13 November 2025 - Mother Cabrini - homily for Thursday of the 32nd week in Ordinary Time - Luke 17:20-25

Mother Cabrini is the saint we celebrate her name. I associate Mother Cabrini’s name with the infamous Cabrini Green 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. Unfortunately, the good intentions of building Cabrini housing project and naming it after a saint who helped the poor were not helpful; this housing project became a symbol of how many housing projects in our country that were designed to help the poor became failures, perpetuating a cycle of poverty, desperation, and violence. The entire complex had been torn down by the year 2011. 

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 suited to missionary work. 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. Mother Cabrini became the first American citizen to be named a saint when she was canonized 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.

Our Gospel today presents a question that the Pharisees ask Jesus about when the kingdom of God will come. When should not worry about when the end of times will come, but rather we should be concerned about how we ourselves are proclaiming God’s kingdom and helping to build up his kingdom here on earth in the present day. We can see in many of the saints like Mother Cabrini and many of the Catholic faithful of how they did this in their daily lives. May we follow that example.