We’ve waited many months—even a century—for the release of the new movie “Cabrini” as directed and produced by Alejandro Monteverde. It does not disappoint. Indeed it is a thrilling look at the other side of the Gilded Age.
We know about the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies, the mansions, tails, and top hats, and the rise of powerful American industry and the building of great cities. It’s a glorious history but there is another story to tell. It’s about the spread of poverty, the spread of disease in cities, the chaos of orphans running around in streets, the difficulties of assimilating so many ethnic immigrants at one time.
The presence of poverty amidst plenty has long provided fodder to those who say commercial freedom is fundamentally broken, forever making the rich richer and the poor poorer. In reality, the rise of prosperity enables, attracts, and reveals poverty (the natural state of man) by creating a surplus means of sustenance for those who in past ages either would not have been alive and or would not have the means to migrate to the urban centers in the first place.
The greatest achievement of an advanced state of commercial freedom, then, is to give rise to the development of philanthropy at a level never before possible. That was the story of American urbanization in the last decades of the 19th century.
Crucial in this story is the role of St. Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the United States. This movie tells her story of believing she had a mission to the East only to have the Pope (Leo XIII) tell her to go to New York City where so many new Italian immigrants were suffering. She founded her order and took a half-dozen nuns with her.
The movie focuses on the early days and the gradual rise of the order to first start orphanages, then schools, then hospitals, and eventually spread all over the country with new institutions. Eventually she came to head what she called “an empire of hope” that covered the world, controlling at least 67 institutions with thousands of religious sisters running the show.
So far as I know from my own reading, the story the film tells is completely accurate.
It’s a fascinating history that is deeply embedded in the cultural memory of Italian migrant families to New York in the 1890s. I was once walking with the grandchild of a first-generation migrant and we were looking for his car in a parking lot. He muttered in passing: “Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, help me find my machinery.”
I found the little rhyme to be ridiculous but he explained that within his family and community this tiny nun had come to symbolize miraculous solutions to intractable problems. She has since been declared a saint. That inspired me to read a few biographies of her, only to find that this titan of charity was as big and important as Rockefeller then or Bill Gates now but with a key difference. She acted not out of a profit motivation but rather a dream of a better society.
So you can imagine my own personal happiness that this movie is finally out, and I’m sure millions feel the same way. The film itself is gloriously produced and perfect in every way. But it cannot tell the whole story. Rare with films these days, I was left with a feeling that it could have been thirty minutes longer than it was because it left out two critical things: the dramatic expansion of the order of nuns and also the vast industry she created.
I cannot recall the precise biography in which this is reported but I distinctly remember one story in which a mogul had willed a silver mine in Colorado to the order of nuns. The normal thing would have been to sell it and take the profits. Mother Cabrini decided instead to send some nuns there to learn how to manage the mine and learn metallurgy and take full control. They did this and created a wonderful income stream for the order.
The order was created at a delicate time for the Catholic Church. The first Vatican Council had closed but with no final resolution for why Pope Pius IX had called it in the first place: to save the Papal States with the temporal power. Partly under the influence of American and English Bishops, the power had been refused. With no real resolution for how to deal with the rise of democracy and the dissolving of monarchical power in Europe, the new Pope turned to firming up internal institutions, among which were charitable institutions.
Mother Cabrini, then, came along at a time when Rome was ever more interested in building out civic institutions, particularly as they pertained to Catholic migrants who were spreading out the world over. It was a time when urbanization and industry was taking over from rural and agricultural life and when the needs of education and health were dramatically expanding to cover the demands of a vastly expanding population.
Cabrini’s order came to New York City when it was a growing city but not the biggest. This was before the skyscrapers dominated the skyline and when corruption of the most egregious sort afflicted local politics. Mother Cabrini, who forever felt herself in a passionate rush to complete her mission due to her persistent ill-health, learned the system well, and eventually became flooded with the cash necessary to expand her operations.
The result was a model for the world, a vast network of charitable institutions run entirely off voluntary donations and administered by highly competent women who had committed their lives to serving the Christian faith. America, with its surplus wealth provided by expanding industry, proved that it was possible to be both capitalistic in its economic system but also fund a huge sector of education, health, and social services run by ideals and not some top-down system of socialism.
When watching the movie, one cannot help but wonder: what happened to all of this? How did this robust network come to be replaced by a brutal welfare state that is so expensive, funded by taxes, and staffed by impersonal bureaucrats inhabiting permanent positions in cruel agencies? This is the part of the story that the movie does not tell.
The end came in three parts.
First, if you look at any social science literature at the time—we are speaking of the Progressive Era from about 1910 to 1925—you discover that the system that the nuns had established came under vicious assault by secular and progressive intellectuals. They denounced their methods and forms as unscientific, replete with mysticism, and wholly dependent on the contingencies of donations and belief systems.
In a more sinister vein, the intellectuals truly resented how the order of sisters was working to make the lives of the poorest better rather than joining in the fashionable push for eugenics that they wanted to deploy to reduce their numbers. The Catholic Church stood strongly against these efforts and rightly so.
Inspired by the rantings of the intellectuals, cities themselves established public schools, hospitals, and orphanages that ended up crowding out the demand for religious institutions to provide the same. Once medical care came to be regulated and secularized, the sisters were pushed out. Same with orphanages. Eventually the same happened with education.
Second, the income and inheritance taxes that were passed in 1913 robbed the well-to-do of surplus income that they had previously used to fund organizations like the Missionary Sisters, as well as churches and other arts institutions. Philanthropy was reduced to a fraction of its previous size. Once again, this move was said to be consistent with modern science.
Third, in the second half of the 20th century, religion itself came under assault from without and within. The traditional orders of nuns were told to replace their customary garb with modern dress and adopt modern ways, while getting rid of religious discipline. The liturgies were translated into the vernacular and the old forms were swept away. The convents were eventually closed and the enormous properties were sold, leaving what one critic has called a “windswept house.”
The end result was to pummel and nearly destroy what Mother Cabrini and many other orders of nuns and many other religious institutions had sought to build. In the 21st century, people absolutely ridicule the idea that government provision could be wholly replaced by something else growing out of philanthropy.
How in the world could this happen? Well, I’m here to tell you that it did happen. The trouble is that no one is alive today who remembers. Not having experience with this means not being able to imagine that it is possible. This is why this movie is so crucially important. It draws attention to a world and a reality that really did exist but about which people know very little.
As we struggle to rebuild a broken world, let this wonderful film be an example to all of us and the world over. Anything is possible with enough vision, love, and passion for the cause. Mother Cabrini would not take no for an answer and you shouldn’t either.
