November 16, 2025

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, The World Day of the Poor and the Jubilee of Hope, Feast of St. Frances Cabrini (Observed), November 16, 2025

27 minutes

Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, New York

Feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Jubilee of the Poor and World Day of the Poor

November 16, 2025

Is 58:6-11, Ps 34:1-7, Rom 12:9-16, Jn 6:24-35

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.16.25_SFXC_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:

Today we have the joy, at this Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini housing her sacred relics under the altar, to be able to celebrate her feast day on the closest Sunday, to thank God for her vocation, life and missionary work, and to invoke her powerful intercession. We do so on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time in the Church’s liturgical year, on which, since 2017, has marked the World Day of the Poor. This now annual observance is augmented today by the Jubilee of the Poor within the year-long Jubilee of Hope. In his Message to help the Church prepare for this observance, Pope Leo explicitly connected the World Day of the Poor to the Jubilee of Hope and focused specifically on the loving care for the poor that is meant to flow from our Christian hope. The points he makes we can easily see illustrated in the life of the great missionary of hope, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini.

“Hope, sustained by God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, turns human hearts into fertile soil where charity for the life of the world can blossom,” the Holy Father wrote, clearly describing the good and rich that led to so much fruit in the life of our saint. Pope Leo emphasized, “The Church’s tradition has constantly insisted on the circular relationship between the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Hope is born of faith, which nourishes and sustains it on the foundation of charity, the mother of all virtues. … Charity is not just a promise; it is a present reality to be embraced with joy and responsibility. Charity engages us and guides our decisions towards the common good.” He said that each of us, like St. Frances Cabrini and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart she founded, “is called to offer new signs of hope that will bear witness to Christian charity, just as many saints have done over the centuries.” In his recent encylical Dilexi Te, on love for the poor, he specifically mentioned St. Francis Cabrini whom he said distinguished herself, among other things, by her love for and pastoral care of migrants. The first American pope wrote, “Saint Frances Cabrini, born in Italy and a naturalized American, was the first citizen of the United States of America to be canonized. To fulfill her mission of assisting migrants, she crossed the Atlantic several times. Armed with remarkable boldness, she started schools, hospitals and orphanages from nothing for the masses of the poor who ventured into the new world in search of work. Not knowing the language and lacking the wherewithal to find a respectable place in American society, they were often victims of the unscrupulous. Her motherly heart, which allowed her no rest, reached out to them everywhere: in hovels, prisons and mines.” He noted that’s why, 75 years ago during the Jubilee of 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed her “Patroness of All Migrants.” That’s why the US Bishops, under her patronage, have urged all Americans to to make “The Cabrini Pledge” and become “Keepers of Hope” for others. St. Frances Cabrini founded hospitals, schools, orphanages, universities and so many other institutions to reach out to the most vulnerable and marginalized. Those institutions of hope, what in St. Frances Cabrini’s life was dubbed an “empire of hope,” all flows from the conviction, Pope Leo underlined, that “the poor are not a distraction for the Church, but our beloved brothers and sisters, for by their lives, their words and their wisdom, they put us in contact with the truth of the Gospel.” In the poor, we don’t find disruptions and disturbances but in fact the divine: we find Jesus who himself became poor and personally identifies with the poor, hungry, thirst, naked, stranger, ill, imprisoned and otherwise in need. Hence Pope Leo concludes, “The celebration of the World Day of the Poor is meant to remind our communities that the poor are at the heart of all our pastoral activity. This is true not only of the Church’s charitable work, but also of the message that she celebrates and proclaims. God took on their poverty in order to enrich us through their voices, their stories and their faces. Every form of poverty, without exception, calls us to experience the Gospel concretely and to offer effective signs of hope.” St. Francis Cabrini’s proclamation of the Gospel, her missionary work, was a response, first, to the “gravest form of poverty,” that of not knowing God, but it also led her and her sisters to the explosion of love that led her to care for those in other forms of deprivation, from orphans, to girls not receiving education, to the sick, to the homeless, hungry and hopeless.

In the readings for the Feast of St. Frances Cabrini that we celebrate today, God illustrates for us the charity for the poor that is meant to flow from what the Holy Father calls charity’s circular relationship with Christian faith and hope. The Prophet Isaiah tells us that the worship God wants is meant never to remain just focused on him, but overflow into love for those he loves. He wants us to fast, to hunger, indeed to starve to release those bound unjustly, set the oppressed free, share our bread with the famished, shelter the oppressed and homeless, clothe the naked, oppose false accusation and malicious speech, satisfy the afflicted and care for our family and fellow human beings. He wants us, as St. Paul reminded the first Christians in his Letter to the Romans, to love one another sincerely, with affection, humbly contributing to each others’ needs and welcoming them into our lives and homes, sharing their sorrows and joys, indeed enduring in affliction with them, perserving in prayer and rejoicing in and with the hope that comes from faith. The ultimate fruit of our faith and hope is the charity that leads us, as we prayed in the Psalm, to bless the Lord at all times, with his praise always in our mouth. When our soul glories in the Lord in this way, when we magnify the Lord and exalt his name, when our faces are radiant in joy despite misfortune, then the poor, we pray, can “hear and be glad” and learn from us how to seek the Lord who desires to answer us and save us from fear and distress, as we become conscious that he is with us. St. Francis Cabrini’s faith blessing the Lord at all times, trusting in him who was her strength in every trial, praying to him with filial confidence, led so many of her sisters and the poor to be able to find joy in the midst of their poverty and sufferings and helped them to magnify the Lord with her.

We see the center of the circle of St. Frances Cabrini’s faith, hope and love in the Gospel in Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist in which he identifies himself as the new and true manna given to us each day by heaven to feed our deepest hunger and enrich to overflowing our most profound poverty. Jesus tells us not to work for perishable food but for the nourishment that endures to eternal life that he would give us, and St. Frances Cabrini dedicated all her energies to striving for the Holy Communion that the Eucharistic Jesus makes possible. The work of God, Jesus said, was to believe in the One whom God the Father sent, and to believe in Jesus means to believe in what he said and did. That’s why she staked her life on what Jesus taught us in today’s Gospel and acted on one year later in the Last Supper, when he took bread and wine, totally changed them into his body and blood, and said, “Take and eat; this is my Body,” and “Take and drink; this is the chalice of my Blood.” She took with the utmost seriousness Jesus’ words, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst,” and gave her life to help others similarly act on those words. She taught the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart and so many of their students, “The Eucharist is the life of the soul,” “Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the fountain of all graces, the center of all virtues,” and “Our Strength is in the Eucharist; let us remain close to Jesus.” She urged everyone, “God often to Holy Communion. Go very often. This is your one remedy” and told those who might be looking for her, with words that apply both to her life and after her death, “If you want to find me, look for me in the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.” She insisted that every institution she founded have a chapel with the Blessed Sacrament and made Eucharistic adoration the center of community life. When she had to make important decisions, like founding a new mission, or sending sisters overseas and solving one crisis after another, she prayed for long periods before Jesus. She encouraged frequent communion well before it became common in the Church, catechized immigrants and prepared thousands of children for Holy Communion, organized Eucharistic processions, journeyed with priests long distances through dangerous areas to help bring the Eucharist to the sick and dying. If her motto was that she could do all things in Him who strengthened her, that was concretized by her believing she could do all things in Jesus, her Eucharistic Lord, God-with-us, who in the Blessed Sacrament has kept his promise to be with us always until the end of time. Her love for the Eucharistic Jesus was the fullest daily expression of her faith, the source of her abiding hope, and the root of all her charity, as she sought to make her life a Eucharistic offering, giving all she was and had out of love for God and others.

We celebrate her feast day not on December 22, which is the day she died in 1917, which falls within the special last days of Advent in preparation for Christmas, but on November 13, which is the day 20 years later she was beatified by Pope Pius XI, the great Pope promoter of the missions. In order to be declared a saint, as many of you know, there needs to be an investigation as to whether someone lived the theological virtues of faith, hope, charity towards God and towards neighbor, as well as of the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, and their associated virtues, in a heroic degree. In the papal decree for her beatification, Pius XI linked her heroic hope to her heroic charity. “Beyond doubt,” the Holy Father wrote in Latin, “there is evidence of the theological virtue of … hope … in a heroic degree.” It described, “Frances Xavier Cabrini endured many insults, adversities, and incredible hardships for the salvation of souls, bravely bearing them as the Apostle did, claiming: ‘I can do all things in Him who strengthens me,’ which she left as a noble legacy of her Institute. Strengthened by this hope, she could not be deterred from her holy purpose by any difficulty. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean twenty-four times, traveling thousands of kilometers on horseback or on foot over the rugged Andes mountains, disregarding dangers and sparing no consideration for her frail health. … She reaped abundant fruits from her immense labors until she succumbed to exhaustion on December 22, 1917, in Chicago.” Pope Francis, as the Church was preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her death and birth into eternal life in 2017, called her a “true missionary” who kept her eyes constantly open “to see where God was sending her on mission” and that led to a burst of “such great energy to accomplish extraordinary work within a few years,” indeed, “a whirlwind life laden with work, endless journeys on foot, by train, ship, boat, horse…; creating out of nothing 67 charities including shelters, schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, workshops … all in order to propagate the power of the Gospel that had opened her heart, so that it could belong to everyone.” This is what she did here in New York, as she came to care for the 50,000 poor and frazzled Italian immigrants being served by only 12 priests, beginning with those children who no longer had a mom or a dad. This is what led her to New Orleans and Chicago and Denver, to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, France and England as she brought hope, faith and Christ-like love to the poor who were falling through the cracks.

Today as we celebrate her feast, we ask her to pray for us so that we might imitate her faith and hope in the Lord in whom she believed she could do all things, her love for God that led her to consecrate her life to him and love for others that helped her to give her best and her all. How fitting it is that as we make this prayer to God through her intercession, we do so here, where her mortal remains are under the altar where the Eucharist is celebrated. “If you want to find me,” she said, “look for me in the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament,” and her body will soon rest under that very presence of his Body and Blood. She reminds us that the Eucharistic Jesus is our strength, the life of our soul, the fountain of all graces, and the center of all virtues and urges us to remain close to him as he seeks to draw close to us and become the food that endures to eternal life for which he urges us to labor just like she did. The Eucharistic Jesus wants to make us, like he made her, missionaries of hope in the midst of an often desperate world that ever needs to find in him the hope that never disappoints. Let us ask her to intercede for this grace so that we, like her, can hunger for what God calls us through Isaiah to do, to magnify the Lord with her in a way that the poor can see and be glad, and indeed rejoice in hope while enduring in affliction, as we await the blessed hope, the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Eucharist now, and one day, we pray, in his risen state, together with St. Frances Xavier Cabrini and all the saints.

These were the readings for the Mass:

A Reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed; Your vindication shall go before you, and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am! If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday; Then the LORD will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. He will renew your strength, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails.

Psalm — I will bless the Lord at all times

Of David, when he feigned madness before Abimelech, who forced him to depart. I will bless the LORD at all times; praise shall be always in my mouth. My soul will glory in the LORD that the poor may hear and be glad. Magnify the LORD with me; let us exalt his name together. I sought the LORD, who answered me, delivered me from all my fears. Look to God that you may be radiant with joy and your faces may not blush for shame. In my misfortune I called, the LORD heard and saved me from all distress.

A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans

Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor. Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality. Bless those who persecute [you], bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation.

A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St. John

When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus. And when they found him across the sea they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.” So they said to him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” So they said to him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

The post Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, The World Day of the Poor and the Jubilee of Hope, Feast of St. Frances Cabrini (Observed), November 16, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

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By Father Roger Landry

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November 16, 2025

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, The World Day of the Poor and the Jubilee of Hope, Feast of St. Frances Cabrini (Observed), November 16, 2025

27 minutes

Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, New York

Feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Jubilee of the Poor and World Day of the Poor

November 16, 2025

Is 58:6-11, Ps 34:1-7, Rom 12:9-16, Jn 6:24-35

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.16.25_SFXC_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:

These were the readings for the Mass:

A Reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah

Psalm — I will bless the Lord at all times

A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans

A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St. John

The post Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, The World Day of the Poor and the Jubilee of Hope, Feast of St. Frances Cabrini (Observed), November 16, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

...more