Cabrini originally wished to travel to China, but Pope Leo XIII responded: “Not to the East, but to the West.” He had recently penned Quam Aerumnosa (also known as “On Italian Immigrants”), an encyclical released on December 10, 1888, directed to American archbishops and bishops and pledging to send those of the Italian religious order to the United States to provide spiritual and material support. In it he struck an elegiac tone:
How sad and fraught with trouble is the state of those who yearly emigrate in bodies to America for the means of living is so well known to you that there is no need of us to speak of it at length. . . . It is, indeed, piteous that so many unhappy sons of Italy, driven by want to seek another land, should encounter ills greater than those from which they would fly. And it often happens that to the toils of every kind by which their physical life is wasted, is added the far more wretched ruin of their souls.
Cabrini and several fellow sisters left Italy on March 23, 1889, and arrived in New York City on March 31. The sisters were surprised to learn that there was nowhere for them to sleep—there was no convent in the area. Instead, they spent their first night in a filthy rooming house, and, due to bedbugs, took turns sitting on a chair rather than sleeping on the bug-infested mattresses.
According to biographer Theodore Maynard, Fr. Morelli warned Cabrini and her fellow sisters that even American clergy “share the general prejudice against us,” and noted that Italians had to “hear Mass in a basement apart from everybody else.” Few Italian priests were available to celebrate Mass in the city, let alone hear confession. As Pope Leo XIII described, the absence of regular worship and a parish community had immediate consequences—“very few are consoled by a priest in death, and many are deprived of baptism at birth”—and created a lineage of Italian Americans whose children would lead the same spiritually unmoored lives.
Cabrini embraced the spiritual and practical challenges of her mission. “Our mode of work is to go right down into the Italian quarters and go from house to house, from apartment to apartment,” she told a reporter. The sisters, another news report observed, ventured into “certain forbidding places where not even the police dare to enter.”