Untitled - Digitizing America

and bonds as mortgage collateral, suggests the
need for a new church building:
The old Red Church built in '1806 with rough boards,
painted in deep red, is a relic of long ago it is true; but
very much dilapidated, parts of which are nothing but
dry rot. I have seen most of the parish churches of the
diocese and none looks so bad as mine. The Red
Church has to be repaired and somewhat enlarged
for the time being. lt holds twenty-two pews only with
practically no sanctuary. The sacristy is a shed which
is a haven of lizzards (slc.), spiders, mud-diggers,
and birds of all kinds. When you come up here which I
hope will be soon, you will realize the truth of my
statements. I may not be able to conjure snakes to
appear in church when you are there, (l am not a St.
Francis) still I can produce witnesses who will tell you
that snakes come to hear Mass occasionally and of
course produce great disturbance amongst the fair
sex. . .
Sisters In Charity
rancesca 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 Xlll to minister to ltalian 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
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were arriving by the thousands each month to
escape poverty in ltaly, only to find discrimination,
slave wages, and misery in their new home. Assuming
their mission to aid these people the seven
Sisters, Ied by God, began begging in the streets
each day untilthey 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
Xll on July 7, 1 946, the f irst American-citizen saint.
ln the year that Mother Cabrini first set foot on
these shores, Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia
entered the religious life. Well-educated and welltraveled,
Katharine inherited a fortune upon her
father's death in 1885. During a visit to Rome and
an audience with Pope Leo Xlll she offered to
donate her fortune to the Church, but only if it were
to be used to aid lndians and Negroes.
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 lndians and Negroes. Their convent had
once been the Torresdale, Pennsylvania, summer
home of the Drexels.