Shrine of the Saints of America
Saint Martín dePorres, 1579 – 1639, Patron of Interracial and Social Justice. Feast Day: November 3
Martin was born in the city of Lima, Peru and grew up in poverty. He aspired to join the Dominicans, but his mixed race was a barrier at first. He became a Dominican lay brother and performed many menial tasks very well and was noted for his holiness and work on behalf of the poor, the hungry, and the sick. He maintained an austere lifestyle that included fasting and abstaining from meat. He spent hours of the night in prayer. Many miracles were attributed to him including instantaneous cures and an ability to communicate with animals. He eventually helped to establish an orphanage and a children's hospital.
Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, 1656 – 1680, Patron of Ecologists, Environmentalists, Loss of Parents, and Exiled Peoples. Feast Day: July 14
Kateri is known as the Lily of the Mohawks. She was born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon in present-day New York and contracted smallpox in an epidemic as a young girl; her family died and her face was scarred. She was visited by three Jesuits about age eleven and converted to Catholicism at age nineteen and took the name of Catherine. She placed wooden crosses around the woods that she loved, and she took a vow of perpetual virginity. She found it difficult to maintain her religious vows in the village so she moved for the remaining five years of her life to a Jesuit mission village just south of Montreal. When she died, her facial scars disappeared, and friends heard her say she was on her way to heaven.
Saint Isaac Jogues, 1607 – 1646, Patron of the Americas and Canada. Feast Day: October 19
Isaac was a French Jesuit missionary who enthusiastically embraced his mission to bring Christ to the tribes of Indians in New France near Quebec. He and his companions had some success until he was captured in a battle between the Huron and Iroquois Indians and was cruelly tortured in many ways, including having some of his fingers gnawed off (as portrayed in the icon). He was able to return to France for some time and received a Papal dispensation to say Mass with his maimed hand. He returned to Quebec to continue his missionary work and made many converts, but he was again tortured and then killed by a band of Mohawk Indians who thought that the “Black Robes” were responsible for bringing diseases to them.
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, 1850 – 1917, Patron of Hospital Administrators, Immigrants, Orphans. Feast Day: November 13
She was born Maria Francesca Cabrini on July 15, 1850 in Lombardy, Italy. Born two months early, she was small and weak as a child and remained in delicate health throughout her life. She dreamt of becoming a missionary to India and China. At thirteen, she attended a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Five years later, she graduated cum laude with a teaching certificate. She applied for admission to their Order, but they told her she was too frail for their life. She became the headmistress of the House of Providence orphanage and took religious vows in 1877. She added Xavier to her name to honor the missionary St. Francis Xavier.
She founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and they established seven homes and a free school and nursery. These good works brought her to the attention of the bishop and Pope Leo XIII.
In September 1887, she went to seek the pope's approval to establish missions in China. Instead, he urged that she go to the United States to help the Italian immigrants flooding into that nation, mostly in great poverty. "Not to the East, but to the West," was his advice.
Cabrini left for the United States, arriving in New York City on March 31, 1889, along with six other sisters. She encountered disappointment and difficulties but founded many institutions to meet the immigrants’ needs. She was as resourceful as she was prayerful, finding people who would donate what she needed in money, time, labor, and support. She also founded Columbus Hospital. Mother Cabrini was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1909.
In Chicago, she and her sisters opened Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park and Columbus Extension Hospital (later renamed Saint Cabrini Hospital) in the heart of the city's Italian neighborhood on the Near West Side. Both hospitals eventually closed, but their foundress's name lives on with Chicago's Cabrini Street.
She founded 67 missionary institutions to serve the sick and poor, long before government agencies provided extensive social services in the U.S. and throughout Latin America and Europe. In 1926, nine years after her death, her sisters achieved Cabrini's original goal of becoming missionaries to China.
When she was canonized in 1946, an estimated 120,000 people filled Chicago's Soldier Field for a Mass of thanksgiving. She is also informally recognized as an effective intercessor for finding a parking space. As one priest explained: "She lived in New York City. She understands traffic."
Shrines in her honor have been created in many U.S. cities and around the world. The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini at 2320 North Lakeview in Chicago is thriving and is an architectural gem functioning as a stand-alone center for prayer, worship, spiritual care, and pilgrimage.
People around the world are discovering anew the genius of Mother Cabrini in a 2024 movie called “Cabrini.” Look for it!
Saint Katharine Drexel, 1858 – 1955, Patron of Racial Justice and Philanthropists. Feast Day: March 3
She was born Catherine Mary Drexel in Philadelphia to a family that owned a significant banking fortune. Her mother died five weeks after her birth, and she was raised by her uncle and his wife. The family lived on a 90-acre estate, which was named St. Michel in honor of Saint Michael, the archangel.
Katharine was awakened to the plight of indigenous American people during a family trip to the Western United States and was inspired. In 1886, during an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she was urged to become a missionary and to realize her desire to assist the Indian and African-American populations. She founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and financed more than 60 missions and schools around the United States, as well as founding Xavier University of Louisiana and Mother Loyola in Havana. She also helped to establish St. Monica’s parish in Chicago as a national church for African-Americans where Father Augustus Tolton served.
When she was canonized, the Vatican cited her many achievements and virtues, including the donation of her inheritance, for the victims of injustice. She was the second person born in what is now the United States to be declared a saint and the first who was born a U.S. citizen.
Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, 1774 – 1821, Patron of Death of Children and Widows. Feast Day: January 4 (also on the Episcopalian calendar.
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in New York City to a socially prominent Episcopalian couple just before the U.S. declared its independence from England. Her father was an important doctor and surgeon who later served as the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College. Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine, was the daughter of a Church of England priest who was rector for 30 years of St. Andrew’s Church on Staten Island. Catherine died when Elizabeth was three years old. Her father married again, and the couple had five children. Later the couple separated, and the stepmother rejected Elizabeth, a source of grief for the young girl.
At age 19, Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, aged 25, a wealthy businessman in the import trade. Elizabeth continued the ministry of nursing the sick and dying and became a charter member of The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797). The Seton’s daughter, Catherine, later became the first American to join the Sisters of Mercy.
Through most of their married life, William Seton suffered from tuberculosis. Doctors sent him to Italy for the warmer climate, but William died there in 1803. Elizabeth was aided by the Italian business partners of her husband and was introduced to Catholicism.
After returning to New York, the widow Seton was received into the Catholic Church on March 14, 1805, by Father Matthew O'Brien, pastor of St. Peter’s Church, then the city's only Catholic church. (Anti-Catholic laws had been lifted just a few years before). A year later, she was confirmed by John Carroll, the Bishop of Baltimore and the only Catholic bishop in the nation.
To support herself and her children, Seton had started an academy for young ladies, but as news of her conversion to Catholicism spread, most Protestant parents withdrew their daughters from her school. She was about to move to Quebec, Canada, when she became involved with the Sulpicians who were in the process of establishing the first Catholic seminary for the United States and a religious school to meet the educational needs of the new nation's small Catholic community.
In 1809, the widow Seton accepted the Sulpicians' invitation and moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland where she established a school dedicated to Catholic girls' education and a religious community dedicated to the care of children of the poor. This was the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States, and its school was the first free Catholic school in America. This modest beginning marked the start of the Catholic parochial school system in the United States. Her congregation was initially called the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph's. From that point on, she became known as "Mother Seton." The remainder of her life was spent leading and developing the new congregation of sisters.
Elizabeth Ann Seton died on January 4, 1821, at the age of 46. Today, her remains are interred in the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.