Patron of Immigrants

 

Today the Church commemorates Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), the patroness of immigrants, who, despite intense anti-Italian prejudice both inside and outside the American Catholic community, created numerous schools and other institutions to serve those struggling to find their new life in this new land. As a child, I remember regularly being brought to visit Mother Cabrini's shrine in northern Manhattan, where her body was on display under the altar. Along with the recent election of New York City's third immigrant mayor in my lifetime, her story is one more reminder that this city - as indeed this country - was built by imigrants, who continue to transform and enrich it.

Italians had been among the great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants who crossed the ocean in waves in the late 29th and early 20th centuries. Scalabrinian Archbishop Sillvano Tomasi's Piety and Power: The Role of Italian (Catholic & Protestant) Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area 1880 - 1930 (NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1975) provided an important and particularly noteworthy historical study of Italian Catholic life in that formative period for the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, the period when my own grandparents immigrated to New York from Italy. Another important contribution to our appreciation of immigrant religiosity (in my father's childhood neighborhood, no less) was Robert Orsi's The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale University Press, 1985).

Italian and other Catholic immigrants experienced the twofold push-and-pull experience of holding on for security and community to aspects of the old world (including especially their language and their religion), while at the same time adapting to this strange new country which was so seemingly hostile to them and  simultaneously so welcome and full of opportunity. Likewise within the Church itself, the famous conflicts of the late 19th century were in part a disagreement between those who remained suspicious of American culture and values and those cautiously (or sometimes less cautiously) open to those same values even at the risk of insensitivity to immigrants' old-world worries about their culture and their religion's future in America. (One thinks here of Orestes Brownson's opposition to Catholic schools being used to perpetuate aspects of old world culture which he believed could - and should - be disentangled from the necessary effort to preserve the immigrants' Catholic religion.)

Likewise, the American parochial school system, perhaps the U.S. Church's greatest institutional accomplishment, strove both to bind Catholic children to their inherited immigrant religious culture while simultaneously (and, ultimately, more successfully) turning them into good Americans well prepared to advance in the new society into which they had been born. When I was in Catholic elementary and high school in the 1950s and early 1960s, depending on the moment or the issue, one sometimes saw oneself as an inheritor of an outsider immigrant culture and at other times (and increasingly more frequently) saw oneself as part of a wider common American culture. Undoubtedly the effective end of new immigration after the 1920s and the intense common experience of World War II had helped prepare thew ay for this transition.

The centrality of the Catholic school system for earlier immigrant generations and for my post-immigration generation cannot be overestimated. However impractical and far from universal its eventual enforcement proved to be, the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 had required the building of parochial schools in all parishes and  had mandated attendance at them. This obviously highlighted the importance of the school system within the immigrant Catholic community and that community's extensive commitment to the schools' above-mentioned double mission. Generations of immigrant and heirs of immigrants have been the great beneficiaries of that commitment.

Meanwhile, new challenges face immigrants in our society today, and once again the Church is being called upon to address those challenges. Yesterday, by an almost unanimous vote (216 in favors 5 opposed, 3 abstentions), the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Plenary Assembly issued a "Special Message" on Immigration, which highlighted the Church's pastoral ministry to and concern for immigrants and explicitly opposed "the indiscriminate deportation of people."

The full text is available at: https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/us-bishops-issue-special-message-immigration-plenary-assembly-baltimore.

Photo: Immigrants' Panel from recently installed mural, St. Patrick's Cathedral, NY.