Six Schools in Nine Months

“How sweet and good it is to go to sea, tired and drained from the work of the missions!” Mother Cabrini wrote on September 1, 1899.

In nine months she had done a staggering amount. Her sixth journey to the United States took her to New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. The missions in the U.S. were expanding rapidly, spreading to Italian enclaves across the country.

A Storefront in Newark

Mother Cabrini’s first new initiative was in Newark, New Jersey. There in the Ironbound District she established a school for Italian children at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. It was located in a storefront which the children affectionately nicknamed “The House of Glass.” The school lacked desks, books, paper – just about everything except the things most important to the students: teachers who understood their native language, and love. The attention of the Missionary Sisters to their needs bore fruit quickly. Attendance rose quickly, first to 200, then 300, then 400.

West to Chicago

From there Mother Cabrini was off to Chicago, where the Servite Fathers had asked for her help running Assumption School. Like the other parish schools where the Missionary Sisters eventually taught, the students in Chicago couldn’t afford to pay tuition. Nor could the parish pay them a salary or stipend. They taught anyway, driven by the compassion of Christ, spending their free time begging for donations to make ends meet.

“The devil has employed all his cunning…”

Next came a project dear to Mother Cabrini’s heart. Back in New York she labored to launch Transfiguration School in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. Getting this up and running was particularly hard work. “The devil has employed all his cunning, frustrating my efforts for several months,” Mother Cabrini wrote to the Missionary Sisters. Fortunately Archbishop Corrigan, who by then had become a fast friend, was a huge support in getting the school opened.

Uptown and across the river was a heavily Italian section of the East Bronx, where scads of children whose parents both worked  had very little structure at home and were roaming the streets. Here Mother Cabrini founded St. Rita’s School in an abandoned saloon on 151st Street. The first lessons: cleanliness, order, and discipline, all taught with warm but firm care.

Mother Cabrini also began a scuola di lavoro, or trade school for women, at Our Lady of Pompeii Church in the East Village.

South to Scranton and Mississippi

But there was more. Mother Cabrini headed to Scranton, Pennsylvania to assess the possibility of beginning a school there (St. Lucy’s opened two years later, in 1901). Then it was on to New Orleans to visit the missions she had opened in the wake of the lynchings of Italians. This time she made arrangements to open a summer house for the orphans in Long Beach, Mississippi.

Paying for it All

Mother Cabrini’s last stop before returning to Italy was again New York City. Here she straightened out legal matters and then purchased a substantial property in the countryside of northern Manhattan. This mansion and its side buildings, which she called Sacred Heart Villa, solved part of the dilemma of how to pay for all the schools she had just opened. At 701 Fort Washington Avenue Mother Cabrini opened a boarding school for well-to-do girls. She used the tuition to help cover the costs of educating the hundreds of children in her free schools.

How Did She Do It?

Mother Cabrini thought of none of this in terms of accomplishments. She set up schools, entrusted the missions to others, and moved on. “In the field I shall work with all my might,” she wrote in 1899, “but when obedience takes me away from one assignment to go to another where the harvest is ripe, I shall leave the first.”

Mother Cabrini only ambition was to be the hands and heart of Jesus on earth in whatever way he made possible. She yearned as he did to soothe the suffering, comfort hearts in need, and draw souls to his Sacred heart. To work hard because God had given her something hard to do was an honor. To the Missionary Sisters she wrote words that can encourage us as well:

“The harvest that God spreads before you is vast and fertile and you can roam through it zealously daily, gathering abundant sheaves… remember that those souls cost all the Blood of Jesus, so do all in your power to lead them to His Divine Heart. Labor with zeal; the power of your love will endow your actions with strength and courage.”

St. Frances Cabrini, pray for us.