Pope Leo XIV honors Mother Cabrini, urges compassion for migrants

Pope Leo XIV went to Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini’s birthplace near Milan and turned a saint’s homecoming into a pointed message on migration. In Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, he presented Cabrini as the first saint of the United States and a model for how Christians should respond to people on the move.

The pope’s pastoral visit to Pavia and Sant’Angelo Lodigiano had been scheduled for Saturday, June 20, 2026. In Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, he prayed before Cabrini’s tomb in the basilica that bears her name, thanked Bishop Maurizio Malvestiti, the parish priest, the mayor and other civil authorities, and later presided over an evening prayer service. He said he had come to pay homage to Cabrini, whom he called “Patrona dei migranti” and “prima Santa degli Stati Uniti d’America.”

Leo used Cabrini’s life to press the debate far beyond local devotion. He asked young people to learn her story and to consider what her missionary spirit would say now, adding, “What could be more relevant today?” and urging people to “get to know St. Frances Cabrini!” Vatican reporting said he framed her witness as a response to a migration crisis that is now far more complex than in her era, and as a prompt to ask what Christ would ask of believers in the present moment.

Cabrini’s biography gives the appeal its force. Born in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano in 1850 and dead in Chicago in 1917, she was canonized on July 7, 1946, after founding the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880. The Vatican says Leo XIII told her to go “not to the East, but to the West,” where millions of Italians were emigrating to the Americas, and that Pius XII later called her the “Celestial Patron of All Emigrants.” Her work went beyond immigrant ministry to schools, hospitals, orphanages and kindergartens for emigrants’ children.

For Leo, a Chicago native and the first U.S.-born pope, Cabrini also offered a bridge to today’s political fight over migration. He has repeatedly returned to the subject in his papacy, including appeals to migrant workers and to the threat posed by human traffickers in Tenerife. By elevating Cabrini in her hometown, Leo linked Catholic charity, church doctrine and public policy, and placed the care of migrants at the center of a moral argument now being heard in the United States, in Europe and inside the church itself.