Vatican City, Nov 9, 2017 / 00:08 am
Pope Francis praised St. Frances Cabrini in the preface to a book about her life for her foresight in addressing the needs of migrants, saying she's an example of how to treat people with both charity and justice.
The saint combined "great charity with a prophetic spirit," the Pope noted. "Frances Cabrini, precisely for this reason, is very present today and teaches us the way to deal with the momentous phenomenon of migration by combining charity and justice."
Not only did she realize that mass migration "was not a temporary phenomenon," he continued, she also saw "the emergence of a new historical era" in which modern transport would allow easier movement of large populations.
"Frances understood that modernity would be marked by these immense migrations and uprooted human beings, in a crisis of identity, often desperate and lacking resources to face the society in which they would have to enter," he said.