Immigrant Saint

The Life of Mother Cabrini

Pietro Di Donato

• Éditeur: Papamoa Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787204218
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Religion

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.PIETRO DI DONATO'S Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini is a powerful nonfiction account of a woman whose gripping story of perseverance, courage, and profound godliness serves as a paradigm for the new age of faith. Written in the fluid prose that made it a huge popular success upon its initial publication in 1960, Immigrant Saint is a book that makes us re-examine, and ultimately reaffirm, our belief in the possibilities of prayer, the validity of miracles, and the crucial importance of good works."…eloquent, fascinating, miraculous"—Saturday Review

1

AGOSTINO CABRINI was swinging his flail, threshing wheat in the courtyard. While he worked he listened to the voices of the midwife and his sister-in-law, Angela, within the cottage.

That morning his wife had been threshing wheat with him, when suddenly she said, “This child who seems to have been carrying me, wants to come into the world today.”

Agostino and Stella had not expected to have another child, for Stella was fifty-two. The couple had known each other since childhood. They had been engaged for ten years, and only after they had respectfully buried their parents were they wedded. They suffered tragedy after tragedy. Nine of their children had died, at ages from three to eighteen. Only Rosa, Maddalena, hopelessly invalided by polio, and little Giovanni lived. This coming child was the late autumnal gift of their marriage.

Agostino paused and wiped the sweat from his forehead and tousled flaxen mustache. He wondered. The child was two months premature. Would it live? He chided himself for questioning. God knew best.

From the east high above the Lombard plain appeared a swift moving cloud of white. It was a flock of doves. Other farmers saw them, and ran to their fields with pitchforks and shotguns to protect their rice and wheat, but the doves did not come to plunder. They soared over the Sforza castle, past the tall campanile of Sant’Angelo’s church, down above the red-tiled roofs of the village and to the Cabrini cottage at 225 Borgo Santa Maria. The white feathery multitude whirred in a circle above the cottage and courtyard.

Agostino looked at them curiously. In his lifetime doves had never come to Sant’Angelo. Where had they come from? Why? He thought of his granary, but though he waved his flail at them, they tenaciously returned again and again. Rosa and Giovanni came from the house to help him. A dove became ensnared between the thongs of the flail.

“Father, please don’t hurt it,” begged Rosa.

The children caressed the dove as Agostino disentangled it from the flail. It flew to the bedroom window. As it perched upon the sill and cooed, the sunlight seemed to flash more brightly, and the cries of the newborn baby sang forth.

The midwife called from the window, “Agostino, benedictions. It’s female and pretty.”

He jubilantly signed the cross, then scooped up grain and threw it to the doves. The winged troops pecked the grain. With united impulse they reformed their flight and disappeared to the west.

In a few minutes, Agostino and the children were permitted to enter the room of birth. Rosa, a serious, usually restrained girl of fifteen, clapped her hands and cried, “Look, Father! What eyes, what beautiful eyes Saint Lucy has given the baby!”

The tiny fresh life at Stella Cabrini’s bosom had the biggest of blue-green eyes and soft blonde curls.

Agostino whispered to his wife, “She is a precious flower, and may she forever precious be. I am grateful to God and you.”

The sagacious midwife shook her head. “The little angel is like a lily, and just as frail. She is almost transparent, and has not the strength for this world. If she lives, I tell you now, it will be a miracle. Dear ones, I do not wish to alarm you, but you had best christen her without delay.”

A few hours later, Stella Cabrini left her bed. In memory of two of the children she had lost, Francesco and Maria, she decided to name the baby Francesca Maria. It seemed this lily of a child had come by herself. Stella Cabrini could not explain to herself why, but she felt that God had a clear and signal purpose for giving her Francesca Maria. She bowed her head and vowed to do everything possible to keep the child alive. With her sister Angela, she bathed the baby in warm milk redolent with rose petals, gently massaged her with olive oil, and tenderly swathed her in soft linen.

The sun rolled far west, and cooling shades began to soothe the hot ancient walls of the village. With Agostino carrying his crippled daughter Maddalena, Stella bearing her baby in her arms, her sister Angela, and young Rosa and Giovanni following, the Cabrini family went into the church of Sant’Angelo. As the first evening vespers of Our Lady of Carmel knelled from the campanile over town and plain, the pastor, Don Melchisedecco Abrami baptized the infant at the sacred font, and then wrote in the registry: “July 15, 1850, Francesca Maria Cabrini.”

Agostino Cabrini was a pious man, who cleaved to the Commandments. The people of Sant’Angelo called him the “Christian Tower.” He was not often to be seen in the village tavern, nor on the street corners with public idlers. The course of Agostino was the way of the apostle, direct and unobstructed. He had no need to go beyond the village limits to know the world fashioned by man. Man, the sole creature given the privilege to choose between good and evil, made his own woes, made tyrants that came and went like the winds. Agostino feared no mortal and knelt, with joy, to only one authority—God. Who else but God made life? Life was to be revered, and gratefully returned to God.

Such was the honest piety of Agostino, father of Francesca Cabrini. But the simplicity and faith of the Cabrini family was not universal in their world. For years their homeland had been repeatedly harassed by war and civil war. That which we call Italy today was then a disorganized assortment of feudal territories, confused by the intrigues of royal families, oppressed in turn by French Bourbon influence and Austrian military domination. Generations of intellectuals and poets, noblemen and churchmen had dreamed of Italian independence and unification. But even among the patriots there was strife, dating back as long as half a century. In the 1800s, when Napoleon had asserted his sovereignty over Italians and soon thereafter had introduced the Code Napoléon, he paved the way for dissension between civil powers and the Church. Slowly, the clergy, beloved of the common people, were dispossessed of many of the lands, and subjected to other forms of tyranny. The result was a series of petty wars, bloody abortive uprisings of peasants and social idealists. These early years of revolution saw the birth of numerous patriotic secret societies in the Carbonari, the Federati, the Giovine Italia. The period was characterized by bitter dispute between Church and state.

It was in 1846, just four years before Francesca’s birth, that the humanistic Pope Pius IX was elected. Simultaneously, the elements of the risorgimento, the “resurrection” of Italy arose. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pius IX was of noble birth, yet at heart he was sympathetic to liberal ideas. By bitter experience he learned how they often incorporated the principles of anticlericalism. He recognized that the papal administration, if not so corrupt and despotic as its opponents claimed, was inefficient and intolerant, and its reform was one of his chief concerns. At the same time, he wanted the church kept intact and would not have it enslaved to either nationalism or liberalism. The price exacted for his determination was the endless bitter turmoil that surrounded the Vatican throughout his papacy.

It was among the rural folk that this humane and intellectual leader had his staunchest allies—in the villages, like Sant’Angelo, in the devout fathers and mothers, like Agostino and Stella Cabrini. The Christian Tower paid no heed to the voices urging rebellion against God and church, any more than to the political maneuvers of the many-factioned government. He kept his home as sacred as any temple of Christ, and it was as content as the richly yielding Lombard plain was prosperous. His devout family cherished the days of the unblighted years that followed Francesca’s birth.

Stella Cabrini guarded little Francesca as though she were a rare flower ever about to perish. As she grew older, Francesca became aware that vigor had been denied her and that her uncertain health would never let her join the robust village children in their games. She did not complain.

One day as Rosa was braiding Francesca’s long hair, she turned and looked up. “Miss Rosa, if you please...why do you call me ‘Magpie’ instead of Francescina? Is the magpie a good bird or a bad bird?”

“Because, little girl,” answered Rosa, “like the magpie you have a long tail—which is your braid—like the magpie you are really good, and easy to tame, but also, like the magpie, you try to do everything too quickly and talk constantly. And if you expect to become an educated young lady, you must learn to listen.”

“Then I shall be a magpie no longer. I will listen and learn, and become a schoolteacher, like you.”

Rosa was the village schoolmistress, and at home taught Francesca the alphabet and numbers. When at last Francesca went to school, Rosa, whose standards for her sister were extremely demanding, insisted that she set an example in her studies. Often Francesca was too ill to attend. On these occasions, she remained obediently in her little room and dreamed. Her dreams were different from those of other children and more fervent. Her schoolmates dreamed of heroes and heroines of fabled lore, of Cinderella and fairy godmothers, of sorcerers and werewolves, of elves and orgres and crusading armies with knights and knaves. Francesca knew these tales, but one by one, beside the great passion within her, they burst like bubbles. She had a wonderland of her own, and dreamed of Him who is most true.

On the long, icy nights of winter, the family would sit by the blazing fireside, eating hearth-roasted chestnuts, as Agostino read to them from the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith. On the horizon of Francesca’s inner sky, the martyred Saints stood forth. They are not the pastry puppets of children’s myths; they are people magnified by their good acts; they are human and real. They walked the earth, were enamored of Him, braved the terrors of the unbelieving, and fearlessly died for His love.

Father, smoking his long reed pipe with the red clay bowl, read of Saint Teresa: “He led her about and taught her, and He kept her as the apple of His eye. As an eagle He has spread his wings and hath taken her and carried her on His shoulder. The Lord alone was her leader.” And the words were as hands, molding the inspiring images of Francesca’s inner realm.

Father said: “There is only one true way, His way. We are here according to His will, and we are His children. He is the heart and the spirit of nature, the heart and spirit of arts and labors. He is the Son of God, and King of kings. Love is His bread and wine, love is His law which maintains in balance the universe.” Francesca absorbed his words with a heart already open to their message.

One summer morning Rosa took Francesca to spend a day with their mother’s brother, Uncle Don Luigi.

They found the old priest cutting roses in the garden behind the rectory. He greeted them and chuckled. “My illustrious nieces, schoolmistress Rosa Cabrini and Miss Francesca, student of wide-eyed prescience! Signorina Francesca, have you come to take care of your helpless old uncle?”

Don Luigi is the famous thief of himself; Don Luigi robs Don Luigi for the distressed; he gives the very shoes on his feet, the clothes he should wear, the meals he should eat, to the poor. He never thinks of Don Luigi. Rosa asked how he was, but he answered, “While playing a Scarlati cantata on the clavichord I composed a fine poem; would you like to hear it?”

Was he moderating his generosity?

“Rosa, what oceans of honey my bees are providing!”

Was he still handing out to the needy more than he had?

“Tell good Agostino I have mastered my chess, and will surprise him in our next game!”

“Uncle, are you taking care of yourself, as you promised me?”

“Rosa, my dear Rosa, the Spirit of charity is the asset that covers all liabilities!”

Rosa instructed her little sister upon deportment, and drove off with the horse and buggy.

Francescina was particularly fond of Uncle Don Luigi. He was easy-going and had her mother’s clear brown eyes. Uncle Don Luigi treated her as if she were a young lady and a special guest. She liked to have him tell her about the faraway lands where missionaries went to bring souls to the Lord. He described the heathen Chinese and their strange habits as though he had been there himself. She asked him if she could be a missionary. Was it hard to learn the Chinese language? How did missionaries get to China? Why didn’t the Chinese know about the Lord? Why were there poor people and sick people, and why were there people who did bad things?

Uncle Don Luigi raised his eyes. “Young lady, serious problems like this, important thoughts, are too much for man; you must tell your wondrous ideas personally, privately, to Our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

She reflected, and answered confidently, “Uncle Don Luigi, thank you, I shall.”

Don Luigi’s garden extended to the nearby Venera River which moved swiftly between low walled embankments. Whenever uncle Don Luigi left her by herself in the garden he cautioned her not to go near the river’s edge.

Alone, she wandered about the garden, inspecting the flowers. The roses are grand ladies pink and red, the geraniums are intelligent young women. She gathered some and brought them to the riverside. Along the embankment were daisies and violets. The daisies are sunny girls, and the violets are smiling maidens. She fetched paper and scissors from the rectory and fashioned paper boats. She is Mother Superior Francesca, and the pretty flowers are her nuns. She arranged the flowers in the paper boats.

“Sister Daisy and Sister Geranium and Sister Rose and Sister Violet, I am sending you across the ocean to far away China to save souls for Our Lord. Do not be afraid. Be brave and do not cry. I, your mother, will pray for you, and you will be safe. God bless you, Sisters of the Flowers.”

She leaned over the embankment, launched her boats, and bade them farewell as they sailed downstream on the rapid current. She remembered losing her balance and falling into the river. Then she recalled nothing until she opened her eyes. She is lying on the river bank quite a distance from where she fell in. A group of people are standing about her. Her frightened uncle carries her to the rectory. A woman removes her clothes, drys them in the sun, an...

Table des matières

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• EPILOGUE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER