St. Frances Xavier Cabrini vows in Rome to take her sisters East

ROME, September 25, 1887 AD — Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was in Rome on September 25, 1887 AD, with three things to ask of the Holy See. She was thirty-seven, the foundress of a congregation of missionary sisters she had begun in Lombardy. That same day, in the Church of the Gesù, she vowed to take her sisters to the missions of the East as soon as Rome approved her order.

She wanted the Holy See’s approval of her Rule, permission to open a house in Rome, and permission from Pope Leo XIII to take her sisters to the foreign missions. The missions she had in mind were in the East, and above all in China. The Bishop of Lodi had approved her institute in December 1880 AD. But the Rule she wrote the next spring was not for a congregation tied to one parish or one diocese. It was for an order that could work anywhere, and only Rome could approve that. Permission for a house in Rome had to come from Cardinal Lucido Maria Parocchi, who governed the diocese of Rome for the Pope.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini had wanted to be a missionary in China since she was a child. Before she was ten she read the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, a magazine of news from the missions, and after that she dreamed of going to China in the footsteps of St. Francis Xavier. When she made her religious vows at Codogno in 1877 AD, she took St. Francis Xavier’s name. Three years later the Bishop of Lodi told her to found a missionary order of her own, and she began it at Codogno on November 14, 1880 AD, with seven young women. She left Codogno for Rome on September 22.

In Rome, two priests took up her cause: Father Angelini, a Jesuit, and Father Bernardini da Portogruaro, a Franciscan. They backed her requests and helped her reach Cardinal Parocchi.

The Church of the Gesù keeps the arm of St. Francis Xavier, the missionary of the East whose name she had taken. The relic mattered to her. At Codogno she once told a Jesuit priest that praying before it had inspired her to found a body of missionary sisters. On September 25 she knelt at St. Francis Xavier’s altar in the Gesù and made her vow. She would go to the missions of the East, and she would take six sisters with her. The vow had one condition: she would go as soon as the Holy See approved her order.

On March 12, 1888 AD, the anniversary of St. Francis Xavier’s canonization, the Holy See approved her Rules and blessed her institute in a Decree of Praise. In 1889 AD Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York asked her to found an orphanage and an Italian school in his city. The request ran against the hopes she had held since childhood and against the vow she had made at the Gesù to go to the missions of the East, so she went back to Rome to ask what she should do. Cardinal Parocchi, Father Angelini and other friends of her order urged her to accept.

That March, about eighteen months after the vow, she asked Pope Leo XIII in a private audience whether she should go to China or to America. He told her to go west, to America, and not east. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini answered the Pope in one word: “Vado” (I go). She knelt, received his blessing, made the sign of the cross and left. After the Pope’s words she had no more doubts, and she decided that as long as she lived, no mission of hers would open in China. On March 19 she left Codogno for New York with six sisters.