Better Than the Movie? A Biography of Mother Cabrini, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, March 26, 2024

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. 

Theodore Maynard, Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Frances Cabrini. Ignatius Press, 2024 (originally published 1945). 374pp. $18.95 paper; $12.32 ebook.

The recent critical assessment by Thomas Mirus of the new film on the life of St. Frances Cabrini has attracted a great deal of interest. If you need to catch up, this is what you will wish to read about the film:

• Cabrini secularizes a saint (March 4, 2024)

• Cabrini and the denial that Christ is for everyone (March 15, 2024)

In response to the furor occasioned by this discussion, it seemed to me—whose first memories of life at home in the early 1950s do not include a screen of any kind—that the responsible thing to do was to read a biography of Mother Cabrini to increase the likelihood of acquiring a more accurate understanding of her personality. We oldsters amuse ourselves with the fiction that the next generation knows nothing other than what they see on a screen.

Of course I am writing this on a computer, but into this pleasant feeling of self-congratulation has dropped a new book by Ignatius Press, being a reprint of historian Theodore Maynard’s 1945 biography of the very saint in question: Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Frances Cabrini. However, its arrival may have been an act of God twisted into a trick of the Devil: Imagine my smug sense of superiority when, having heard about the movie, I picked it up and began to read! ….

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