The Catholic Educator
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The Catholic Educator Quarterly Journal of the Catholic Education Foundation Calendar Reminder: Annual Priests’ Seminar Seton Hall, New Jersey July 14-16, 2020 Volume 27 – Winter 2019 A Word From Our Editor Homily preached for the Pilgrimage Mass of Holy Innocents Parish in Manhattan to the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini on 21 December 2019 The Archdiocese of New York – and Holy Innocents Parish in particular – recently hosted the Pilgrim Virgin statue of Fatima. Today, you show yourselves as loyal sons and daughters of Mary by imitating her example by embarking upon a pilgrimage yourselves. The phenomenon of pilgrimage is as old as Christianity itself; indeed, it goes all the way back to our elder brothers in Judaism. And the New Testament informs us that the Holy Family observed the sacred tradition of pilgrimage, which Our Lord Himself adopted into His own personal practice and spirituality. A mini-pilgrimage from Midtown Manhattan to the tip of the Boro is a microcosmic symbol of the much larger journey of the People of God moving from the Church-Here-Below to the Church-Beyond. Today we hope to gain a glimpse of that “Church-Beyond” through the person of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. May she help us do so. I like to say that I grew up in Madre Cabrini’s shadow because, as a boy in grammar school, I played in a park in Newark, New Jersey, named for her and where a statue of her still graces its entrance. For those of you not too familiar with this saint, permit me to rehearse but a few of the more salient elements of her life story. Francesca Cabrini was born in 1850 in a small village near Milan. As a young girl, she was very much taken by the stories of missionaries and wanted to join a missionary order. Plagued by poor health, she was denied admission to the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, who had taught her and through whom she had gained her teaching certificate. Undaunted, Francesca founded her own religious community, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, having gathered around her seven young women. With equal parts of prayerfulness and resourcefulness, she surfaced people willing to contribute to her new community with their time, treasure and talent. Her vision for the new institute was that they would be missionaries to China, for which she sought and obtained an audience with Pope Leo XIII to gain his blessing (it seems it was quite simple to get access to the Pope in those days). To her surprise and probable disappointment, Leo told her: “Not to the East, but to the West.” His goal for her and her Sisters was that they would establish a beachhead in the United States to provide pastoral care for the burgeoning population of Italian immigrants, who were not great Catholics when they reached Ellis Island and became even worse after a while in the anti- Catholic environment of nineteenth-century America. In New York City, she established schools, hospitals and orphanages; her outreach extended to such far-flung American cities as Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Denver, Los Angeles, Omaha, St. Louis, and Seattle. Her work also brought her renown worldwide, with requests for her to open schools in Europe, Central and South America. Her love and respect for the United 2 States was so strong that she became a naturalized citizen in 1909. She traversed the Atlantic Ocean 23 times – quite remarkable for a woman who was terrified of sea travel! By the time of her death in 1917, she had established 67 institutions – one for each year of her life. She did her great work for Christ and His Church out of a sincere conviction that God willed it and, that if He willed it, He would provide the means to accomplish His will. Her reputation for sanctity was so great that Pope Pius XII canonized her in 1946, thus making her the first American citizen to be named a saint. In 1950, he declared her Patroness of Immigrants. Mother Cabrini’s remains are entombed in the altar which lies before us; well, not all of her, parts of which were sent on to Chicago and Italy! This shrine is but a five-minute walk from The Cloisters Museum (part of the Metropolitan Museum network), which houses the most magnificent collection of medieval religious art and artifacts. For years, I have delighted in giving tours of The Cloisters to Catholic school children and then capping the day by offering Holy Mass for them over Mother Cabrini’s holy body. Undoubtedly, you heard that some months ago, a process was established by Mayor DiBlasio’s wife to nominate women who had made important contributions to life in New York City. The hands-down winner was Mother Cabrini. Were you surprised to learn that the will of the people was coopted by the Mayor’s wife and the other secularists who run the City? Interestingly, Governor Mario Cuomo mounted his white steed to come to the rescue by declaring that he would take responsibility for erecting a monument to our saint of the day. Given his less-than- pious proclivities, I suspect it was Italian sensibilities more than Catholic ones, that were offended by the snub. It likewise gave him the chance to engage in yet another confrontation with the Mayor. I imagine that Mother Cabrini is probably not exactly ecstatic with having Cuomo for a defender. At any rate, as the saying goes, God can indeed “write straight with crooked lines.” We know that when the Church presents us with saints for veneration, she also does so because she wants us to take them for emulation. Therefore, what are some lessons we should take from this holy and valiant woman? Let me offer six for your consideration. First, we can suppose that she wasn’t exactly thrilled when Leo XIII upset her plans to evangelize the Orient. However, as a loyal daughter of the Church, she followed his counsel and God blessed her apostolate a hundred-fold. Sometimes, we have to believe that God does have a better plan – something beyond our present ability to see or comprehend. Second, she had an indefatigable trust in Divine Providence. She was a penniless immigrant among penniless immigrants and yet founded sixty-seven institutions in the course of her relatively short life. She conducted no feasibility studies but knew, intuitively, what was unfeasible – namely, that a new generation of Italians would be unevangelized and uncatechized. That could never have been God’s intention; therefore, she incarnated St. Paul’s maxim, “Caritas Christi urget nos” (The love of Christ compels us; 2 Cor 5:14). She was no reckless dreamer, but 3 she would have been horrified to witness hundreds of parishes being built in the 1970s – and until the present day – with no school as part of the program. Which leads us to the next lesson. Third, although it is unlikely that she had read any of the pastoral letters of the American bishops who preceded her, she certainly embodied the spirit of so many of them. Immediately comes to mind the assertion of Archbishop John J. Hughes of New York: “The days have come, and the place, in which the school is more necessary than the church.” Or, that of Bishop John Lancaster Spaulding of Peoria: “Without parish schools, there is no hope that the Church will be able to maintain itself in America.” Closer to our own time, Pope Paul VI, in his bicentennial message to the Church in the United States declared that “the strength of the Catholic Church in America is in her Catholic schools.” I would suggest further that it is no accident that almost every canonized saint of our nation was a promoter of Catholic education: Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, Mother Katharine Drexel, Mother Theodore Guérin; Mother Rose-Phillipine Duchesne – and, oh yes, one man: John Neumann, the fourth bishop of Philadelphia. It is not only our privilege but our bounden duty to accept their legacy and to build on it. Fourth, so often we hear that today parents cannot afford our schools any longer. Here are a few of my responses to what is supposed to be a conversation-stopper. A few moments ago, I made reference to the “penniless” immigrants of Mother Cabrini’s day. I like to ask how it is that penniless immigrants built our Catholic institutions and that the most affluent Catholic population in the history of the Church cannot maintain them? Immediately, my own Ukrainian grandmother comes to mind. In the midst of the Great Depression, she was raising three children by herself and working under intolerable conditions for about five dollars a week – yet she gave a dollar a week to her parish. Years later, I asked her, “Grandma, how could you afford to give 20% of your paltry salary to the Church?” Her reply: “If we didn’t do it, who would?” You see, that is the answer of faith. Our problems in the contemporary Church are not financial; they are faith-related. One of the most embarrassing statistics thrown in our faces is that Catholics in this country give the least of any other religious group – although they have the highest standard of living. That realization prompted one of my boyhood pastors to chide the congregation around 1962: “Catholics are for the birds – cheap, cheap, cheap!” To be sure, there are parents who truly cannot afford current tuition rates, but the vast majority of those who claim a financial obstacle do not hesitate to subscribe to hundreds of cable channels or to take wonderful winter vacations – and pastors are loathe to challenge such unevangelical priorities; in fact, most are totally intimidated.