In 1850, a small and sickly girl, the youngest of thirteen children, was born two months prematurely to a farm family in the Italian region of Lombardy. Francesca Cabrini would suffer from poor health her entire life. When in her teens she decided to give her life to Christ, she was rejected by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, who considered her too weak to endure convent life.

But she persisted and became a nun in 1877, taking the name by which we know her now: Frances Xavier Cabrini. Years before, while visiting her uncle, Fr. Don Luigi Oldini, she placed violets into paper boats, dropped them into a stream, and imagined they carried her and other missionaries to China, where the great St. Francis Xavier had journeyed 300 years before.