As the Church in the United States marks the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini on Friday, Nov. 13, the Italian-born nun who became the first U.S. citizen to be canonized is drawing renewed attention as a champion of immigrants at a time when deportations and detentions are reshaping the lives of migrant families across the country.
Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in 1850 in Lombardy, Italy, the youngest of 13 children. Frail from childhood, she was turned away by more than one religious congregation. In 1880, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, taking the name “Xavier” in honor of the patron of the missions, and hoped to serve in China.
Pope Leo XIII redirected her. Millions of Italians were arriving in the Americas, many of them poor, exploited and cut off from the sacraments. The pope told her to go not to the East but to the West. She arrived in New York in 1889 with six sisters and, though advised to return home, stayed and opened an orphanage within months.
She went on to cross the Atlantic 24 times and found 67 schools, orphanages and hospitals across the United States, Latin America and Europe. She became a U.S. citizen in 1909 and died in Chicago on Dec. 22, 1917, while preparing Christmas sweets for the children in her care.
Pope Pius XII canonized her on July 7, 1946, waiving the customary 50-year waiting period, and in 1950 named her the universal patroness of immigrants.
The significance is hard to overstate. The first U.S. citizen raised to the altars was not born in the United States. She arrived when Italian immigrants were widely ridiculed and viewed by many as a threat to the nation. Her life stands as evidence that immigrants are not only people to be served; they, too, can become saints.
Her work also helps explain how Catholicism took root in this country. She founded schools and hospitals so that uprooted families would not lose their faith along with their homeland and would pass it on to their children. That pattern runs through the history of the American Church: Irish, German, Italian, Polish and many other Catholic immigrants built parishes and schools amid suspicion, and in time gave the country priests, religious and saints.
Florida’s story is no different. Spanish settlers brought the faith to St. Augustine in 1565. In recent decades, Cuban exiles, Haitian families and migrants from across Latin America and the Caribbean have filled churches and strengthened parishes throughout the state. Seen through Mother Cabrini’s life, welcoming migrants is not a distraction from evangelization but one of the main ways the Gospel has spread here.
Her witness comes as the nation’s bishops speak out with growing urgency. In November 2025, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a special message, its first in 12 years, opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” Pope Leo XIV welcomed it and urged U.S. Catholics to heed it. In February, responding to plans to double federal immigration detention capacity, the bishops called the moment “a moral inflection point for our country.”
For many immigrant families, the current climate of raids, detentions and deportations is experienced as persecution. It is to them, in Florida and across the country, that Mother Cabrini’s example speaks most directly. A pope named Leo once sent her to care for migrants in America; today, Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, is calling the country to remember them.
On her feast day, I invite all Catholics and persons of goodwill within the five counties where the Diocese of Palm Beach is established to ask for her intercession with the following prayer:
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, you left your homeland at the call of Christ and knew the loneliness of the stranger. Look with love on all migrants and refugees throughout the world. Watch over those who are detained, those who live in fear of being separated from their families, and those who have been deported far from the homes they built.
Intercede especially for the immigrants of the United States, your adopted country, and of our state of Florida. Keep their families together, protect them from persecution, and let them find in the Church a true mother and a home. Make us, like you, generous and fearless in serving Christ in the stranger.
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, patroness of immigrants, pray for us. Amen.
Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, JCD
