She promised to go East. The Pope sent her west.

ROME, September 25, 1887 AD — On September 25, 1887 AD, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini knelt in a church in Rome. There she vowed to go to the missions of the East. She was thirty-seven, and she led an order of missionary sisters that she had started in Lombardy.

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. After that she dreamed of going to China to follow St. Francis Xavier, the missionary of the East. When she made her religious vows at Codogno in 1877 AD, she took his name. Three years later she began her order at Codogno with seven young women.

She came to Rome in September 1887 AD to ask the Church’s leaders to approve her order’s Rule. She also wanted Pope Leo XIII to let her take her sisters to the foreign missions. The Bishop of Lodi had already approved her order. But her Rule was written for sisters who could work anywhere, and only the Church’s leaders in Rome could approve that. In Rome a Jesuit priest, Father Angelini, helped her.

An arm in a church in Rome

The Church of the Gesù in Rome keeps the arm of St. Francis Xavier. That relic mattered to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. Back at Codogno, she once told a Jesuit priest about it. Praying before the arm, she said, had inspired her to start a group 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 Church’s leaders in Rome approved her order.

The Church’s leaders in Rome approved her order’s Rules on March 12, 1888 AD. It was the same date on which St. Francis Xavier had been declared a saint.

China or America

Then, in 1889 AD, Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York asked her to open an orphanage and an Italian school in his city. His request went against all she had hoped for since she was a child. It also went against the vow she had made at the Gesù to go East. So she went back to Rome to ask what she should do.

Cardinal Lucido Maria Parocchi, who governed the diocese of Rome for the Pope, told her to say yes. Father Angelini and other friends of her order told her the same.

That March, about eighteen months after her vow, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini met Pope Leo XIII in a private audience. She asked him whether she should go to China or to America. The Pope told her to go west, to America, and not east.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini answered him 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. She decided that as long as she lived, no mission of hers would open in China.

On March 19, 1889 AD, she left Codogno for New York with six sisters.