‘Cabrini’ biopic offers sense of hope to filmgoing audience

“We are bold or we die, that is how I learned to live in America,” is a watershed line of dialogue spoken by Mother Cabrini as she explains to Pope Leo XIII the living conditions in New York in the feature film, “Cabrini,” that opened nationwide March 8, fittingly on International Women’s Day. 

The film, from Angel Studios that also brought “The Chosen,” takes us back to the 1880s in Lombardy, Italy as Francesca Cabrini is summoned to Rome to explain to the pope that she and her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, would like to establish missions in the Far East. Rome has other plans for her and her order. With the large influx of Italian immigrants to the United States, and particularly New York City, church officials ask that Mother Cabrini and her small order venture to America to serve the poor.

Arriving in late March of 1889, the frail, five-foot-tall Italian nun and her six sisters are stationed in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, later to become known as Little Italy. Amid the squalor and the prejudice, Mother Cabrini, played very ably by Cristiana Dell’Anna, fought to establish a working orphanage for Italian immigrant children who lost parents because of typhoid and abject poverty.   

A recurring theme of the movie is that Mother Cabrini is constantly challenged by the men opposed to her mission. At first with Msgr. Scalabrini, her local ordinary in Lombardy whom she told in 1887.

“The world is too small to limit ourselves to one point; I want to embrace it entirely and to reach all its parts.”

Then next, the pope, portrayed by famed actor Giancarlo Giannini, who cautions her mission to America by stating he doesn’t want her to fail.  

She next takes on New York’s Archbishop Corrigan in a strong performance by David Morse whose contempt for her effort and the immigrant population struggling in Five Points exposes the too cozy relationship between the archdiocese and the political elite of the city.  

Her most formidable foe is Mayor Gould, played by John Lithgow, who presents major obstacles to her success until he realizes he has met his equal in a woman committed to equal treatment for all people regardless of their origin.

Western New Yorkers will recognize various locales like Main Street and the Ellicott Square Building, and City Hall Council Chambers as a portion of the film was shot in Buffalo in the summer of 2021. (See related article on a Buffalo native who worked on the film.)  

The movie is visually complex as the utter misery of the Five Points neighborhood (shot on Elk Street in Buffalo) is portrayed in dark, heavy scenes as Mother Cabrini and her nuns, as well as Vittoria, portrayed by Romana Vergano, a prostitute who aids the order, save children literally from the sewers, and house, clothe and educate them.

In a touching scene where one of her missionary sisters discusses cloth to make clothes for the orphans, Mother Cabrini opts for the more expensive cloth so that the children can gain some dignity and self-worth by looking their best. 

Mother Cabrini, the first American saint of the Catholic Church, canonized in 1946, went forward to found hospitals and orphanages in American and throughout the world.  In Cabrini, the spirit of a woman inspired by Christ’s work shines through this portrayal by Dell’Anna, whose toughness and focus brought order to the lives of immigrant children who had so few options in the late 19th century in New York.  

The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, based in New York City, funds numerous causes throughout New York state and has current assets of $3.5 billion. 

Watching this movie, with a runtime of two hours and 25 minutes that seems much briefer, took me back to stories my mother used to tell.  She was a first generation American of Italian descent, and she told stories of the struggles her parents went through coming from Sicily and the Basilicata region in Southern Italy.  My mother was born in 1918 in a tenement building on Dante Place in downtown Buffalo. It wasn’t pleasant accommodations for the growing family of five at the time.  As I watched the trials that these immigrants faced in the film, I had a renewed appreciation for my grandparents. 

“Cabrini” is a tale of overcoming everything put in this religious revolutionary’s way.  She always championed the underserved and challenged power brokers to treat everyone the same because as she says in the film, “We are all God’s children.”

You’ll leave the movie with an immense sense of hope that with focus, and the spirit and will of God behind you, that anything truly is possible.  A diminutive, infirmed female immigrant – whose ethnicity and gender was dismissed by the New York City elite – used every fiber of her being to not only help transform late 19th century New York, but impact the care and treatment of the underserved throughout America and the world.