19th–20th century
Feast: November 13
She was terrified of water and crossed the Atlantic twenty-three times — building sixty-seven schools, hospitals, and orphanages across two continents.
Frances Cabrini was small — barely five feet tall — and had been rejected by two religious orders because of her fragile health. She wanted to be a missionary to China. The Pope had other plans. 'Not to the East,' Leo XIII told her. 'To the West.' He sent her to New York to serve the flood of Italian immigrants living in squalid tenements, exploited by employers, and largely ignored by the Irish-dominated American Catholic Church. Frances arrived in 1889, and within weeks she was arguing with the Archbishop of New York (who had tried to send her home) and negotiating real estate deals in a language she barely spoke. She had a genius for organization that bordered on ruthless. Over the next twenty-eight years, she founded sixty-seven institutions — schools, hospitals, orphanages — across the United States, Central America, South America, and Europe. She became a U.S. citizen in 1909. She negotiated with Sing Sing prison to visit Italian inmates. She managed finances, trained sisters, and supervised construction projects. She did all of this while being terrified of water — a childhood near-drowning left her with a lifelong phobia — yet she crossed the Atlantic twenty-three times. She died in Chicago in 1917, sitting in a chair, wrapping Christmas candy for orphans.