VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The men, women and children who flee poverty and violence need to find people like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who have open hearts and hands to welcome them, Pope Francis said.
Her charism is extraordinarily relevant today “because migrants certainly need good laws, development programs, organization, but they also and first of all always need love, friendship and human closeness,” the pope said.
“They need to be listened to, looked at in the eyes, accompanied” and they need God, whom they encounter in the kind of selfless love that St. Cabrini displayed, he said in an audience Dec. 9 with the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The pope met with members of the congregation founded by St. Frances as they were marking the 100th anniversary of her death. The Italian nun immigrated to New York in 1889 to minister to fellow immigrants, opening schools, orphanages and hospitals for the poor. She died Dec. 22, 1917, in Chicago and became the first U.S. citizen to be declared a saint.
In his speech, the pope said that now, so many years later, “the new faces of men, women and children, marked by so many forms of poverty and violence, are once again before our eyes.”
He said, they, too, “are waiting to find along their way the extended hands and welcoming heart like Mother Cabrini’s.”
The pope asked the sisters to keep alive their “caring and merciful gaze toward the poor.” He praised the saint’s courage in being able to show love for the orphans under her care, at-risk youth and exploited men and women.
In them, “she recognized the face of Christ and, gifted as she was, was able to bring to fruition the talents the Lord had given her,” he said.
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