13 November 2019 - Wednesday of the 32nd week of Ordinary Time - Mother Cabrini - Psalm 82: 3-4 and 6-7

       As I was thinking of Mother Cabrini today in light of our readings, I thought that the first verse we hear in the 82nd psalm was very appropriate indeed: “Defend the lowly and the fatherless; render justice to the afflicted and the destitute.  Rescue the lowly and the poor; from the hand of the wicked deliver them.”         
        I knew Mother Cabrini’s name from Cabrini Green, an infamous housing project that was built in Chicago in the 1940s near the downtown area with the intention to provide safe affordable for the poor.  In fact, my grandmother grew up as a girl in an apartment in downtown Chicago just a few blocks away from that site, although this housing project did not exist at the time that she lived there.  However, the good intentions of building Cabrini housing project and naming it after a saint who helped the poor became meaningless; this housing project became a symbol of how many housing projects in our country that were designed to help the poor became absolute failures, perpetuating a cycle of poverty, desperation, and violence. 

        Mother Cabrini was born near Milan, Italy.  She was rejected from joining several religious orders, having been told that her frail health would not be well suited to being a missionary.   She founded a new religious congregation, the Missionary sisters of the Sacred Heart.  Her dream had been to be a missionary sister to China, but her bishop and Pope Leo XIII both decided that she and her sisters would be better suited to be missionaries to the United States, which was attracting many Italian immigrants at the time.  Mother Cabrini and six sisters of her congregation sailed for America in 1889 where they established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. She worked in the United States until her death in 1917.  Since she became an American citizen, she became the first American citizen to be named a saint, which occurred in 1946.  Mother Cabrini followed the Lord’s call to minister to the poor and the downtrodden, to lift them out of there desperate circumstances and to help them realize their dignity as children of God.  May her example inspire us in our lives of discipleship.