Male Nuns, Misogynistic Kings, and Mother Cabrini

I was all set to write a post about October being Italian-American Heritage Month and wanted to try AI to make a custom image using my existing Adobe account since I didn’t want to sign up for anything new. I played around with some prompts, and it kept spitting back images that were not particularly the hybrid I was looking for.

Then I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. I prompted the AI to create an image of Mother Cabrini in New York City. And this is what I got:

As my great-grandmother would say: Madonna!

Speaking of holy women: as I continue research on my next novel, I finally watched the movie Cabrini and highly recommend it. It is based on the true story of the Italian nun Mother Cabrini who was sent by the pope to start a mission in New York City in 1889 to help the desperately poor Italian immigrants there, particularly the children. Tiny, sickly, but with a will of titanium, Mother Cabrini founded orphanages, built hospitals, battled the political establishment, and dealt with extreme anti-Italian discrimination, becoming a mother in every sense of the word to hundreds of orphans, not just Italians but all destitute immigrant children.

I first heard about Mother Cabrini from my grandfather, who was born in Brooklyn in 1913. Although he grew up in an orphanage, he did not know her personally and she died in Chicago in 1917. But clearly she was a legend to New York Italian-Americans. In 1999, we visited her shrine in the northern reaches of Manhattan. Here’s what she looked like:

Truly an amazing and inspirational woman.

Finally, in other spiritual news, I was struck to learn that King Charles III recently prayed with Pope Leo XIV in the Sistine Chapel, marking the first time that a pope and an English monarch prayed together since Henry VIII (he is the misogynistic king, by the way), nearly 500 years ago! Lots of other significance too, most importantly finding unity and healing even when there are differences.

Given my novels about popes, the Vatican, Michelangelo, and Raphael, I am utterly fascinated. Here’s a gift article about it. I can’t resist sharing this most striking image, which includes of course Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement fresco behind the altar. Henry VIII would never have seen this fresco, since he broke away from the church in 1534 and Michelangelo started painting it in 1536.