The History of Catholic America
Sisters in Charity

Francesca Cabrini, born in Lombardy, Italy, and imbued with the missionary spirit since childhood, founded orphanages and seven missions of a new order - the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus - before being assigned by Pope Leo XIII to minister to Italian immigrants in America. The Mother Superior and six of her missionary sisters, none of whom spoke English, sailed for New York, where they landed on March 31, 1889. They found destitute families who were arriving by the thousands each month to escape poverty in Italy, only to find discrimination, slave wages, and misery in their new home. Assuming their mission to aid these people the seven sisters, led by God, began begging in the streets each day until they had amassed a sum sufficient to construct their first American school and orphanage. From this humble start, Mother Cabrini eventually established sixty-seven schools and orphanages.

"The Vagabond of God" covered the globe in her travels, always followed by her devoted missionary sisters, some of whom she left behind to cultivate the seeds she had sown. At the time of her death in 1917, the original seven sisters in the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had added more than four thousand devout missionaries to their ranks.

The body of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini is preserved in the chapel of Mother Cabrini High School in New York City. She was beatified on November 13, 1938, and canonized by Pope Pius XII on July 7, 1946, the first American-citizen saint.

In the year that Mother Cabrini first set foot on these shores, Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia entered the religious life. Well educated and well traveled, Katharine inherited a fortune upon her father's death in 1885. During a visit to Rome and an audience with Pope Leo XIII she offered to donate her fortune to the Church, but only if it were to be used to aid Indians and Blacks.

Father Serra, great founder and tireless worker of the California missions, is shown instructing art of basketry to an Indian. Symbols in upper window are the Mission Church and swallows of Capistrano. The ribbon represents the Via Riale - the road that now travels through the missions.

The pope suggested that she should be their missionary herself and so, in 1889, she began her novitiate with the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh. Two years later, she and a few of her devoted friends founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Blacks. Their convent had once been the Torresdale, Pennsylvania, summer home of the Drexels.

Mother Drexel's missions began with Black Americans of the South and Indians of the Southwest, but soon became a proliferation of schools and convents scattered throughout the country. In 1915 she opened Xavier University in New Orleans. Its rapid growth led to a beautiful campus dedicated by Dennis Cardinal Dougherty in 1932. Before her death at the age of ninety-six, she had seen her vast stores of money and love grow to forty-nine foundations in the Northeast, Midwest, and deep South.

In 1893, an American community of the St. Joseph Society of the Sacred Heart (Josephite Fathers), also dedicated to work among Blacks, was founded. The Paulists and Glenmarys, and the Missionary Trinitarians, were also home missionaries. In 1908, Pope Pius X finally terminated the mission status of the American Church.

Of War and Peace
The American Church had already proved capable of caring for its own and then some. Generations of immigrants had been embraced by brothers and sisters in Christ, even when there was little to share. And newcomers continued to swell the ranks of our parishes.

In the first five years of the twentieth century, three-and-a-half million Italians came to our shores. By 1930, one-fourth of our country's Italian-American population lived in New York City, giving that city more Italians than Rome.

Polish immigrants came in only slightly fewer numbers, peaking just before World War I. Having suffered Russian-German oppression for so many years, they formed closely knit groups to retain and enjoy their own cultural and lingual heritage, often establishing national parishes.

The Titanic disaster in 1912, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 with its subsequent boost to our productivity, the declaration of war in 1917, the all-out support at home of "our boys over there" and the spirit of brotherhood kindled by the War To End All Wars, capped by the great joy of Armistice Day were turbulent and exciting years for our country.

Immigration legislation of the twenties stemmed the flood of newcomers who had always looked to the Church for aid. No longer would the care of immigrants be the Catholic Church's major concern in this country.

Now a great movement began for conversion; large numbers of Blacks, for instance, were converted in New York City. Very few Blacks had been Catholic before, except in Louisiana and southern Maryland where there had been a large number since Colonial days - yet the conversion of Blacks was a nation-wide phenomenon that continued to grow until the late fifties. Schools grew and many new classrooms served as convents for their teachers after school hours.

Governor Al Smith of New York City, a "wet" Democrat and a Catholic, lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928's presidential race, but he surprised pollsters by gaining more than forty percent of the popular vote. In fact, he brought in more votes than the Democratic party had ever before received. During the campaign there was a revival of interest in the Ku Klux Klan, since he was popular not only with the "papists" but with the "foreigners" as well.

At least, his loss meant that he could not be blamed for the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 - the black day that led to miseries and a skyrocketing suicide rate for the next few years. Not only financial investors lost in those Great Depression years. People from every walk of life stood in breadlines. Many farmers lost their lands to mortgage holders. St. Xavier Farm at old Bohemia Manor, deeded by the diocese to the Jesuits in 1898, had been used as loan collateral. It, too, was lost.

As Rudy Vallee's melodious voice echoed Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries from American radios, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and murdered; Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the governorship of New York and became president of a deeply troubled United States; Prohibition was repealed; the Morro Castle disaster killed 137 persons; Will Rogers and Wiley Post lost their lives in an Alaskan plane crash; a three-year drought turned the Great Plains into the "Dust Bowl."

The Church was a blessed solace and source of strength to the faithful in those hours of trial. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble.

Church activities were the center of the Catholic family's life in the twenties and thirties as they enjoyed peace after war and then sought relief from Depression tribulations. Dramas, minstrels, and pageants were planned for all age groups. Strawberry festivals, bazaars, balls, concerts, lectures, card parties, interspersed with Masses, special devotions, society meetings, religious festivals and processions, filled the days and nights of many Catholics. "Five-dollars-a-month" pews were reserved for the more prosperous, but giving was a natural part of belonging and building.

Some new parishes - particularly, but not only, national parishes - had to prove a need for their existence by accumulating funds for a building before their establishment was approved. These fund-raising campaigns often included the "selling" of bricks for the church, usually at ten cents apiece. Sometimes Protestant friends, as well as neighboring parishes, joined in the crusade. Old-timers recollect, "our campaign lasted so long, each brick must have been bought at least twice!"

Active St. Vincent de Paul societies, and other church-sponsored groups, visited jails, established homes for wayward and orphaned boys, and were missionaries to homeless and down-trodden men. They helped pay rents and brought foodstuffs to families suffering under the burdens of Depression days. Well-known during these times was Dorothy Day and her newspaper Catholic Worker, which expressed the hopes and dreams of many working class Catholics.

Hard times had united our nation as never before. It was not long before that spirit of unity was to be tested again. While Shirley Temple and the dance team of Astaire and Rogers were captivating movie theater audiences in 1936, Germany was rearming. In 1938, Walt Disney created Snow White and Orson Welles unwittingly created a panic with his radio broadcast War of the Worlds. Real war once again broke out in Europe; German Armies invaded Poland, Austria fell, and Czechoslovakia was dismembered. In September of 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland. Hitler's minions began a crazed dance across Europe's face that would leave devastation and the murder of more than eleven million innocent victims in their wake.