November's Saint
The saint who was afraid of water
Frances was born in a small town in northern Italy in 1850, two months early, the youngest of thirteen children, and she was sick a lot growing up. She loved stories about missionaries in faraway China, and at her uncle's house she folded paper boats, filled them with violets, and floated them down the river as her own little missionaries. One day she leaned out too far, fell in, and nearly drowned, and deep water frightened her for the rest of her life.
She wanted to be a sister and a missionary, but two convents turned her away because her health was too poor. So in 1880, with her bishop's encouragement, she started her own order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and took the name Xavier after the great missionary to the East. Her heart was still set on China, but when she went to Rome, Pope Leo XIII told her not to the East, but to the West, and sent her across the ocean to the Italian immigrants in New York.
November's letter comes from St. Frances Cabrini herself, telling the little ones about the river that scared her as a girl, the ocean she crossed anyway, and the spot on the Hudson where she found water for her orphans, and the one thing all of it taught her: God is bigger than anything we are afraid of.
Letters start shipping daily after the 10th of each month.
Coming up on the calendar: November 30 is the feast of St. Andrew, the apostle who found Jesus and went straight to get his brother. Meet the first-called.