Saint’s Legacy of Service Survives in L.A.

For a moment, it seemed that Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini was still looking out for the unfortunates of the world 80 years after her death.

When a work crew arrived at the empty lot off Cesar Chavez Avenue to dismantle the shrine she helped create at the turn of the century, it found a homeless man taking shelter in the three-sided grotto.

Cabrini, the first U.S. citizen to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church, built the shrine in the early years of this century in honor of the Virgin Mary.

Until Monday, the grotto was all that remained of an orphanage operated by Cabrini’s order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, just north of downtown.

On Monday morning, to make way for an apartment complex, workers began breaking up the structure and gathering the rocks in baskets to rebuild the shrine at a Sunland retirement home--this time to honor Cabrini.

“She had nothing when she died,” said Gloria Lothrop, who holds the Whitsett Chair of California History at Cal State Northridge and spearheaded the effort to save the shrine. “But she dedicated her life to helping Italian immigrants all over the Western Hemisphere. And she loved Los Angeles.”

Born in northern Italy in 1850, Cabrini twice tried to become a nun as a young woman but was rejected because her small size was taken as a sign of poor health, Lothrop said.

But by the mid-1880s she had established her own order. And on the advice of other missionaries, she came to the United States to aid immigrating Italians. Her work with immigrants to the Americas later formed the basis for her canonization.

Over the years she established orphanages, schools and medical facilities all over the Western Hemisphere--including in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

The Regina Coeli (“Queen of Heaven” in Latin) Orphanage on what is now Cesar Chavez Avenue was founded in 1906.

Cabrini was a quick study when it came to L.A. “The city of Los Angeles is widespread and seems to grow recklessly,” she wrote in 1905 to missionary sisters. “Property is very expensive.”

By the time she died in 1917, she had crossed the Atlantic Ocean 35 times, according to Lothrop. And on at least one occasion she trekked the Andes on a mule during a trip to Argentina. “She turned out to not be sickly,” Lothrop said.

Around the time of Cabrini’s death, the Los Angeles orphanage was moved to Burbank, where it later served as a clinic for teenage girls in danger of getting tuberculosis and as Villa Cabrini High School.

The Burbank property was eventually bought by Woodbury University, and the Los Angeles facility was destroyed by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Only the shrine survived in a corner of the empty downtown property, where it was vandalized in recent years, Lothrop said.

Last year Lothrop got a call from a city official who knew she had an interest in history and who said the shrine would be demolished to make way for the apartment complex.

Together with friends Robert De Pietro, an architect and engineer, and John Heidorff, another architect--both of whom she knew through the Italian American community--Lothrop devised a plan to save the shrine, she said.

First, they approached administrators of the Villa Scalabrini Retirement Center, an Italian American oriented institution, who agreed to have the shrine moved there. (De Pietro’s father, Frank, who died in 1986, built the center.) Lothrop and her friends also came up with the $30,000 the project would cost.

On Monday afternoon, a crew of six men dismantled the shrine rock by rock--about 2000 pieces in all--

and placed them carefully in wire baskets. They will begin reconstructing the shrine in about a month.