modern world. And it all started with one devout Dominican friar, Bartolome Las Casas, who refused to "look the other way" when he saw the miseries and injustices suffered by the natives of Hispaniola.

II.
Frances Xavier Cabrini was born in Italy in 1850, the thirteenth child of a farming family. From her youngest days she dreamed of being a missionary. She used to make paper boats, fill them with violets, and set them down a canal, pretending that they were filled with missionaries journeying to the far corners of the globe. She wanted to become a nun, but several convents refused her entry, ostensibly because of her fragile health. Frances, therefore, resigned herself to becoming a teacher and gave up her missionary daydreams, entrusting the course of her lifeto the hands of Jesus Christ.

It turned out that Frances had repeatedly been refused entrance to convents because of a scheming priest named Monsignor Serrati who really wanted to put Frances to work on his own projects. He convinced Frances to go to an orphanage run by a new religious institute that was under his oversight, to help reform its management practices; he promised her that she did not need to stay there more than a few weeks. In the end, he refused to permit her to leave, and she spent six years in charge of the orphanage. Frances did such a splendid job in running this institution in the face of great obstacles that other sisters came to join her in the religious community there, and she