Cabrini Film Reviewed: How a Nun Beat the Odds

Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher

For Catholics, the release of a film about saints is always welcome news, more so when it gets a mainstream cinema release, as is the case with Cabrini, which opened in NuMetro cinemas on March 8.

The title character is St Frances Xavier Cabrini, the foundress of a congregation of Sisters who moved from Italy to New York in 1889 to care for the bitterly impoverished Italian immigrant community there, which lived in a slum where “even rats live better than the people”. It is no movie cliché to note that Mother Cabrini succeeded against all odds to lay the foundation for the biggest international charity network the world had ever seen.

The obstacles were many: Cabrini’s health was fragile, but she lived to the age of 67. Funding was a perennial problem, at least until Mother Cabrini’s entrepreneurial genius kicks in. Archbishop Corrigan of New York didn’t want her to interfere with his fundraising as she tries to raise money for the immigrant Italians, whom Corrigan blatantly discriminates against (as he did in real life). Politics and society were, at best, obstructive.

Cabrini tells the remarkable story of the nun well and, within the limitations of film narratives, faithfully. The New York of the 1890s is marvellously recreated.

Cristiana Dell’Anna conveys steely, faith-based determination as Mother Cabrini, but allows it to be laced with vulnerability. David Morse as Archbishop Corrigan is suitably ambiguous. The real archbishop was not one of the episcopate’s nicer people, but the film does well not to overplay Corrigan’s villainry. Veteran Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini is superb as Pope Leo XIII, even though he looks more like Pius X than Leo.

Mother Cabrini’s struggles with patriarchy — in the Church, in politics and in society — and xenophobia form the core of the film’s narrative, and the Sisters’ mission of compassion and love for the vulnerable give it its heart. Cabrini avoids the pitfall of saccharine hagiography; the film suggests that Mother Cabrini was driven by compassion as well as ambition in building her “empire of hope”.

The film — which is about 20 minutes too long — obviously dramatises events, and there are scenes of contrived jeopardy and pathos that seemed to be required for an engaging narrative, but Cabrini doesn’t take undue liberties with the facts in the way many biopics do. The scriptwriters certainly researched St Cabrini’s life well, right down to her lifelong fear of drowning.

This movie is aimed at a broader audience than just Catholics, so there are a few things that the Catholic viewer may miss. Glaring among them is a scene in which a repentant prostitute tells Mother Cabrini that she cannot be cleansed, presumably from her sin. Mother goes on to give her a pep talk that sounds more 21^st century psychology than 19^th-century spirituality.

Catholics will know well that her actual counsel to the woman would have been to take her repentance to the confessional where sins are cleansed in the sacrament of Reconciliation.

But these caveats aside, and acknowledging that this is a biopic and not a documentary on the saint, there is very little to object to in this film. Indeed, Cabrini shows what is possible with God.

Moreover, Cabrini sets us a challenge today in our treatment of migrants, including those who come to the USA today, those who come to Italy to escape war and poverty, or those who come to South Africa in search of a better life. What is Mother Cabrini saying to us today?

Early on in the film, Mother Cabrini tells the pope that the world is too small for what she trying to do. Cabrini shows how this woman overcame the obstacles of patriarchy and xenophobia — and also benefitted from Pope Leo’s wisdom in directing her to start in the West — to accomplish her mission.