This Saturday, Leo XIV makes two pilgrimages in one day. He goes to Pavia as a son of Saint Augustine, to pray at the tomb of his spiritual father in the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Golden Sky — a place he knows well, having welcomed Benedict XVI there in 2007 when he was leading the Augustinian order. Then, a short helicopter flight away, he lands in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano: an ordinary Lombard town, except that it was the birthplace, in 1850, of Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American saint.
In fact, though, the American connection is real but secondary. Mother Cabrini acquired US citizenship mainly for practical reasons, though she genuinely loved the country. What draws Leo XIV to venerate the relic of her heart is something less administrative and more personal: the two lives, separated by nearly a century, trace a remarkably similar arc.
“Not toward the East, but toward the West!”
Born to a devout farming family, Frances Xavier — a name that already pointed toward her vocation — grew up reading missionary journals her father kept at home. “She always wanted to be a missionary,” says Sister Patricia, the Argentine assistant general of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, laughing. “As a child, she would play at sending her friends off on mission.” She founded her congregation in 1880, at 30, with little money, uncertain health, and the handicap that female missionary orders were still a novelty.
Her original plan was China. Pope Leo XIII had other ideas. Alerted by Saint John Baptist Scalabrini to the condition of Italian migrants in America, the Pope redirected her with a phrase that has stayed in the records: “Not toward the East, but toward the West.” She crossed the ocean.
A pioneer spirit
Italian migrants in the United States faced considerable hostility. They were channeled into the most grueling work — construction, mining, the heavy industries of a country still building itself. Mother Cabrini opened houses at remarkable speed and made sure her sisters worked directly alongside these communities, not at a comfortable distance.
“Mother Cabrini is part of that difficult and glorious history of building the United States,” says Sister Patricia. The nun was equally at ease speaking to a banker, a politician, or the poorest of the poor. She threw medals onto a property whose owners refused to sell, and waited for Providence. She wanted beautiful buildings — large spaces, trees, dignity — for her schools and hospitals. She got them.
She did not stop at the United States. She opened missions across Europe and Latin America, crossed the Andes in winter, and sent herself ahead as an advance party before bringing sisters over from Italy. “The world is too small for us to limit ourselves to one place,” she said. Devoted to Saint Rose of Lima, she stopped first in Lima to pray before heading south — traveling through a country where Robert Francis Prevost would arrive as a missionary decades later.
She died in Chicago, in Prevost's hometown, in 1917, aged 67, having founded 67 houses. Pius XII canonized her in 1946 and named her patroness of all migrants.
She inspires Leo XIV
Her order today numbers 185 sisters, with a large lay family extending across Brazil, Argentina, Eswatini, Uganda, Spain, and Nicaragua. Her influence, however, reaches well beyond her own congregation: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who wanted to do for India what Cabrini had done for America, counted her among her models.
Leo XIV has cited Cabrini four times since his election, including twice in major documents. In his apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, on the poor, he invokes her as a model of Christian action on behalf of the destitute. In his apostolic letter Drawing New Maps of Hope, on education, he names her among the “courageous women” who opened the way for girls, migrants, and the most vulnerable.
The resonances between their two lives are hard to miss: a special bond with Leo XIII, a dual nationality, missionary formation, organizational ability, a passion for travel, and a deep attachment to the Americas. Today in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, around twenty of her sisters will welcome the Pope to their foundress’s birthplace.
“As Leo XIII did for Mother Cabrini,” says Sister Patricia, “we want him to kindle in us that drive for mission — the call to go to migrants, refugees, the poorest, which is our charism. To go where no one else goes.” To walk, in other words, in the footsteps of their foundress.
