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Leo XIV is the First American Pope, but this Woman is the First American Saint
You know him; get to know her
Much has been made over the past three weeks about the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost (now Leo XIV) as the first American pope. No one saw it coming, and most believed that there would never be a pope from the United States. Long before Leo, however, an even more astonishing thing occurred: a U.S. citizen actually became a saint. I say “U.S. citizen” because this saint was born and raised in Italy, but as we are a nation of immigrants (more on that in a bit), it’s quite fitting that our first saint was an immigrant herself. Let’s meet St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, known to most as Mother Cabrini.
Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850 in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, roughly 20 miles southeast of Milan. She was the thirteenth child of a farming family, and from a young age dreamed of becoming a missionary, inspired by the lives of the saints her father often read to her and her siblings. She so wanted to serve in the Far East like the legendary Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier that upon taking her final vows as a nun she added Xavier to her name.
However, at the time such a missionary role was confined to men, and even her attempts to become a nun were initially rejected because of her poor…
