|
|
|
New Mother Cabrini Writings A new translation of Mother Cabrini's travel writing is
forthcoming from the Center for Migration Studies. Mother
Frances Xavier Cabrini was the foundress of the Missionaries of the Sacred
Heart. She took her first journey outside
of Italy in 1889, when she brought her first band of missionaries from their
mother house in Italy to their first mission in New York City. Thereafter, Mother Cabrini crossed the
Atlantic many times, traveling between Italy, North America, Central America
and South America. She kept in touch
with her spiritual daughters via letters that she wrote in leisure moments on
her ocean voyages. The
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart have collected the surviving letters, and
Sister Phillippa Provenzano has translated them from Italian into
English. The Missionary Sisters have
also supplied a brief introductory biography of Mother Cabrini, illustrations
to accompany the letters, and a description of how the Missionaries of the
Sacred Heart live out Mother Cabrini's charism today. Mother
Cabrini proved a careful observer of the natural world and of the societies
in which her Missionary Sisters worked.
She meditated on her observations, seeking to know God through the
world He had created. She shaped her
meditations into lessons for her Missionary Sisters, conveying to them her
vision of God's plans for them and their response to Him. Paperback
copies of To The Ends Of The
Earth: The Travel Writings of Mother
Cabrini should be available during the summer of 2001. For further information, please contact
Zelly Caccagno at the Center for Migration Studies, 209 Flagg Place, Staten
Island, New York 10304. Phone: (718)
351-8800. Fax: (718) 667-4598. Email: sales@cmsny.org. |
A Word from Blessed Scalabrini From a May
4, 1905, letter of Blessed Scalabrini to Raphael Cardinal Merry del Val,
Secretary of State to Pope Pius X. It
starts with mention of Blessed Scalabrini's 1901 pastoral visit to the United
States and his 1904 pastoral visit to Brazil: "I
have visited large cities and recently established communities, fields made
fruitful by work, and immense plains never touched by a human hand. I have known immigrants who had reached
the prominence given by wealth; others, who lived in comfort; but mostly, the
obscure, immense mass of the poor who struggle for life against the dangers
of the desert, the snares of unhealthy climate and human greed, alone,
totally abandoned, deprived of all religious and social comforts and of
everything. I felt their hearts beat
in unison with mine when I spoke to them in their native tongue in the name
of our common faith. . . . "I
have seen, in a word, that if in those regions the Church of God has no
greater importance than the one it has now in the direction of both public
and private life, and if millions of souls are lost, it is due in large
measure to the lack of a well organized religious work adapted well to the
specific environments, and to the lack of clergy, rather than to the great
activity of the enemies of the faith.
I have, therefore, formed the strong conviction that it is urgent to
take some measures and that it is a serious error, not to say a sin, on the
part of all of us who are charged with the government of the Church to allow
the continuation of conditions which so greatly damage the souls and belittle
before God's enemies the social important of the Catholic Church." __________________________________ Please pray for the activities you read about in this newsletter! |