Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini

by Pietro Di Donato

Overview

Francesca Maria Cabrini was born in 1850 in a small village on the Lombard Plain of Italy. At the moment of her birth, a cloud of snow-white doves appeared and circled the village, an augury of her future sanctity. Tiny frail and sickly, she was enthralled as a child by tales of the adventures of missionaries to faraway lands, and grew up with one burning desire: to join a religious order and tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the people of China. But no order would have her—her health was deemed too precarious. But her dream remained, and she set out to see it realized. Her first step, a formidable one, was obtaining an audience with His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII. This she did, after overcoming many obstacles. It was a meeting that would change her life, and the lives of so many in America. Mother Cabrini was granted her wish to start an orphanage abroad-but not in China, as she had requested. “Not East, but West, my child,” said Pope Leo, and her path was set.

PIETRO DI DONATO’S Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini is a powerful nonfiction account of a woman whose gripping story of perseverance, courage, and profound godliness serves as a paradigm for the new age of faith. Written in the fluid prose that made it a huge popular success upon its initial publication in 1960, Immigrant Saint is a book that makes us re-examine, and ultimately reaffirm, our belief in the possibilities of prayer, the validity of miracles, and the crucial importance of good works.

“…eloquent, fascinating, miraculous”—Saturday Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787204218
Publisher:	Papamoa Press
Publication date:	04/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	96,127
File size:	924 KB

About the Author

Pietro Di Donato (April 3, 1911 - January 19, 1992) was an American writer and bricklayer best known for his novel, Christ in Concrete (1939), which recounts the life and times of his bricklayer father, Geremio, who was killed in 1923 in a building collapse. The book, which portrayed the world of New York’s Italian-American construction workers during The Great Depression, was hailed by critics in the United States and abroad as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America, and cast di Donato as one of the most celebrated Italian American novelists of the mid-20th century.

Born in West Hoboken, New Jersey (now Union City) to Geremio, a bricklayer, and Annunziata Chinquina, Di Donato had seven other siblings. His parents had emigrated from the town of Vasto, in the region of Abruzzo in Italy.

Following his father’s death in 1923, Pietro left school in the seventh grade to become a construction worker in the trade union in order to help support his family. He retained his membership in the union his entire life. His father’s death and his life growing up as an immigrant in West Hoboken were the inspiration for his writings.

When his mother died a few years later, Pietro assumed full responsibility for providing for his family. Though he had little formal education, during a strike in the building trades he had wandered into a library and discovered French and Russian novels, becoming particularly fond of Émile Zola. He also took night classes at City College in construction and engineering.

The family was eventually able to move to Northport, Long Island, where he continued to work as a mason, and was inspired by Zola’s work to write about his own experiences in the Italian immigrant community.

Di Donato died of bone cancer in Stony Brook, Long Island in 1992 at the age of 80.