In the summer of 1889, a reporter for the New York Sun went looking for a story in the Italian quarter and found one he did not expect. “During the past few weeks,” he wrote, “dark-featured women, in the garb of Sisters of Charity, have been going through the Italian quarters in the Bend and in Little Italy, climbing up dark, steep, and narrow stairways, diving down into foul basements, and into dens which even a New York policeman does not care to enter without assistance.”1 The women, he noted, were “all slight and delicate,” and “few can speak English.” He seems to have been unsure whether to be amused or moved.
He had stumbled onto Frances Xavier Cabrini, three months off the boat, and onto the first American chapter of one of the strangest careers in the history of American charity. What the reporter could not have known was that the smallest and least likely figure in that squalid scene—a frail Italian woman who could not make herself understood—would, before she was finished, build a network of orphanages, schools, and hospitals across two continents, and become the first citizen of the United States to be canonized a saint.
The children were there before she was. In the New York City of 1889, orphans slept in the streets. Tenements teemed with families and with vermin; men worked fourteen-hour days at killing labor; there was no safety net beneath any of it; and for the newly arrived Italians there was, on top of everything else, contempt. The sisters recorded within days of landing what they had already heard about the hatred awaiting their countrymen. The suffering sat on the doorstep of the richest city on earth, in plain sight of everyone—shamefully, almost no one went down into the dens.
The scandal at the center of this story is not that the children were hidden. It is that they were visible, and that a great and prosperous people had taught itself, with impressive discipline, not to see them. It took a foreigner to see. It took a woman who had crossed an ocean to notice what the neighbors had trained themselves to overlook. How does a civilization arrange to keep the suffering on its own doorstep out of focus?
Pope Francis, marking the centenary of her death, gave this failure of vision its proper name. He called it indifference, and he was careful to distinguish it from the failure of policy, which is a separate thing. Migrants, he said, “certainly need good laws, development programs, organization; but they also need, always and first and foremost, love, friendship, human closeness; they need to be listened to, looked in the eye, accompanied.”2 I will leave the laws and the programs to those whose office it is to argue about them. What Cabrini offers is the other thing, the prior thing—what no statute can supply: to be loved, to be accompanied, to be looked in the eye. She looked people in the eye. That was her genius, and it is harder than it sounds.
She was, by every account, the wrong person for the job. She had been a sickly child and remained a frail woman; the religious order she first hoped to enter turned her away on account of her health. Since girlhood she had dreamed of the missions of the East, of following Francis Xavier to China, and she had built her whole imagination around that vocation. It was Pope Leo XIII who redirected her with a single sentence that has outlived him: “Not to the East, Cabrini, but to the West.” She wanted China and was handed the tenements of Manhattan. She had to open her eyes, as Francis put it, to see where God was actually sending her—not where she had chosen to go, but where the way had already been prepared. At times that is what a vocation tends to feel like from the inside: not the fulfillment of your plan, but its interruption.
And then, having been sent, she refused to be turned back. When she reached New York City the arrangements had collapsed—no house, no money, nothing ready. Archbishop Michael Corrigan, surveying the wreckage, suggested she return to Italy. She declined. She stayed; she begged in the streets when the orphanage filled beyond its walls; she bought a property the Jesuits had unloaded cheap in the settled resolution that it had no water, whereupon she found water. One begins to understand why the people who told her no tended, in the end, to regret it. Pope Francis counted sixty-seven institutions raised, as he put it, out of nothing. Out of nothing is about right, if by nothing we mean a frail woman with no English, no money, and no intention of going home.
It is easy to turn Cabrini into a story about grit—the little woman with the iron will, the patron saint of not taking no for an answer. There is truth in that. The iron will was real, but I contend it was not the engine. She told us plainly what the engine was. Her motto, borrowed from Saint Paul, was that she could do all things in the One who strengthened her. She did not do all things because she was strong. She did all things because she had stopped relying on being strong.
Her sisters were Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is the claim that divine love is not an abstraction hovering over the world but a particular thing, with a particular location, that beats—love made flesh. That is why Cabrini could go down into the dens the policeman avoided. She was not administering to “the poor.” She was looking at this child, and then that one. Francis said she recognized in each of them the face of Christ, and pointed to the parable in which the King explains that whatever was done to the least was done to him. That is the whole of it. The opposite of indifference is not pity felt at a comfortable distance and at no personal cost. The opposite of indifference is attention—the decision to let a particular face interrupt you, and to act on it before you have finished counting what it will cost.
We do not have her tenements, exactly, but we have our own dens, and we have grown more sophisticated, not less, at declining to see them. The suffering on the modern doorstep is real and the machinery for keeping it out of focus is now global and frictionless. One can scroll past more human misery before breakfast than the Sun’s reporter saw in a career. That is the danger of the age. Indifference no longer looks like cruelty. It looks like being informed but too busy, being reasonably compassionate in the aggregate toward people we will never have to look at. Cabrini stands as a rebuke to all of it, and the rebuke is not “care more” but “come down here”—into the particular, into the basement, to the one face you would rather keep safely at the level of a category.
The world tends to assume that its great deeds are done by its great people: the large, the loud, the credentialed, the ones with the resources and the standing. Cabrini’s life is a quiet argument to the contrary. The mightiest work in that New York of 1889 was done by its least likely servant—a woman the age would have walked straight past on the street. This tiny non-English speaking Italian nun went down into the dens and the dens were never the same.
Cabrini’s example leaves us with an inconvenient mandate. She did not love “the poor”. She loved one person, and then the next, and she went down the stairs to do it. The dens are still there. So are the people who will not go down into them. What the age lacks is not a great soul but a small one willing to go down anyway. And what waits at the bottom is not a statistic but a face, and it is ours to go down and look at. Before, not after, we have finished counting what it costs.
Notes
- “Missionaries to Our Italians,” The Sun (New York), June 30, 1889. Digitized by the Library of Congress, Chronicling America (LCCN sn83030272).
- Pope Francis, “Address to Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini,” Clementine Hall, December 9, 2017. The Holy See, vatican.va.
John Sandy
John M. Sandy is a judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals. A graduate of the University of St. Thomas, where he studied philosophy and Catholic studies, he writes on the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution, and Catholic social thought and culture, with work forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law. He hosts The Catholic Passage Podcast.He lives in Spirit Lake, Iowa.
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