Maria Francesca Cabrini was born two months premature on a farm in Lombardy, the youngest of thirteen children (only four of whom survived childhood). She was sickly her entire life, especially in the lungs — the eventual cause of her death. As a girl she made little paper boats, filled them with violets, and floated them in the irrigation ditches behind her family's farm, telling her sister the violets were missionaries on their way to China. China remained her dream into adulthood.
Twice refused entry to religious communities for poor health, she founded her own — the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — in 1880 at Codogno, Lombardy. In 1889 she went to Rome to ask Leo XIII for permission to go to China. He sent her instead to the Italian immigrants of New York. 'Not to the East,' he told her, 'but to the West.'
She arrived in New York on March 31, 1889, with six sisters, no money, and a letter promising her a convent that turned out not to exist. By the time she died in 1917 she had crossed the Atlantic twenty-three times and founded sixty-seven institutions in the United States, Italy, France, Spain, England, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, and Brazil: schools, orphanages, hospitals (including Columbus Hospital in New York and Columbus Extension Hospital in Chicago), and convents. She had been naturalized a US citizen in Seattle in 1909.
She died of malaria-related complications and chronic pneumonia in a hospital chair in Columbus Hospital, Chicago, at sixty-seven, on December 22, 1917, while wrapping Christmas candy for the children of her West Side orphanage.