National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

The story of the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini begins with Mother Cabrini herself. Born in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, Italy in 1850, one of thirteen children, she was refused entry to religious life in her teens because of frail health. She later founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880 to care for poor children in schools and hospitals. After Pope Leo XIII redirected her from the missions of China to 'not to the East, but to the West,' she arrived in New York in 1889 with six sisters and no English and no funds. Over her lifetime she founded 67 institutions—schools, orphanages, and hospitals—across the Americas and Europe; became a U.S. citizen in 1909; and traveled the Atlantic more than 30 times despite a lifelong fear of water. In 1905 Mother Cabrini founded Columbus Hospital on Chicago's North Side in what is today Lincoln Park. She lived, worked, and administered her growing network of institutions from this lakefront site until her death from malaria there on December 22, 1917, at age 67. Her private convent room was immediately preserved by the Missionary Sisters, and almost overnight it became a destination for the faithful seeking healing and her intercession. She was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1938 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on July 7, 1946, becoming the first American citizen to be canonized. (Her head is preserved in Rome; the rest of her body is venerated at the Saint Frances Cabrini Shrine in New York City; her arm bone, a first-class relic, remains in Chicago.) Following her canonization the flow of pilgrims to her little preserved room in Columbus Hospital overwhelmed the hospital's modest chapel. Cardinal Samuel Stritch, then Archbishop of Chicago, commissioned a large National Shrine within the hospital complex, which he dedicated in 1955. The new Shrine chapel was designed in a luminous Italianate idiom: gold mosaics, Carrara and Botticino marble, Florentine stained glass, and soaring frescoes depicting scenes from Mother Cabrini's life and the mysteries of salvation. The artistic program was largely the work of Italian immigrant artisan Fabian Zaccone, whose son Robert Zaccone (himself an architect) later recalled watching his father cartoon and install the stained glass windows and the great wall mosaic surrounding the altar in the early 1960s. Four side altars honor the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Joseph, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Holy Spirit, while a black onyx and marble papal altar at the center contains Mother Cabrini's first-class relic (her humerus). A rare Tamburini pipe organ—one of only a few in the United States—was installed to fill the space with sacred music. For nearly fifty years the Shrine served as a center of worship and pilgrimage, with weekly Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, and a steady stream of visitors venerating Mother Cabrini's preserved room. In 1998, however, Columbus Hospital was sold to developers amid rising costs and changing medical practice, and the hospital and Shrine closed in 2002. There was serious concern that the Shrine itself would be lost. After roughly a decade of negotiation between the Missionary Sisters and the developer of what became the 2550 N. Lakeview Avenue condominium tower, an agreement was reached that preserved the Shrine as a free-standing chapel on the ground floor of the new high-rise. The original convent room was dismantled (the mother convent had actually been torn down in the late 1960s/early 1970s) but the room attached to the Shrine—long the most popular stop for pilgrims—was also dismantled, to be replaced by a relic room in the new entrance space housing the first-class arm bone relic at the altar. After an extensive restoration designed to preserve its spiritual and artistic heritage and reimagine the space for the next generation of pilgrims, the National Shrine was solemnly blessed and re-dedicated by Cardinal Francis George on September 30, 2012 and reopened to the public on October 1, 2012. In 2017 the Shrine marked the 100th anniversary of Mother Cabrini's death with international pilgrims, special liturgies, and a Mass with Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee. In 2021, on the 75th anniversary of her canonization, the Shrine launched a Jubilee Year that opened with Bishop Robert Casey leading the rite of the Holy Door on November 13, 2021 and offering a plenary indulgence to those who walked through it and prayed; the same indulgence was extended to Holy Name Cathedral, where Mother Cabrini herself once prayed. Today the Shrine functions as a stand-alone center for prayer, worship, spiritual care, pilgrimage, and outreach, stewarded by the Missionary Sisters and a lay board.