The archbishop who urged them home gave them the habit

WEST PARK, New York, September 21, 1891 AD — Seven American women stood in the chapel at Manresa, the villa above the Hudson at West Park. They took off the white veils they had worn for a year. Then Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan of New York gave each of them the habit of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The same Archbishop had once urged the sisters of that order to go back to Italy.

The seven are the first Americans to join the order. It came over from Italy two and a half years ago.

Not to the East, but to the West

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini started that order and runs it. What she had wanted was a mission in China. Pope Leo XIII sent her the other way — “Not to the East, but to the West!” He sent her to the Italian families who had crossed the ocean to America.

She landed in New York in 1889 AD with six sisters. The Archbishop’s welcome was cold. The sisters went to work in the Italian quarter of the city. A great many babies died there, and big families lived in a single room. Children were out begging or shining shoes for a few cents.

Then the school and the orphanage ran into trouble, and that was when the Archbishop urged the sisters to go home. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini would not take them. She had promised the Pope she would do this work, and she stood on that.

The Jesuits had a house above the Hudson, and it was going cheap. There was a reason for that. The estate had no fresh water. Every pot of it had to be carried up from the river, and that walk had become too much for the Jesuits. Two Jesuits told the priest in charge of their order in New York that her work was good. So he wrote to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Rome and offered to sell her the place. She went over the grounds and pointed out where to dig. The well they sank on that spot has given the orphanage water ever since.

In June last year she moved the Italian Sacred Heart Orphanage up to the villa, which is called Manresa. Manresa is also where women who join her order in America do their training.

In his ceremonial robes

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

The chapel there, she wrote to her sisters back in Italy, “inspires one with great devotion and recollection.” That is the room where the seven were today.

Archbishop Corrigan came up the river to the house in his ceremonial robes. Each of the seven had worn the white veil of a postulant for a whole year. They took the veils off. Then the man who had once urged their order to go home to Italy gave them the habit with his own hands.

He did it, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini wrote, “according to our ritual with impressive decorum and devotion.” Then he preached to the seven. His words, she wrote, “sank deeply into the heart of each Religious.”

Afterwards he came to say well done to the new sisters, and told them that giving the habit was always as moving as if it were being done 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.”