Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
In 2020, the graffiti-marred statue of Christopher Columbus in Arrigo Park was unceremoniously yanked from its pedestal and stored on its back in a Chicago Park District warehouse. After a protracted legal battle, the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans was finally able to win its release earlier this year, but only on the condition that it be showcased indoors in a museum that’s currently being created on Taylor Street.
So, who will now occupy the position of honor that Columbus once held in that storied public park just a stone’s throw away from the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii in Chicago’s legendary Italian enclave. Thanks to the tenacity of the JCCIA’s legal team, the city of Chicago has guaranteed the pedestal will showcase an Italian or Italian American who has contributed significantly to the community in Chicago or nationwide.
The decision will rest in the hands of a committee of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, on which a member of the JCCIA will be a part. Whatever luminaries they may entertain, one candidate stands head and shoulders above all others: a frail nun from Italy who built a global empire of giving and who once called Chicago home.
Chicago boasts two “saints” who arrived on its lakeshore at around the same time, one secular and one religious. Jane Addams came to the Windy City from Cedarville, Illinois, in 1889, and Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini travelled from Sant’Angelo Lodigiano by way of New York City 10 years later.
Addams’ Hull House was the first of its kind in the U.S. to bring culture and education as well as aid to the immigrants of Chicago, and she is rightly revered for it. A co-founder of the ACLU and a proponent for workers’ and women’s rights, she was the most famous woman in America at the time. Though she was initially shunned for her pacifist stance during World War I, she was vindicated in 1931 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace.
Today, she is celebrated at Chicago Women’s Park by “Helping Hands,” a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois “that symbolizes the lives that Addams helped improve,” according to the Chicago Park District website. It may surprise you to know that it’s the only monument in the entire Chicago Park District that celebrates an actual (vs. fictional) woman.
As remarkable as her accomplishments were, they pale in comparison to what Mother Cabrini gave to the metropolitan area and the world. This diminutive woman, always in poor health but armed with an indomitable spirit and determination, conquered first the Big Apple and then the Windy City before forging a network of 67 schools, orphanages and hospitals in 15 nations.
Though she and her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were sent to America by Pope Leo XIII in 1889 to help Italian immigrants, her work was never limited to Catholics or Italians. It is estimated that she traveled some 55,000 miles all told and improved the lives of more than 100,000 people. She always said, “The World is too small for my work.”
Mother Cabrini arrived in Chicago in 1899, founding the Assumption School on the Near Northwest Side and then Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park and the Columbus Extension Hospital in the Taylor Street neighborhood. She and her sisters also ministered to prisoners in Cook County Jail.
She used the Chicago rail hub to travel extensively to Colorado to support miners, and to Los Angeles and then Seattle, where she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1909. She died in Chicago in her room in Columbus Hospital in 1917, exhausted by her work, and was canonized on July 7, 1946, becoming the first U.S. citizen to be declared a saint.
Wouldn’t it be fitting, especially now that we have a Chicago connection with Pope Leo XIV, for a monument to Mother Cabrini to occupy that vaunted position in Arrigo Park, making her only the second woman to be honored in that way by the Chicago Park District?
The article above appears in the September 2025 issue of the print version of Fra Noi. Our gorgeous, monthly magazine contains a veritable feast of news and views, profiles and features, entertainment and culture. To subscribe, click here.
