Guest Op-ed: Honoring Mother Cabrini with a public statue
BY STATE SEN. ANDREW GOUNARDES
After a city controversy, New York State will now step in to fund a statue of Mother Cabrini, America’s first saint, who founded dozens of good works institutions in the U.S. and beyond. I applaud this decision, and am glad she will be honored with a statue.
Mother Cabrini made it her life’s work to set up schools, hospitals, orphanages and novitiates to help alleviate the poverty conditions that hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of the Italian-American, faced in the late 1800s.
She did this in New York City and in major cities across the United States. Through strong will and persistence, she fought to help new Americans build a better life, get education and healthcare, and ascend out of poverty.