Told to go home, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini gets two schools in Rome

ROME, September 28, 1887 AD — Three days after she arrived in Rome, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini put the Rule of her young order before Cardinal Lucido Maria Parocchi and asked his permission to open a house in the city. He refused, and told her to go back to Codogno. Within weeks, after he had talked her request over with Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Parocchi told her she could open two schools in Rome instead of one.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini was thirty-seven, and her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were not yet seven years old. She had come to Rome for three things: the Holy See’s approval of her Rule, a house in the city, and permission to send her sisters to the missions. Cardinal Parocchi governed the diocese of Rome for the Pope as his Vicar General, so her requests went to him.

The order had begun in November 1880 AD, when she and a few companions moved into an abandoned Franciscan monastery at Codogno, in Lombardy. The Bishop of Lodi approved it the next month. She wrote its Rule in prayer and on retreat between April 29 and June 25, 1881 AD. The Rule set up an order meant to work anywhere, not one tied to a single diocese. For an order like that, she wanted Rome’s approval.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini left Codogno on September 22 and was in Rome by the 25th. Nobody in the city knew her. On her first day she went straight to the Church of the Gesù and knelt at the altar of St. Francis Xavier, the saint whose name she had taken. There she vowed to go to the missions of the East with six sisters as soon as the Holy See approved her order. A Jesuit priest and a Franciscan friar helped her get an audience with Cardinal Parocchi.

Three days later Cardinal Parocchi received her, with one sister beside her. She handed him the Rule and made her requests. Cardinal Parocchi answered her: “A Community founded only seven years ago wishes to establish itself in Rome and to be approved? This is too much! In Rome there are already many such Communities. And then, the funds? Do you have at least 150,000 lire […] to build a house? Return, return to Codogno: we will talk about it some other time.”

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini came out of the audience pale, a tear running down her cheek, saying, “Deo Gratias!” (Thanks be to God). The sister with her was crying. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini told the sister: “Be calm; the Lord will soon change his heart.”

Cardinal Parocchi had sent the Canossian Sisters, an order already a hundred years old, to India and China, and had recently brought them to Rome to run a small school. In the view of a bishop whom Cardinal Parocchi had consecrated, the cardinal had the Canossians in mind and felt bound to tell a young order to grow stronger before it came to Rome.

Cardinal Parocchi had also been struck by how calmly and modestly she took his refusal. He took her request to Pope Leo XIII and talked it over with him. Not long after the first audience, he received her a second time. Cardinal Parocchi asked her: “Are you ready to obey? Well then, found two houses instead of one.” For the first of the two schools, he offered her the papal elementary school on the Via Nomentana to run.

In her first months in Rome, some people objected to the name of her order. They thought it new, and immodest, for women to call themselves missionaries. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini answered them humbly but firmly. The Blessed Virgin, she said, is called Regina Apostolorum (Queen of the Missionaries). And on the day He rose from the dead, Christ gave women the task of carrying the news to the Apostles. She quoted Christ’s words to the women at the tomb in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “Ite, nuntiate fratribus meis” (Go, announce to my brethren).

On October 31, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini and five sisters opened their house on the Via Nomentana, near the church of the martyr Saint Agnes, and started the school. They lived in the strictest poverty. More girls came than the house could hold, and the sisters slept on straw mattresses. On December 6 Cardinal Parocchi came to the house and brought the Blessed Sacrament to be kept there.

On March 12, 1888 AD, the Holy See issued a Decree of Praise for her order: it acknowledged the Rule she had presented and gave the order its blessing. It came on the anniversary of the canonization of St. Francis Xavier, at whose altar she had knelt on her first day in Rome.