The film “Cabrini,” due out March 8, is described as a biopic about the “influential” Italian woman Francesca Cabrini, who in New York “combats government, church and bigotry, championing society’s marginalized with entrepreneurship and grit, creating a compassionate, enduring legacy.”

That woman, now called St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, traveled the world, visiting Seattle three times — founding an orphanage, a school and a hospital and even becoming a U.S. citizen here.

Dreams of being a missionary

Born July 15, 1850, in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, Francesca was the youngest child in a faith-filled family. From childhood, she dreamed of being a missionary. She dressed her dolls as nuns and played “abbess” with them, making them pray for long hours. In school, geography was her favorite subject. Her classmates remembered her “poring with fixed rapture over the pages of the atlas, imagining her travels to distant places.” But her ambition to be a missionary never received any encouragement, not even from her family.

“She was so small in size that I used to call her ‘my tiny one,’” her parish priest recalled many years later. “But in spirit she was big, strong, expansive, and filled with the grace of God.”

After her parents died, Francesca’s pastor invited her to teach girls at the parish school. Her heart was set on religious life, but because she was considered frail, she was rejected when she applied to religious communities. In 1880, at the age of 30, Francesca at last fulfilled her dream by establishing the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Codogno, Italy.

On the first night in the convent, the poverty of the sisters was such that they took their meals on benches, with only a single spoon to pass around. Nevertheless, they found “great joy and peace with the spiritual hope that our strength may increase every day,” wrote Francesca, now known as Mother Cabrini.

She took as her motto the words, “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me,” and she believed in the power of those words.

A statue of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron of immigrants, is seen after its unveiling Oct. 12, 2020, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. (CNS photo/Carlo Allegri, Reuters)

Sent to America to help Italian immigrants

Love of God motivated everything Mother Cabrini did and filled her with tireless energy.

“We should traverse the whole world to make Jesus Christ known and loved,” she told her community of sisters. “A God who loves us so much! Can we not love him with all our souls, no matter what the sacrifice?”

The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart expanded rapidly. The local bishop told Mother Cabrini there were enough sisters, and she should not admit any more.

“Monsignor, if the Lord is blessing the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart with applicants, don’t you think it’s a sign that he wants them to serve him in this community?” she asked the bishop. “There will never be enough sisters to do all the work that Jesus wants us to accomplish!”

Mother Cabrini established a series of houses in Italy before Pope Leo XIII asked her to go to the United States to minister to the Italian immigrants there. At that time, 50,000 to 100,000 Italians were moving to the U.S. each year.

‘Not far from the North Pole’

On March 31, 1889, Mother Cabrini reached New York City and began founding schools, orphanages and hospitals in the face of huge obstacles. She approached the task with her legendary energy.

“With your grace, my sweet Jesus, I will follow you until the end of my days and forever,” she would pray. “Help me, Jesus, because I wish to do so with ardor and speed.”

Mother Cabrini didn’t stay in one place. Her work took her to Nicaragua, Brazil, Chicago and New Orleans before arriving in Seattle in 1903.

“Here we are, not far from the North Pole,” Mother Cabrini said after her arrival. She described young Seattle in glowing terms: “This city is charmingly situated, and is growing so rapidly that it will become another New York. … The town of Seattle spreads over twenty hills; and though it is fifty degrees north latitude, it enjoys an interminable spring because of the current that comes from Japan. … The bishop is very good. His name is (Edward J.) O’Dea, and he is happy to have us in his diocese because we bear the name of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”

Seattle had a large population of Italian immigrants, and Mother Cabrini found that some of them hadn’t seen a church for more than 20 years, and some for 50 years. She immediately set about remedying the situation, founding Mount Carmel Mission on Beacon Hill in October 1903, which included a temporary mission chapel, school, convent and Sacred Heart Orphanage.

Mother Cabrini returned to Seattle in 1909, becoming a United States citizen on Oct. 13.

In 1914, the sisters moved the orphanage to a location on Lake Washington that Mother Cabrini had seen in a dream. The orphanage eventually became a school and is now Villa Academy.

Declared a saint in 1946

On her final visit to Seattle in 1915, Mother Cabrini ran into difficulties. With much trouble and many prayers, she had acquired the Perry Hotel on Madison Street, between Boren and Terry avenues. When she told Bishop O’Dea that she wanted to establish a hospital there, objections arose. It was feared a new hospital would compete with Providence Hospital, the city’s other Catholic hospital. Bishop O’Dea forbade Mother Cabrini to continue the project.

The opposition devastated her.

She had recourse to prayer, and may have come to pray at St. James Cathedral, just a block away. Eventually, clarity came.

“It is I who have alienated the blessing of God,” Mother Cabrini told her sisters. “When I shall have gone, everything will be better.”

When she left Seattle in November 1916, Mother Cabrini was already very ill. But Bishop O’Dea soon relented, and before Mother Cabrini died at age 67 on Dec. 22, 1917, she had the happiness of knowing that Columbus Hospital was flourishing. (Renamed Saint Cabrini Hospital in 1956, it closed in 1990.)

Mother Cabrini established 67 institutions — schools, orphanages and hospitals — in Europe, Central and South America and the U.S. She was declared a saint by Pope Pius XII on July 7, 1946, and proclaimed patron of immigrants in 1950.

At St. James Cathedral in Seattle, Mother Cabrini is commemorated with two statues and a bronze-relief plaque. When the cathedral was rededicated in 1994, relics of Mother Cabrini were sealed beneath the altar.

Quotes are taken from “Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini” by Mother Saverio de Maria, MSC, translated by Rose Basile Green.