Movie Review: ‘Cabrini’ 2024 Movie: St. Francesca Cabrini & The Call To Spiritual Motherhood

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Cabrini starring Christiana Dell’Anna is a biopic aiming to inspire the same crowds of female audiences who have been flocking to cinemas in recent years. The film’s heroine is a petite, plucky nun on a mission with only this to say to those who would stand in her way: “The world is too small for what I intend to do.”

Mother Francesca Xavier Cabrini (Dell’Anna) is no stranger to rejection. Forced to become the leader of her own order after being rejected by several religious orders due to her “weakness of constitution,” Cabrini petitions repeatedly to be sent to China to establish orphanages. Though Cabrini is deathly ill, she feels a call she cannot ignore. But instead of sending her to China, Pope Leo XIII sends her across the Atlantic to New York City to serve the city’s impoverished Italian immigrant community.

Cabrini and her order arrive in New York alone and unsupported in the dangerous, prostitute-filled streets of Five Points. “Open your eyes,” Cabrini says matter-of-factly to her sisters, “These are the people we come to serve.” With this spirit she perseveres for the remainder of the film, fighting in banks and boardrooms to get the permission and then resources to open her orphanage (and later, hospital).

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Fresh off the success of surprise summer blockbuster Sound of Freedom, director Alejandro Monteverde has crafted a beautiful, historically-accurate film about the life of the first American citizen ever to be canonized a saint. But while Cabrini is a story about a woman of faith, it would be an injustice to call it merely a “faith-based” film. Rather than explicitly addressing the inner spiritual faith of its heroine, Cabrini chooses to depict what a woman with strong faith can accomplish (and must face) in a broken world.

Films with “strong female-leads” are in vogue at the moment, and it would be easy to write off Cabrini as religious pandering to a passing entertainment fad. Certainly Cabrini is not a perfect film, for it often eschews artistic subtlety and depth in its earnestness to convey its message. For me, however, this is a forgivable flaw because Cabrini takes the modern narrative of what a strong woman looks like and repaints it into a holy icon of feminine strength. More impressively, Cabrini achieves this without taking many liberties with the facts of its heroine’s life, including actual quotes whenever possible.

Yet though Mother Cabrini is meant to be an icon of womanly strength, the film only works because Christiana Dell’Anna refuses to play the character as a stereotype of the saintly. Dell’Anna’s Cabrini is forceful yet feminine, and above all imbued with the indomitable spirit of the historical figure.

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Though it’s never directly mentioned in the film, I couldn’t help but feel the specter of the Proverbs 31 woman lurking in the shadows of everything Mother Cabrini chooses to do during the story: seeking wool for clothes, bringing bread from afar, rising in the night for her household, considering a field and buying it. All are actions which Cabrini must take over the course of the film, the building blocks of the “empire of hope” she wishes to build in Christ’s name.

Cabrini presents audiences with a strong, female lead — but the catch lies in the way she exhibits that strength. Instead of practicing destruction or violence, Cabrini shows her strength in the daily practice of spiritual motherhood. Surrounded by church and civic politics, Mother Cabrini is unmanageable to the men who tell her no, but only because she answers to the higher calling of her nurturing mother’s heart. The great misfortune of the film is that we have only a few moments where we as an audience are allowed to peek inside the world of Cabrini’s spiritual motherhood — the delight she feels in caring of the orphans she calls “my children” and the grief she feels over the body of a lost child.

Cabrini may not be a nuanced masterwork of cinema, but the film’s call to women is beautiful nonetheless. In a world where every news outlet is stocked with pundits who preach about the problems in our society, Cabrini reminds us that women who embrace the calling to spiritual motherhood do not wait for permission to serve the needy in this world. Such women embrace each day as an opportunity from the moment they open their eyes and put on their daily habit. Cabrini the film is ultimately not unlike the woman who inspired it: hopeful, earnest, and direct.