Thursday of the First Week of Advent
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There is a beautiful new statue in Battery Park City. Have you seen it? It is of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. The patron saint of America’s immigrants, “Mother” Cabrini stands in a boat with two children, looking towards the rough seas from which she first set foot in our country in 1889. It was a landing few would have predicted. Even in that company, there were arguably only two who were not at all surprised by it: Mother Cabrini herself and the Lord who had called her to be a missionary sister of His Sacred Heart.
Born in 1850, the girl who would become Mother Cabrini was born in a tiny village south of Milan – fitting, given how small of stature she was. She was the perfect size, however, for what Lord wanted to make of her. Once considered too frail for religious life, she would eventually found her own religious congregation, cross the Atlantic on a ship, surmount the Andes on a donkey, and establish 67 orphanages, schools and hospitals in her adopted homeland and around the world. Only twenty-nine years after her death in 1917, she became the first U.S. citizen to be declared a saint.
Jesus says in today’s Gospel that not all who cry “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of heaven, “but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven (Mt 7:21).” And what is His will? At its heart, it is to have faith in Him who has greater faith in us than we often have in ourselves. For He sees well the work His grace can accomplish in us, regardless of what we may appear to be in others’ eyes – or even our own. Pray for us, Mother Cabrini, that the grace you knew so well may also be ours this day.
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