Doing What Needed to Be Done

The Life of Mother Cabrini

By: Ann Bottenhorn

The nineteenth century was an age of grand accomplishment: electricity, telegraph and telephone, automobiles. Perhaps some of the most astonishing accomplishments, however, came from a diminutive, frail Italian woman. In twenty-seven short years, she established sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and hospitals.

She founded a religious order worldwide that, at her death, numbered nearly two thousand. She did it all simply by “doing the work that needs to be done.” She believed absolutely that she could do all things in Christ who strengthened her—even ordinary duties.

“If we’d stayed in Italy, we’d have had to eat each other.” Italy in the nineteenth century was struggling financially, with overcrowded cities and rampant unemployment. In the meantime, industrial expansion in the rest of Europe and in America offered a tantalizing promise of prosperity. So millions of Italians headed west. Between 1889 and 1917, Italian immigrants to the United States alone topped four million. The vast majority of these crowded into ghettos, filled low-paying jobs, and scratched out a menial existence without the benefit of teacher, doctor, or priest.

Into this desolation stepped “Mother” Frances…

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