A Saint for the City of the Angels

She was a tiny woman with an outsize faith. Twice rejected by Roman Catholic religious orders because of her physical frailty, this bird-like woman’s perseverance and heroic virtue ultimately led the church to elevate her to sainthood.

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini--America’s celebrated “saint of immigrants”--even left a part of her legacy in Los Angeles, today the foremost destination among a new generation of newcomers to the United States.

An immigrant herself, Cabrini in 1946 became the first American citizen to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church, and the order of nuns she founded, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, once offered care and assistance to foreign-born Angelenos in an orphanage, school, sanitarium and one of the city’s first day-care centers. Those institutions have long since vanished. But one relic of her presence remains: a small, one-room chapel--built by the Knights of Columbus in 1916--nestled in the Verdugo foothills.

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Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in Italy in 1850, the youngest of 13 children. She was orphaned at the age of 13, and became a schoolteacher and director of an orphanage by the age of 30. Cabrini twice tried to become a nun, but each time was refused because of her chronic poor health and small size.

Undaunted, Cabrini set about establishing her own order of nuns.

Energized by her devotion to the immigrant, “God’s gypsy,” as she was affectionately called, would cross the Atlantic Ocean 30 times in 35 years. She arrived in New York in 1889 and during a subsequent visit to Argentina, where she trekked the snowcapped Andes on a mule, Cabrini predicted to her sisters: “One day we shall have to go to California, where we will do something for the glory of God.”

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1905--the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Missionary Sisters--Cabrini’s robust personality cut a wide swath in the city’s streets. Her face jutting from a tightly wrapped wimple beneath a straw hat, she set out every morning with her tired, old horse and dilapidated buggy looking for used and discarded lumber to build an orphanage. Venturing deep into the city’s slums, she found growing numbers of homeless children who begged to help.

Ingenious at making do with limited resources, she taught the children how to straighten the rusty nails that would be used in their future home. Children who were too unhealthy to work were given a dose of an herbal concoction that Cabrini formulated herself.

North of downtown, in Angelino Heights, she built the Regina Coeli (“Queen of Heaven” in Latin) Orphanage on what is now Hill Street, Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues. This promising site, next to the Mexican and Italian communities Cabrini served, was the former home to department store founder J.W. Robinson, who called it Edgemont.

Rock by rock (about 2,000 of them), Cabrini built a three-sided shrine to the Virgin Mary next to the orphanage. There, she spent hours day and night deep in personal prayer.

In 1908, a year before she became a naturalized citizen, she personally supervised the construction of two more buildings at the orphanage. There, she lived in a small room with an iron bed and battered roll-top desk for six months at a time while visiting Los Angeles.

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In 1912, after studying local maps, she found 475 acres in Burbank. Here, on the barren land of “sand and snakes,” Cabrini envisioned lush vineyards and orchards like those in her Italian homeland. Her vision gave Burbank its heart and the state its first “preventorium” for the treatment of young girls at risk of tuberculosis.

In 1916, after she had planted olive trees and grape vines and added a school and chapel, the Knights of Columbus built her a one-room shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with stained-glass windows in whose light she prayed daily.

The next year, she died in Chicago at one of the hospitals she had founded. Her remains were enshrined in the chapel at Mother Cabrini High School in New York.

But even in death, her plans continued. In 1919, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart opened one of Los Angeles’ first day-care centers--Mother Cabrini Day Home--at 1406 Mateo St., where 110 babies and small children were cared for while their mothers labored in fruit-packing plants and their fathers worked in factories.

The nuns began a movement for her canonization in 1946, at which time Pope Pius XII said, “especially toward immigrants . . . did she extend a friendly hand, a sheltering refuge, relief and help.”

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Several miraculous healings were attributed to Cabrini, including the healing of a newborn in 1921 whose eyes were accidentally washed with an acid-type solution, instead of the typical silver nitrate solution.

But by 1970, enrollment at her order’s Los Angeles school dropped, and both it and the orphanage were closed. The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart were ordered to pack it up and head for other cities. Months later, most of their buildings were destroyed on both the Los Angeles and Burbank properties by the Sylmar earthquake. Only the shrines remained untouched.

The stone grotto Cabrini built in 1906 sat sheltering the homeless until last year, when it was dismantled and taken to the Villa Scalabrini Retirement Center in Sunland, where the rocks sit in a pile waiting to be rebuilt. And the tiny shrine called the “place of healing” was moved in 1974 to the upper school grounds of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Burbank.

The Italian Catholic Federation added a library to house some memorabilia next to her shrine, which is open from noon to 3 p.m. the first Sunday of each month.

Today, Woodbury University sits on 22 acres of Villa Cabrini, and students cross paths where Mother Cabrini often gave spiritual solace and guidance.

She left behind 67 clinics, hospitals and schools that she founded throughout the world, but it was her compassion and devotion to immigrants that was her greatest contribution to the people of Los Angeles for almost 70 years.