By Christopher Harper
Cabrini, a film about a Catholic nun who built orphanages and hospitals worldwide, is the best movie I have seen in years.
The storyline is outstanding. In 1850, a small and sickly girl, Francesca Cabrini, was born two months prematurely to a farm family in Italy. In her teens, she decided to give her life to Christ. The Daughters of the Sacred Heart rejected her, considering her too weak to endure convent life. She persisted and became a number in 1877, taking the name Frances Xavier Cabrini.
Years before, while visiting her uncle, Father Don Luigi Oldini, she placed violets into paper boats, dropped them into a stream, and imagined they carried her and other missionaries to China, where the great St. Francis Xavier had journeyed 300 years before.
When she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880, she told Pope Leo XIII she wanted to travel to Asia with her small group of sisters. However, the pope had another idea and sent her to the United States, where Italian immigrants lived in the harsh streets of New York.
Pope Leo expressed skepticism about that journey and its challenges, given her weakness–a worry compounded when people met her because she was barely five feet tall. But she told him, “We can serve our weakness, or we can serve our purpose. We can’t do both.”
The cinematography and acting are compelling.
Director Alejandro Monteverde provides a jarring, tightly focused tour of the underside of New York, where the poor scavenged for a life.
Mother Cabrini, superbly portrayed by Cristiana Dell’Anna, encountered slums, hunger, disease, and virulent anti-Italian sentiment—even among many Irish Catholics, not least among them Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan, played by David Morse.
The dialogue alternates between Italian and English, but I didn’t find the subtitles as annoying as I often do. Sometimes, the translations were a bit off, but not disturbingly so.
The movie is not a religious hagiography. Despite almost overwhelming odds, it demonstrates what one person can accomplish.
Before she died in 1917, Mother Cabrini helped build 67 schools, orphanages, and hospitals worldwide, including in China.
She was canonized in 1946 and became known in the United States as the patron saint of immigrants.
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