Saint Who Dwelt in City of Angels Is Celebrated

Mother Cabrini -- the first American citizen to be named a Roman Catholic saint -- is being honored this weekend in Los Angeles, where the tiny Italian-born woman once walked the downtown streets, shaded by a straw hat, seeking alms for her immigrant flock.

Canonized in 1946, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini built more than 65 hospitals, schools and orphanages in the United States and elsewhere. The patron saint of immigrants, she was especially fond of Southern California, which reminded her of the Italian Riviera.

Born in the Lombardy region of Italy in 1850, she arrived in Los Angeles a century ago, in July 1905, at the invitation of Bishop Thomas Conaty. According to historian Gloria Ricci Lothrop, the bishop hoped the indefatigable nun would put the city’s Italian immigrants back in the pews of local Roman Catholic churches.

“The Italian immigrants were not much taken with the Irish-dominated clergy in the United States, so many stopped going to church,” said Lothrop, professor emerita of history at Cal State Northridge.

The immigrants hadn’t lost their faith, Lothrop said: “The Italians felt the church was theirs.” But the church they had known back home “was a much more relaxed and more celebratory experience” than the more legalistic American one, she said.

At 10 a.m. today, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony is scheduled to preside at a Jubilee Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, marking the centennial of Mother Cabrini’s arrival in the city and the 125th anniversary of the order she founded in Italy, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

She had wanted to go to China, but Pope Leo XIII had other plans: “Not to the East, but to the West,” he said.

She came to the United States in 1889 and became a naturalized citizen in 1909.

In her journal, she wrote that she knew she was in California when she saw, from the train bringing her west, “orange groves, hedges of eucalyptus, and the most beautiful green meadows of flowers.” Los Angeles, she observed, “is widespread and seems to grow recklessly. Property is very expensive.”

Mother Cabrini drew Italian Americans to her hospitals by naming them after Columbus. But in Los Angeles she immediately recognized the plight of Mexican immigrants as well.

She built Regina Coeli Orphanage downtown. When in the city, she lived in the orphanage complex, praying in the grotto she had built on the grounds from thousands of stones.

When the grotto was being demolished in 1997, Lothrop helped save the stones, hoping to recreate the grotto elsewhere. That plan was dropped because of seismic considerations. Now the hope is to use the stones for a rock garden in the saint’s honor on the grounds of the Villa Scalabrini Retirement Center in Sunland, Lothrop said.

When Mother Cabrini arrived in New York City, the church hierarchy there told her to go back to Italy. But she was warmly received in Los Angeles.

Bishop Conaty soon surprised her with a gala celebration and special Mass at St. Vibiana’s to mark the 25th anniversary of her order. She thought this was a turning point. “We were always hidden until now,” she wrote. “Now everyone is interested in us.”

Angelenos took to the tiny nun who hitched up her horse and buggy and hauled scrap wood from a defunct amusement park to build her orphanage.

“She was wined and dined,” Lothrop said. Mother Cabrini took the Red Car to Venice and a glass-bottom boat to Catalina.

“I was always proud of the fact that she was an American saint of Italian descent who worked here in Los Angeles,” Lothrop said.

According to Lothrop, Mother Cabrini acquired land for her charities after scrutinizing maps with the eye of a general going into battle. A prodigious fundraiser, she bought hundreds of undeveloped acres in and around Burbank, where she built the state’s first “preventorium” to save children from the plague of tuberculosis.

In 1937, the site became Villa Cabrini Academy, a private school for girls. It closed in 1970, and Woodbury University bought the property in 1986 and renovated the Villa Cabrini chapel to serve as its library.

Nancy Costantino of Costa Mesa was a boarding student who graduated from Villa Cabrini in 1949. She remembers when the campus stood among vineyards and olive orchards planted at the saint’s direction: “When we were young, we would go out and pick the olives in our uniforms.”

Costantino said she admires Mother Cabrini for “her work with the disenfranchised and the poor and people who had no other avenue of help ... her total, selfless devotion.”

A 1962 graduate, Roa Brand of La Crescenta is vice president of the Villa Cabrini Alumnae Assn., which will hold a gala dinner tonight and brunch Sunday at Woodbury. The alumnae plan to donate the money they raise to the Missionary Sisters and to Woodbury, which has preserved elements of their chapel and other academy artifacts.

A manager at Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, Brand said she now appreciates what a good businesswoman Mother Cabrini was: “I look up to her for that.”

Coming to Los Angeles from New York for the event is Sister Lucille Souza, the head of the Missionary Sisters’ Stella Maris Province, which includes the United States, Australia, the Philippines and Swaziland. Souza graduated from Villa Cabrini in 1962 and joined the Missionary Sisters the same year.

Souza noted that Mother Cabrini always addressed the mundane needs of the poor before bringing up religion. Discrimination and battered self-esteem were routinely part of the immigrant experience. And, Souza said, Mother Cabrini, an immigrant herself, “saw her people losing all sense of who they were, losing their dignity ... and she said: ‘Don’t forget who you are. You have something to offer this country.’ ”

In 1916, the year before Mother Cabrini died at age 67, the Knights of Columbus built a one-room chapel for her high in the Verdugo Hills. She often prayed in the cozy little chapel.

In the 1970s, the chapel was moved to the grounds of Burbank’s St. Francis Xavier Church and school at 3801 Scott Road. The Italian Catholic Federation added a small museum and library, whose treasures include one of the saint’s white nightgowns. (On Sunday, the shrine will be open to the public from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.)

For Lothrop, Mother Cabrini is a model of service to others, all the more compelling because Los Angeles was her town too.

“She was here. We can walk the streets that she walked,” Lothrop said. “It makes you feel that sanctity is something that’s really attainable, not just something you read about in a book of saints.

“Somebody who bought property in Burbank can achieve sanctity at the same time.”