. The priest’s name at the time was Don Achille Ratti; it was the Pontiff who beatified her”.

The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal George Mundelein, in a radio message broadcast on the same day of the beatification by the Vatican, said among other things: “She is the first of our people to receive the highest honour that the Church assigns to one of her children, counting him among the Blessed of Heaven. Many of us are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and it is fitting and encouraging for us that a foreigner, who has become a naturalised American citizen, should be the first to be raised to the honour of the altars, to become our national heroine and our universal patron saint”. And Saint Pius X, Blessed Cardinals Andrea Carlo Ferrari and Ildefonso Schuster, both archbishops of Milan, Pius Xii and many others were great admirers and devotees of Mother Cabrini.
A few months after the beatification – it was 1939 – a picture of Francesca Cabrini was exhibited and blessed on the steamer Rex. On that occasion Giuseppe Capra held a conference to underline the good that the new Blessed had done while alive and that she continued to do after her death. Among other things, he recounted a singular fact: “A poor Italian man was returning from visiting his sick wife in Cabrini’s Columbus hospital and, desolate because he was out of work, had decided to throw himself into the river. He was walking sadly with a gloomy purpose when he saw a Sister coming towards him, who, knowing the cause of his sadness, accompanied him to a given office, where he was offered a good job. While he was out of his mind because of the meeting and the job he had found, he wanted to thank the good Sister, but she had disappeared. He returns to the hospital happy, finds his wife improved and tells the story of the meeting. His wife shows him the picture of the Blessed Virgin, and our good man exclaims: That is the Sister I met.

In New York, where the body of the new Blessed was displayed, twenty-seven thousand people paraded in a single day while a pontifical in her honour was celebrated in St Patrick’s Cathedral. The pilgrimages that came to Rome on 13 November 1938 were almost all led by bishops: from Chicago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Milan and Lodi. And it was a providential coincidence that two weeks before Mother Cabrini’s beatification, on 28 October, the new parish church was inaugurated in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, where she was born. Bishop Pietro Calchi Novati then announced Francesca’s beatification saying ‘this will be her temple’. Eight years later, after her canonisation (7 July 1946), the basilica was dedicated not only to St Anthony Abbot but also to the new saint, who was declared patron saint of emigrants in 1950.
Re-reading the events of her beatification, Mother Cabrini’s testimony shows that suffering for the kingdom of God is never useless, it produces fruits of good in the world, but above all it changes hearts and makes the Church grow in truth and holiness.

Curiosity: In the birthplace in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano are exposed: a precious document, dated October 3, 1933, the act of recognition and translation of the body of St. Francesca Cabrini for the acts of the process of beatification and a panel with some beautiful black and white photographs of the celebrations prepared in S. Angelo in 1946 on the occasion of the canonization of the illustrious fellow citizen.








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