Founding
At the behest of Pope Leo XIII, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, traveled from Italy to New York City with seven of her Sisters to serve the burgeoning population of Italian emigrants to the United States. Within weeks of arriving in New York City, the Sisters were caring for a small group of orphaned or unsupervised young girls in a donated Fifth Avenue apartment.
Realizing that they needed a larger property, with land, to provide for the children, Cabrini purchased a property in West Park, Ulster County, New York from the Society of Jesuits to serve as an orphanage for Italian immigrant girls. The property included a monastery and working farm. Because the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart is a begging order, all properties purchased by the Sisters are and were funded through gifts and loans, and not the Catholic Church. Having run their well dry, and believing there to be no water on the grounds, the Jesuits sold the property at a fraction of its worth. Cabrini envisioned digging for a spring that would provide enough water for the fledgling orphanage; miraculously, the spring, found just up the hill to the west of the main road, provides water to the campus to this day.
Within weeks of opening the orphanage, the Sisters began accepting children from a variety of backgrounds from Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, and other local communities. Archives of records from this time period are available for viewing by appointment in a museum room located at St. Cabrini Home’s campus.
St. Cabrini Home served as the novitiate and United States home base for the Mother Cabrini and her Sisters for decades. Upon her death in Chicago on December 22, 1917, Mother Cabrini was buried at her beloved West Park campus, as per her wishes. Her body remained entombed there until her exhumation in 1931, and was moved to the St. Frances Cabrini Shrine in New York City in 1946 upon her canonization.
Read more about this topic: St. Cabrini Home
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