Seven American women enter St. Frances Xavier Cabrini's order at West Park

WEST PARK, New York, September 21, 1891 AD — Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan of New York came up the Hudson today to Manresa, the villa at West Park, and gave seven American women the habit of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. They are the first Americans to enter the congregation, which came over from Italy two and a half years ago.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini founded that congregation and governs it. She had wanted to open a mission in China. Pope Leo XIII sent her west instead, to the Italian emigrants of America: “Not to the East, but to the West!” She landed at New York in 1889 AD with six sisters, and Archbishop Corrigan’s welcome was cold. When the school and the orphanage ran into difficulties he urged the sisters to go back to Italy. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini refused, standing on the commitment she had made to the Pope.

The sisters’ work in the city began in the Italian quarter. Infant mortality there was very high, large families lived in a single room, and the children were out begging or shining shoes for a few cents.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini moved the Italian Sacred Heart Orphanage up to Manresa in June last year and made the house the Institute’s novitiate for its American foundations. Two Jesuits had praised her work to Father Campbell, who governed their order’s province in New York, and Father Campbell wrote to her in Rome offering to sell her the Jesuits’ novitiate house on the river. The price was low for a reason: the estate had no fresh water, and the walk down to the Hudson and back for every pot of it had become too great a burden for the Jesuits. She went over the grounds and pointed out where to dig, and the well sunk on that spot has supplied the orphanage ever since.

A postulant is a woman testing whether she belongs in the order: she has made no promises and is free to leave. Taking the habit begins the novitiate, the years of training a woman goes through before she makes her vows.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini is forty-one, and she has been back in the country eight days. She landed on September 13 with twenty-nine more sisters, brought over from Le Havre, and took them straight up to Manresa. Most of them stayed on at the villa to rest.

The chapel there, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini wrote to her sisters in Italy, “inspires one with great devotion and recollection.” Archbishop Corrigan came out to the house today in his ceremonial robes. The seven had worn the white veil of a postulant for a year; they took the veils off in that chapel and received the habit from his hands. He performed the ceremony, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini wrote, “according to our ritual with impressive decorum and devotion.” Then he preached to the seven, and his words, she wrote, “sank deeply into the heart of each Religious.”

Congratulating the sisters afterwards, Archbishop Corrigan said the ceremony was always as impressive as if it were being performed for the first time. “The 21st September came as a dear and moving feast,” St. Frances Xavier Cabrini wrote of the day, and the sisters spent “a happy and heavenly day in community.”