Our Neighborhood Saint: Mother Cabrini

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born near Milan, Italy, in 1850. In 1880, she and seven other young women founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with hopes of going to China. But there were millions of Italian immigrants in the cities of the United States, and Pope Leo XIII asked her to serve them.

For 28 years, she traveled throughout the United States founding schools, orphanages and hospitals. In 1903 she founded Columbus Hospital just blocks from Saint Clement. She lived there in the last years of her life and often visited Saint Clement for prayer and worship. In 1917, she died in the hospital she founded.

Mother Cabrini was canonized in 1946, the first American citizen to be named a saint.

Saint Jude and the Comedian

It was late in the 1930s, the depths of the Depression. Comedian Danny Thomas had recently moved to Chicago with his young family, and his career was not going well. Now out of work, he prayed before the statue of Saint Jude at Saint Clement. "Show me my way in life," he prayed to the patron saint of hopeless causes, "and I will build you a shrine."

Not much later, his career began to turn around. He got a good job at a local nightclub, and before long he was working regularly in radio and then television. He starred in a popular TV show, Make Room for Daddy, from 1953 to 1965, and established a production company that produced the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Andy Griffith Show, among many other successful shows.

He remembered his pledge to Saint Jude and began discussing with friends what form that shrine might take. With the help of fellow members of the Arab American community and Memphis businessmen, he founded Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which opened in 1962. It is the world’s foremost center for the study and treatment of catastrophic diseases in children.

He was honored for his philanthropy many times over. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1984. Danny Thomas died in 1991; his daughter Marlo Thomas carries on the good work of supporting Saint Jude Children's Hospital.