13 November 2020 - Friday of the 32nd week in Ordinary Time - 2 John 4-9

     Today, we hear from the 2nd letter of John.  Modern scholars believe that the three letters of John were written during in the same time frame, probably by a person living in Ephesus in the last two decades of the first century.  The second letter of John is the shortest book of the New Testament, only 13 verses long in one chapter, less than a page long in most Bibles.  The elder writing this letter was addressing a community with a lot of problems, including its denial of incarnation of Jesus as true God and true man.  The author calls on the community to remembers Christ’s commandment to love one another. 

      As we hear this exhortation to love in the midst of the troubles and problems of our complicated lived reality, we celebrate a saint who brought a lot of love to the harsh reality of her world:  St Francis Xavier Cabrini.  She felt the call to become a nun when she was a teenager growing up in Italy in the middle of the 19^th 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 travel to the United States with 6 other nuns from her order in 1889 to work amongst the Italian immigrants there.   She devoted herself to workmen with the immigrant population in the US, founding school, hospitals, and orphanages.  She died in Chicago in 1917.  I first heard of Mother Cabrini as a child growing up in Chicago, as the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project in downtown Chicago was named after her.  It wasn’t until later on in my adult life that I found out that my paternal grandmother grew up in an apartment building in downtown Chicago only a few blocks south of Cabrini-Green.  Mother Cabrini was  canonized a saint in 1946, the first American citizen to receive such an honor.  She is the patron saint of immigrants. As we honor St Francis Xavier Cabrini today in our mass, may we see her as a great example of the love and service in which we all should live out our faith.