Piotr Podemski
Studia Migracyjne – Przegląd Polonijny, Nr 4 (170), 2018 (XLIV), s. 137 - 156
https://doi.org/10.4467/25444972SMPP.18.050.9452Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) was a Catholic nun of Italian origin, one of the first women missionaries who decided to leave for the United States in order to offer assistance to Italian Americans at the peak of their mass scale migration (1889–1917). Following an unprecedented success of her Missionary Institute of the Sacred Heart, she obtained American citizenship and was proclaimed the first U.S. Catholic saint in history, a global patron of immigrants. Until quite recently her work had been studied almost exclusively within a purely ecclesiastical context. However, nowadays her crucial intercultural experience is being revised by U.S. gender scholars who perceive her as a strong and independent woman of her time, founding and running a charity enterprise on three continents, little short of a Catholic feminist avant la lettre, but also an education innovator, pioneer of bilingual schooling as well as of an inclusive model of integrating immigrants into a modern society.