By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future.
By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons, and worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff.
By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about his bones. Hebrews 11:17–22
It’s an interesting story, with an ironic and most blessed twist. In Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, on July 15, 1850, Frances Cabrini was born two months premature, the tenth of her parents’ eleven children, only four of whom lived past adolescence.
Perhaps it was her being premature, but throughout her life, Frances Cabrini, who would become Mother Cabrini, was sickly, so much so that church authorities doubted whether she had the wherewithal to become a “religious” (that’s traditional Roman Catholic language). That’s why, for instance, when she made application she was, each time, denied admission. No one doubted her faith; all doubted her stamina.
In 1863, having graduated from a training school for teachers run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, and having then petitioned that order for admission, she was, once again, refused. The authorities, once again, doubted her toughness.
Some say that to soften the blow of her rejection, the Mother Superior, who never doubted the adequacy of Cabrini’s stout faith, told her that she was “called to establish a new Institute to bring glory to the heart of Jesus.”
That was sweet. It was also prophetic.
Frances Cabrini, who became Mother Cabrini, did just that, sickly or not. When she died, at 67 years old, in Chicago, Illinois, Mother Cabrini had established 67 missions of mercy by way of the Institute she had established. Mother Cabrini was the very first American canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
When Mother Teresa was awaiting the church’s verdict on the mission she was sworn to create in a vision, she read – she likely devoured – the life of Mother Cabrini. “She did so much for the Americans because she became one of them,” she wrote the Archbishop in a note. “Why can’t I do for India what she did for [America]?” (47).
Protestantism’s gift to political theory is and was the republicanism that arose from a theology that valued the idea of our being “saved by grace.” Luther and Calvin and the others refused to believe that the church and its decrees or practices stood between God and the believer. In the Protestant view, access to God almighty is neither created nor regulated by the church. All men and women are created equal.
Well, mostly.
Don’t get me wrong – this lifelong Protestant isn’t petitioning the next synod to canonize our spiritual giants. Nope. But the lives of the saints have done marvelous things in the Roman Catholic world, served as models to help millions believe in their own consecration.
Whether or not Mother Teresa would have succeeded without the witness of the life of Mother Cabrini is a question not really worth asking. What we know is that Mother Cabrini’s witness bore fruit in the life of a young idealist from Albania, a young teacher confident in a divine way that she’d heard directly from the voice of the Lord.
The lives of the saints, Protestant and Catholic, those canonized and those only quietly admired because so gloriously blessed. A – all of them enrich us, enrich our own lives.
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