Nov 13 – S Frances Xavier Cabrini

It’s the Feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, 3rd Class, with the color of White, and a commemoration of St. Didacus. In this episode: today in Church History: “Vatican Cardinal Clarifies the SSPX’s Status (2005)”, the meditation: “The Weeds Cast into the Fire”, a preview of this week’s episode of The SSPX Podcast: “Will Heaven Ever Get Boring? – The Roman Catechism – Episode 14”, and today’s thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

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There’s a stone house in the foothills west of Denver that owes something to a donkey. Each evening, girls from a Denver orphanage loaded its cart with stones from a nearby quarry. The stones would be waiting for the builders the next morning. The girls were helping to build their own summer home.

Alongside Saint Didacus, whose Collect we just prayed, today let’s look at Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. She was the one who wanted those girls to have a place in the mountains.

Cabrini had once hoped to go to China. But Pope Leo the Thirteenth sent her west, to serve Italian immigrants in America. When she arrived in New York in 1889 with six of her sisters, the house they’d been promised for an orphanage fell through. The archbishop advised her to go back to Italy. She stayed, and the sisters opened their orphanage. In time, their work took them as far as the mining districts of Colorado, where Cabrini visited Italian workers and their families.

That was how she came across the land near Lookout Mountain. She saw what it could mean for the girls at Denver’s Queen of Heaven Orphanage. They could spend weeks outdoors, look after the animals, and get to know a world beyond the city. There was one drawback. The sisters had to haul drinking water up from the bottom of the canyon. According to the shrine’s account, when they told Cabrini how badly they needed water, she pointed to a rock and told them to move it and dig. They found a spring.

On her last visit, she went up the hill with some sisters and children. They gathered white stones and laid them out in the shape of a heart with a cross above it. You can still see that heart at the shrine today. Pilgrims climb the hill past the Stations of the Cross, and many take home water from the spring. There’s also a grotto modeled on Lourdes where people come to ask the intercession of the patron saint of immigrants.

Cabrini could have stopped at finding beds for the girls in Denver. She wanted them to have summers, too. And up on that hill, with stones the children could pick up themselves, she showed them whose Heart had made room for them. It was the same Heart that had sent her across the ocean.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

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What is the SSPX Podcast?

The SSPX Podcast is produced by Angelus Press, which has as its mission the fortification of traditional Catholics so that they can defend the Faith, and reaching out to those who have not yet found Tradition.

What is the SSPX?

The main goal of the Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic Faith in its fullness and purity, to teach its truths, and to diffuse its virtues, especially through the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional liturgy are its primary means of bringing this life of grace to souls.

Although the traditional Latin Mass is the most visible and public expression of the work of the Society, we are committed to defending Catholic Tradition in its entirety: all of Catholic doctrine and morals as the Church has always defended them. What people need is the Catholic Faith, without compromise, with all the truth and beauty which accompanies it.

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