Angelus News | February 23, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 4

leaving her with serious lung damage
that should have left her bedridden for
the rest of her life. In one scene, we
see her collapse from exhaustion a few
days into her mission. A doctor gives
her two, maximum three years to live.
In emphasizing Cabrini’s human
shortcomings and weakness, the film
presents a saint who didn’t accomplish
great things because she was endowed
with extraordinary willpower or unusual
talents. Rather, we meet a woman
who was convinced from the start
that her mission, humanly speaking,
was impossible. That she was bound
to fail. Her success was based on her
complete and utter trust in God.
In other words, it was precisely her
weakness that made her more suitable
for her mission.
As the movie shows, that trust led
her to aim for the impossible. “The
world is too small for what I intend to
do,” she tells Pope Leo XIII (played by
legendary Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini)
in an early scene. This from a
woman who was not supposed to leave
her bed for the rest of her life!
Her drowning incident left her with
a deep-seated terror of water, but this
did not prevent her from crossing the
Atlantic by boat some 30 times. In one
scene, she quotes St. Paul: “I can do
all things through him who strengthens
me.”
“Do you want to be king?” an astonished
Pope Leo asks her at the end of
the movie. “Yes,” she replies, “I want
to build an empire of hope.”
Cabrini invites us to do something
strange, even radical: to rejoice in our
weaknesses, our laziness, our lack of
courage, our lack of natural talents
because they make us more, not less,
apt for the mission that God is entrusting
us.
The second part of the film follows
Cabrini’s struggles in New York City,
where the local church and the mayor
are opposed to her work. We see the
saint overcome impossible odds to
establish an orphanage, a house, and
then a hospital.
Two other aspects of this saint’s
character emerge in this part of the
film. First, her absolute trust in divine
providence. “Begin the mission and
the means will come,” she repeats in
several scenes.
The second is the insistence on freedom
and love. Her missionary work
consisted in presenting children with
love, without asking them to change.
“The wounds the children bear,” she
says in one of the movie’s scenes,
“are only healed through love, and
through an education of the heart.”
Cabrini is often presented as a “social
saint.” But the primary source of her
vocation was the immersion in the
tangible experience of the love of
God.
“Let all your affections, O daughters,
be concentrated in this beautiful
Heart, and you will always and truly
be happy,” she wrote to her sisters during
one of her transatlantic voyages.
“But if, on the other hand, some
private affection either to you or to
creatures binds you, you will always
have some annoyance, some hours of
tedium and melancholy. … Put on
your wings, I pray you.”
Missionary work was a natural
consequence, almost a reflex, of this
immersion in the love of God.
“We must from time to time dive
into God, immerse ourselves in the
salutary water of his grace and loving
kindness, and then fly, that is, work
with much vigor.”
“Cabrini” offers viewers a refreshing
opportunity to think about the true
meaning of our lives, the love of God,
and the mission that he’s entrusted to
those who are baptized — one that
surpasses our strengths. The key to
this mission, Cabrini’s life suggests, is
to have a tangible, concrete experience
of his love.
Cabrini says it best in the film: “You
need to have the courage to be what
God wants you to be.”
Stefano Rebeggiani is an assistant
professor of Classics at the University
of Southern California.
February 23, 2024 • ANGELUS • 29