Mother Cabrini Shrine
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
High above Mount Vernon Canyon, visible from the Interstate below, stands a twenty-two-foot statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus atop three hundred and seventy-three stone steps. This is the Mother Cabrini Shrine, honoring the first American citizen ever declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Frances Xavier Cabrini was an Italian nun who arrived in the United States in eighteen eighty-nine to help the waves of Italian immigrants struggling in American cities.
Over the next three decades she founded sixty-seven institutions, including schools, hospitals, and orphanages across the Americas. In nineteen ten she purchased land on Lookout Mountain for a girls' summer camp, and a stone house was completed here by nineteen fourteen. Cabrini was canonized in nineteen forty-six.
Colorado now observes Cabrini Day on the first Monday of October.
