Cabrini, Capodanno, and the Suffering Servant

Many have criticized Angel Studios’ film Cabrini for its lack of overt or explicit focus on the faith of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, an Italian nun and foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This lack is truly lamentable, even though the film’s creators – devout Catholics all – may have had good reasons for not giving her faith obvious mention in the movie’s dialogue. Yet, while Cabrini may not directly speak of God, He is still present in the film if one but looks for Him.

One of the most eloquent treatises on God in Cabrini is the indication that the saint loves life. Prior to viewing Cabrini I had read Father Daniel L. Mode’s biography of Father Vincent Robert Capodanno – an Italian American, and a priest who became a Navy chaplain. Father Capodanno served with the 7th and 5th Marines in Vietnam as a chaplain and gave up his life on September 4, 1967, trying to protect the seriously wounded corpsman (Naval medic) for the 5th Marines. When a Viet Cong soldier opened up on both of them with a machine gun, the two were killed, with Father Capodanno taking 27 fatal bullets in his back.

A chaplain who worked with Father Capodanno noted that most Marines despised a man found killed with bullets in his back, as that meant he had been running away when he was shot. Not so with Father Capodanno – even without the full story, his Marines knew he could only have been shot in the back because he was trying to protect someone else. Their “Grunt Padre” would never run from a fight and leave his Marines behind, not after routinely following them into combat, something most Navy chaplains at the time notably did not do.

In his biography of this Servant of God, Father Mode considers whether Father Capodanno had a death wish and, in turn, if the archetypical martyr has a death wish. Father Mode concluded that no, a martyr does not desire death. Union with God, yes, but not death. Death is the enemy. In his final analysis, Father Mode concludes that Father Capodanno “loved life and loved living” and that he died to protect his Marines, not out of a desire for death and glory. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason:/To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Desiring death for glory or union with God against God’s own will is presumption of the worst kind.

Cabrini has a similar underlying theme. After being denied her childhood dream of being a missionary in China, Mother Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) and her sisters are sent to Five Points, the New York slums to which recent Italian immigrants gravitated. Her will has been denied because it is not God’s Will for her, and as Eliot wrote: “A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways.” Mother Cabrini in the film as in life must accept God’s Will and not her own, which is why she turns to her sisters and says, “Keep your eyes open. See everything.” She does not want any of them to look away from the suffering that the people they have come to serve endure, so that they can better assist and comfort them.

This theme is re-expressed in the film when Mother Cabrini and her sisters move into the abandoned orphanage Father Morelli (Giampiero Judica) has given up trying to run. On entering the building with Father Morelli, they find two boys, Enzo (Liam Campora) and Paolo (Federico Ielapi) hiding to eat some stolen food in relative safety. Father Morelli shouts at the two and chases them out over Mother Cabrini’s protests. She runs to the window to try to call the boys back, but they rush off and do not return. “Why did you do that?” she says, turning back to Father Morelli.

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” he replies. Father Morelli is a soul who has seen the worst of both America and the Italian immigrants he was sent to serve. He is clearly dealing very poorly with both the prejudice of the Americans and the apathy of the immigrants, having resigned himself to doing so much and no more for either and both these peoples.

But Mother Cabrini’s love, in life and in the film, is too great for the world because it is rooted in Christ’s love. When Enzo and the younger Paolo try to hold her and the sisters up for bread in the film, Mother does not scold them. Instead, she greets them with a smile and tells them she had been hoping to see them again, then invites them to dinner at the orphanage. Paolo is enchanted by the idea of an Italian meal and goes to the orphanage, prompting the older Enzo to follow him. The two boys soon find themselves going to school, dressing well, and helping Mother Cabrini with the other orphans in her care.

When circumstances lead Mother Cabrini to establish her orphanage in an old property once owned by the Jesuits, she finds there is no well to provide drinking water. Vittoria, a former prostitute who began living and working with the nuns not long after they arrived, spots Mother heading out in the middle of the night. She follows Mother outside to find her digging for a well and points out the time. Rather than make note of the time, too, or tell Vittoria to go back inside, Mother Cabrini asks the younger woman pleasantly: “Care to join me?”

Never in good health, Mother Cabrini still continues to dig when Vittoria has taken a seat after aiding her for some time. “You should rest more,” Vittoria tells her. “You’re not well. Why do you do this? Are you trying to die?”

It is a pointed question. Is Mother’s will to die? Is she trying to be a martyr? Taking a seat beside Vittoria, Mother Cabrini does not assure her with platitudes or say that she is given strength from above. Instead, she admits the universal truth that death terrifies her because she has not yet accomplished God’s Will. As long as she is working, she “feels [she] is stealing another day of life” for herself and her work. It is when she rests that she feels death to be too close to her for comfort.

One can see that, like Father Capodanno and all true martyrs, Mother Cabrini loves life. She also loves those who share it with her, whether they be orphans struggling to survive on the streets or seemingly recalcitrant Americans who call her and other Italian immigrants “Dagos.” Even a prostitute and two boys stealing food are loved by her, and this love that is received by an eager heart seeks ways of pleasing the one who gives it so freely.

Thus, it is not really a surprise when the grateful Enzo and Paolo reflect on Mother Cabrini and the orphanage early one morning. The two decide to find jobs to aid in supporting the sisters’ efforts, but the only job they can find is in a pump station, where an accident occurs. Enzo manages to find and save Paolo but is himself injured and left unconscious. Though the sisters and the doctor, who works with them at the makeshift hospital in Five Points, try to save him Enzo passes away despite their best efforts.

Paolo, whom Enzo at one point referred to as “Bro!” in the film despite their being unrelated, is deeply affected by his best friend’s loss. He sits on the porch of the hospital and cries, only to be joined by Mother Cabrini. For a moment it appears she will offer the boy some comforting words of hope…

…but then her own face crumples and she breaks down sobbing. Startled, Paolo reaches out to hug and comfort her.

Mother Cabrini could not shield Enzo, not as Father Capodanno tried to shield the corpsman for whom he gave his life. But each loved their people and loved them keenly, enough so that they wished to save them. Mother Cabrini grasped Enzo’s hand when the doctor finally set it down, unwilling to let him go to the last, for she loved him as she would her own son and was reluctant to release him even when it was clear that he was gone.

Throughout his biography of Father Capodanno, Father Mode makes constant reference to the path of suffering and how it refines us. Christ is the Suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah and those who love Him most must also suffer for others. This, however, does not mean they are dour or constantly in pain; it means something much harder. It means crawling out into the mud and muck of a Vietnamese jungle to listen to the troops, to share their hardships and hear their hopes. It also means going into the slums where prostitutes are beaten and children starve. It means staying up late to write letters to the families of boys who are not coming back, or who are coming back wounded. It also means getting up at two in the morning to dig in search of a well in the dark, before the chores begin and when resting would be more reasonable.

Yes, the path of suffering includes moments of magnificent courage, such as throwing oneself between a machine gun and a wounded man. But it also means letting someone go and then grieving that loss, as Mother Cabrini does on the porch of her hospital in Five Points. The comfort of knowing God will take a dead boy home does not negate the sorrow those who remain behind must feel. The pain is as sharp or sharper for Mother Cabrini than it is for Paolo, who loved Enzo as a brother. Yet Mother Cabrini was their adopted mother and now one of her sons lies dead, dead when he may not have died if the American doctors had come when she sent for their aid.

It is right for her to weep. It was right for the men of the Marine Corps to weep behind the lines when the word came across the radio, “The chaplain’s hit. The chaplain’s hit.” Love does not demand stoicism in the face of loss. Not if it is true love. Christ wept at Lazarus’s tomb even knowing He would raise His friend from the dead. How much more appropriate is it, then, for Mother Cabrini to cry over Enzo, or the men of the Marines to sob at Father Capodanno’s death?

The film Cabrini does not talk about faith, but it doesn’t have to do so to be effective. How often we have been told, “Preach the Gospel and, when necessary, use words.” Cabrini does not have words on faith in the dialogue because the heroine’s actions illustrate the Gospel quite well: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”

Words can be twisted to form a lie, or to be construed as a lie. Consistent actions are more difficult to bend, as what does Cabrini gain by building her empire of hope? What did Father Capodanno gain, living with his “grunt” Marines? Many people – many Catholics – did not even know of Mother Cabrini until this film came out. Father Capodanno may have seven chapels and a U.S. destroyer to his name, but outside the Marines and his family, who knows him? Who remembers Mother Cabrini?

Yes, it would have been good to see God mentioned more within the film. But the movie does not fail because it lacks mention of Him. It soars because He is there at every turn, whenever Mother Cabrini and her sisters need Him. Just as in the jungles of Vietnam, Father Capodanno always had what he needed to speak to or care for his Marines – including a rather scapegrace poem, according to one of his grunts!

Cabrini demonstrates what it means to be “in the world but not of it.” Mother Cabrini meets people “where they are at” but never leaves them there. Father Capodanno met the Marines “where they were at,” but even decades later they remember him and are different because of him. These suffering servants of THE Suffering Servant are models of good behavior and good preaching for us all, as they demonstrate that there are times to talk about God, but there are also times to show Him to others with action. “We mourn [for Christian martyrs], for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, for another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and the salvation of men,” as Eliot says in Murder in the Cathedral.

Mother Cabrini’s tears at the loss of a boy who didn’t need to die is in keeping with this view, as is a priest forcefully telling his brother that those who oppose the Vietnam War “don’t know what’s happening [there].” The saints are human, and too often tales about them make them seem other than human, superhuman beyond ever imitating. Who can be as holy as the (apparently preternaturally) gifted saints?

Yet that is not and never has been the case. It was not the case with Our Lord, Who is both God and Man. He is vulnerable and as Jerome German tells us, that frightens us, for it means we must be vulnerable as well. Father Dwight Longenecker argues in his book The Romance of Religion that we have done our best to “tame” Christ, reminding readers several times in Romance what was said of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: “He is good. But He is not a tame lion.”

Have we, perchance, attempted to tame our saints? To tame Mother Cabrini by, if not forgetting her as many have forgotten Father Capodanno and wish to forget the veterans of the Vietnam War, then by making her less human in books, film, and discourse?

It would have been nice to have God spoken of more in Cabrini. I certainly would have appreciated it. Yet Mother Cabrini was a woman, a human being. She had to deal with an age at least as secular as our own and was surrounded by suffering, with her own death staring her in the face every time there was a delay of any kind in her efforts. At times, speaking directly of God would have served her and Him less than to be firmly confident in her mission.

Father Capodanno did not spend all his time preaching to the Marines. That would have kept them away from him and God. Instead, as Father himself said, he listened to them. Then he spoke to them, and not always about faith. Church was not on the list of places one could find a Marine in that poem the Marine recalled, and there was no mention made that Father Capodanno added it to the list. He just read the poem to the Marines and laughed with them over it.

What are we missing by insisting there should have been more faith in Cabrini? Perhaps we are trying to tame her, to tame the saints as we have tried to tame God Himself, so that we do not need to make more effort to love as she loved – as Christ loved. There are times to speak directly of the Good News, but it is better to live it. Perhaps by demanding more faith in Cabrini we are shying away from actually living our own faith in the Suffering Servant and meeting people “where they are at” so we can show by our lives that they do not have to stay “where they are at” in this world.

It is something worth reflecting upon, at the very least. Aslan is not a tame lion, but He is good. Christ did not come to minister to the righteous, but to call the sinners back. In other words, He did not come for the tame, who desired to stay tame so much they went to the point of nailing Him to a cross. He came for the rowdy, the wild, those who love life and want it more abundantly, but got lost trying to find their way there.

Are we any less than our Master? It is something to think about. Mayhap we need to adjust our views, rather than demand that Cabrini be adjusted for us and “tamed” to our expectations. Perhaps we need to love more, give more of ourselves, and see Cabrini again in theaters. Who knows? Perhaps we were not looking closely enough to see God there the first time. Or as in the words of T.S. Eliot: “[Martyrdom] is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.”

Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) tells Mother Cabrini in the film that he “cannot tell where [her] faith ends and [her] ambition begins.” That is because her ambition is God’s Will; her will is not her own, she has given it to Him. Without mentioning Him she still relies on Him for everything, even to the last moment of the movie, just as the real Mother Cabrini relied upon Him in her life.

Have we done the same? Where do our ambitions diverge from our faith? Cabrini asks of us, tacitly, to review our ambitions, to see if they are in keeping with God’s Will for our lives. And it does so without mentioning Him directly, for He is not a tame lion. The Great Lion, particularly to those who do not know Him, is a frightful creature. Perhaps it is better, then, to see the woman with a lioness’s courage while recognizing there is a Great Lion behind her. He will be easy to see – once we know we should look for Him through her.