Frances
Cabrini said thank you to God with her life.
Not for a terribly prosperous life; not for a spectacular moral healing,
for she had no great life of dissipation to turn away from. Not for a miraculous physical healing, for she
was a sickly child, and remained in poor health most of her life. She lived a life of gratitude for the everyday
sustenance God provided for her, the slow growth in virtue, the sacramental
life she rejoiced to participate in. She
was so grateful for the gift of education in her life that she wanted to join
the order of sisters that had taught her, but they wouldn’t have her because of
her ill health.
But,
she was determined that she wanted to be of service, so she founded her own
religious community, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in her hometown
just outside of Milan. At the suggestion
of their bishop, they sailed to America to come to the aid of Italian
immigrants in New York. Bit by bit,
their ministry expanded, as they founded orphanages, schools and eventually
hospitals, expanding from New York to the rest of the United States and
eventually other parts of the Americas. She
knew that by serving those in need, she was meeting and offering thanks
to Christ himself for all the ways he loved and sustained her. The Opening Prayer of today’s Mass points to
this, asking her intercession that we might “see Christ in all the men and
women we meet.”
Once,
she attended a private audience with the Pope, who urged her to “hurry all over
the earth if possible, in order to take the holy name of Jesus
everywhere.” She consented, writing: “I
will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of
Jesus.” What she had come to realize was
that as she encountered and thanked Christ in the poor she served, so her
actions made Christ present. To look,
again, to our Opening Prayer, it calls attention to her immigrant status (and
she is one of the patron saints of immigrants today). Her willingness to move, to enter another
world, to stop seeing any other human as foreign, but see Christ in them, to
allow herself to be seen as foreign… in all this we see in her the image of God
authentically lived out, of God who would (as a song puts it) “leave his place
on high, and come for sinful ones to die.”
Compassion moved Frances, moved her miles upon miles. Each of those miles is a tiny reflection of
the chasm Christ crossed to seek and save the lost, to heal us of our sin. We’ve come together around this table to say
thank you. Saying it here has the power
to strengthen us to say it to all those we meet today, all those in whom we can
encounter Christ.
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