She Was Told No: What Francesca Cabrini Can Teach Us About Perseverance

BY: GOOD.

There are plenty of reasons you might give up on a dream. Someone tells you it won’t work. The money isn’t there. The timing is wrong. You’re not qualified enough, strong enough or connected enough. Eventually, after enough closed doors, accepting “no” can start to feel like the sensible thing to do.

Francesca Cabrini had more reasons than most.

She was a woman trying to establish ambitious charitable institutions in the late nineteenth century, when positions of power were overwhelmingly held by men. She suffered from poor health throughout her life. She had limited resources and enormous ambitions, and when she arrived in New York in 1889, she encountered poverty on a scale that would have overwhelmed almost anyone.

Yet Francesca Cabrini possessed a remarkable ability to hear “no” without necessarily accepting that it was the final answer.

Her extraordinary story is brought to life in CABRINI, now streaming on GOOD. It’s an epic historical drama, but underneath the scale of the film is a surprisingly relatable story about what happens when determination meets obstacle after obstacle.

A Dream That Almost Ended Before It Began

Born in northern Italy in 1850, Francesca dreamed from childhood of becoming a missionary. Yet her fragile health repeatedly stood in her way, and she was turned away from religious orders she hoped to join.

It could easily have been the end of the story. Instead, she eventually founded her own order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in 1880.

Francesca’s original ambition was to become a missionary in China, but Pope Leo XIII had another idea. Rather than travelling east, he encouraged her to go west and serve the enormous population of Italian immigrants struggling to establish new lives in the United States.

So in 1889, Cabrini and six fellow sisters arrived in New York City. What they encountered was confronting. Italian immigrants were often living in overcrowded and impoverished neighbourhoods, with families facing poor sanitation, limited healthcare and discrimination.

She had arrived ready to help. Unfortunately, not everyone was ready to help her do it.

Another Door Closes

Shortly after arriving in New York, Cabrini encountered opposition from Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who had concerns about whether there was sufficient support for her mission. He reportedly suggested that the sisters might be better off returning to Italy.

Imagine hearing that after crossing the Atlantic to begin the work you believed you had been sent there to do. Francesca stayed.

Rather than allowing opposition to end the mission, she began finding ways around the obstacles in front of her. She established an orphanage and gradually expanded her work into education and healthcare. Mother Cabrini approached wealthy benefactors for support, negotiated with people in positions of authority and developed a formidable reputation as an organiser and fundraiser.

The woman who had arrived in America with little eventually became responsible for an extraordinary network of institutions. By the time of her death in 1917, Cabrini had founded 67 schools, hospitals and orphanages across the United States, Europe and Central and South America.

What makes that number particularly remarkable is remembering that every one of those institutions began with something that didn’t exist yet.

Perseverance Isn’t Pretending Things Are Easy

There’s a temptation when we tell stories about remarkable historical figures to make perseverance sound effortless. The hero has a dream, encounters resistance, bravely refuses to give up and inevitably succeeds.

Real life isn’t usually that neat.

Mother Cabrini’s achievements required years of fundraising, travelling, negotiating, planning and persuading. Her health remained fragile. Money was frequently an issue. She operated in environments where women had limited institutional power, while also advocating for immigrant communities facing significant prejudice.

Her perseverance wasn’t based on pretending those barriers weren’t real. It was grounded in refusing to allow them to have the final word.

That’s an important distinction.

Perseverance doesn’t necessarily mean repeatedly throwing yourself at the same locked door. Sometimes it means looking for another entrance. It can mean changing the plan without abandoning the purpose, asking someone else for help, learning something new or accepting that the route towards the goal may look completely different from the one you originally imagined.

Francesca’s own life demonstrates that beautifully. She dreamed of China. Her life’s work took her somewhere else entirely.

Start With What’s in Front of You

There’s another lesson in Cabrini’s story that’s easy to miss when we look back at the enormous scale of what she eventually accomplished. She didn’t begin with 67 institutions. She began with the need in front of her.

Big problems can have a paralysing effect. Poverty, homelessness, inequality, loneliness and countless other challenges are so enormous that it’s easy to conclude there’s little one person could possibly do about them.

Cabrini couldn’t help every vulnerable immigrant arriving in America. She couldn’t eliminate poverty from New York. What she could do was begin helping particular people in a particular place, and then build from there.

One orphanage became another project. One community led to another. One successful institution demonstrated what might be possible somewhere else.

It’s a pattern we see again and again in people who make an enduring difference. They don’t necessarily begin by asking how they’re going to change the world. They ask what they can do about the piece of it sitting directly in front of them.

When “No” Really Does Mean No

Of course, perseverance doesn’t mean we should never accept an answer we don’t like. Sometimes a closed door is closed for good reason, circumstances genuinely make something impossible, or wisdom requires us to change direction.

The challenge is learning the difference between a necessary boundary and an obstacle that can be overcome.

Cabrini herself changed direction dramatically. Her dream of missionary work in China never happened. Had she defined success solely as achieving her original plan, her story might have looked like failure. Instead, she remained committed to the deeper purpose behind that dream: serving people who needed help.

Perhaps that’s one of the most useful lessons perseverance can teach us. Sometimes holding onto our purpose requires loosening our grip on exactly how we thought we would achieve it.

What Could Be on the Other Side of No?

Francesca Cabrini eventually became a US citizen and, in 1946, Pope Pius XII canonised her, making her the first American citizen to become a Catholic saint. In 1950, she was named patron saint of immigrants. Her legacy continues through institutions and organisations around the world.

But perhaps the most compelling part of her story isn’t what she eventually became. It’s remembering how many opportunities there were along the way for none of it to happen.

She could have stopped when her health prevented her from following the conventional path into religious life. She could have abandoned her mission when her plans for China changed. She could have returned to Italy when her welcome in New York was less than encouraging. Instead, each setback forced another decision: is this the end, or do I find another way forward?

Most of us aren’t going to establish hospitals on several continents or become figures remembered more than a century after our deaths. But we will encounter closed doors. We’ll have plans fail, opportunities disappear and people tell us that something we care deeply about can’t be done.

In those moments, Cabrini’s story offers an encouraging question to ask. Perhaps “no” isn’t always the end of the story. Sometimes it’s simply where perseverance begins.

Discover the extraordinary true story of Francesca Cabrini in CABRINI, now streaming on GOOD.

Feature Image: Promotional images from Cabrini.