This is the article in the Culture section of the Swiss magazine “Tidningen Dagen” about the film Cabrini. Here is the translation of the text of the article in our languages.
Enjoy reading it!
Italian nun’s life journey now becomes a film
Francesca Xavier Cabrini was born in northern Italy and dreamed of becoming a missionary in China. But the Pope’s words made her change course towards the great country to the west, where her mission would be with her compatriots.
In Lombardo, northern Italy, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the youngest of 13 siblings plays by a river. It’s the middle of the 19th century. But inside her lives a love that knows no bounds. As she picks violets and watches them disappear into little paper boats that she has folded, she imagines that one day she herself will be able to travel. To distant countries. To proclaim Christ to the pagans.
At the age of 13, she confides her longing to her older sister. She was dismissed with the words: “You, so small and uneducated, dare to dream of becoming a missionary?”
When, a little over 50 years later, she takes her last breath in the frail body of only one and a half meters tall in a Chicago hospital that she herself founded, she will have crossed the ocean 30 times and founded 67 orphanages, hospitals and schools.
As many institutions as years of life. World traveler, missionary and saint Francesca Xavier Cabrini is remembered for her tireless work especially among Italian immigrants in need – a life journey that now comes to the silver screen under the name Cabrini, a film produced by the studio behind the blockbuster Sound of Freedom.
Audience with the Pope
Don’t go east, go west!
Cabrini had an audience with the Pope. After getting an education and founding a mission-oriented women’s religious order, she will finally realize her dreams.
Cabrini had China in mind, but after Leo XIII’s appeal to change direction, she will set off for America. There, millions of Italians, instead of the hope of a better life on the other side of the Atlantic, found deplorable circumstances.
When she landed in New York in 1889, Cabrini encountered misery among her compatriots. The Italian areas of the city are notorious. In an enormous upsurge of poverty, prejudice and exclusion, Cabrini and her followers, with scarce resources, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The leader of the order, Cabrini, walks courageously through the city and starts teaching catechism, schools, orphanages and hospitals.
But she’s not just a missionary. She’s also a businesswoman. When new buildings had to be built for the work, she seemed to have a divine inspiration. Or as one biographer put it: “She built islands of rest, safe havens from disease, cold, hunger and death; quiet houses of prayer and schools ventilated by fresh air as if it came from the very breath of Jesus.”
Globetrotting for JesusSoon, Cabrini will be establishing schools and homes for the poor on several continents.With a fragile constitution, but an unshakeable faith, the little Italian is launching herself into a life of globetrotting for Jesus. “The world is too big for us to limit ourselves to just one place” was an expression she coined.As well as numerous crossings of the Atlantic, she will also make the dangerous journey across the Andes on a mule to reach Buenos Aires and found a school there.She also travels through Central America and Brazil. She is often ill, sometimes feverish for months. But her strength comes from her union with Jesus. From the age of eight, she carried within her a profound experience of the Holy Spirit that she received when she was confirmed. The motto she set for her life was the words of the Apostle Paul: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me”.
To this day, several schools, orphanages and hospitals are run by the Cabrini Sisters.
I’m looking for one of them who works in Cabrini’s path.
She was so drawn to Jesus that she couldn’t resist. She gave herself completely, says Sister Terezinha Lumbieri, herself a missionary in São Paulo, Brazil.
In Cabrini’s life, contemplation and action cannot be separated. She didn’t separate life and mission, continues Sister Terezinha. Cabrini herself summed up her attitude with the words: “Everywhere I go, I pray, and everywhere I go, I evangelize”.
She wanted to be a bearer of Christ
Francesca Cabrini was Catholic and worked hard to ensure that Italian immigrants didn’t abandon their faith.But the children who attend her schools today come from different backgrounds. Marisa Rosseto, principal of Colégio Madre Cabrini in São Paulo, a private school with almost a thousand students, highlights how new family configurations, lifestyles and changed values represent a major challenge today.
We seek to keep Cabrini’s principles and legacy alive through an education from the heart that is welcoming and concerned with both human and academic development, says Rosseto.
We want to help our students develop ethically and become good people capable of changing society, she continues.
From a work more focused on Italian immigrants, the work of Cabrini and her sisters has become a worldwide work that covers six continents and fifteen countries. She used to say that she wanted to build a steamship called Christopher – the bearer of Christ – so that it could travel to all peoples and make the name of Jesus known to the last island in the universe. There was no steamship. But the thirteenth fragile little sister from Lombardy, with her boundless love for Christ, left great waves in our world when she followed her dreams.
Like a violet in a little paper boat.
Thanks to Dagen Magazine
Madre Cabrini tem família no Brasil.
Minha bisavó era sobrinha dela.
Tem uma igreja em São Carlos dedicada a ela e a família Cabrini é de lá.