As we hear
the leper giving glory to God for the healing that he had his life, we might
wonder: In our own lives, how often do we show our thanks and gratitude to God
and to others? In our modern world, we
have so much occupying our time and we are pulled in so many different
directions. Often, we often don’t take the time to express our gratitude and
our thankfulness. Such an attitude might
not even cross our minds. Since we in our society are so used to our
comfortable modern lifestyle, perhaps we have a sense of entitlement as well –
perhaps we don’t even feel the sense of gratitude and thankfulness that perhaps
our parents’ and grandparents’ generation felt, where the struggle for daily
survival was much more difficult.
The saint we celebrate today is St
Francis Xavier Cabrini, a woman who felt the call to become a nun when she was
a teenager growing up in Italy in the middle of the 19th century,
but due to her ill health and her need to help her large family, she was not
allowed to enter the convent. After
working at a school for girls after her parents’ death, at the request of her
Bishop she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, an order
established to care for poor children in schools and hospitals. Pope Leo XIII asked her to come to the United
States with 6 other nuns from her order in 1889 to work among the Italian
immigrants. She did much work with the
immigrant population in the US, founding school, hospitals, and
orphanages. She died in Chicago in
1917. The Cambrini-Green public housing
project in downtown Chicago was named after her. She was canonized a saint in 1946, the first
American citizen to receive such an honor.
She is the patron saint of immigrants.
As
we think of St Francis Xavier Cabrini and so many of the other saints, may we
see them as great examples of the thanksgiving and gratitude all of us should
live on our journey of faith.
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