Cabrini and the Holy Beauty of Feminine Strength
Cabrini demonstrates both the purpose and texture of well-ordered femininity and does so with a characteristically gentle hand. The film’s message encourages woman to go where God calls her, not where she has been told to stay, suggesting that while woman may have an ordained role in God’s kingdom, she is not by her sex confined to one corner of it. In a discourse that so badly requires a definition of womanhood beyond chromosomes, the story of the first American saint paints a faith-inspiring picture of the depth and breadth of femininity without ever once needing to steal fire from men.
This piece contains references to plot points and other film spoilers
For all the ink spilt over the question “What is a woman?” the culture wars appear no closer to a definition, but the new film Cabrini offers a cogent, if aspirational one: she is the embodiment of the Church’s mission for others, and its hands and feet in the world. The film’s depiction of its title character is a rebuke of the self-worshiping “girl boss” archetype, but it also serves as an important reminder against overly narrowing the scope of women’s vocations. Although Cabrini’s story has received well-deserved praise for bringing social justice back to its roots, its most underrated accomplishment may just be doing the same for womanhood.
Cabrini follows the story of Saint Frances Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants and the first American saint, and her mission to New York City in the late 1800s. Though her character is nearly always in a plain black habit, the film vibrantly illustrates her mission through her roles as a teacher, mother, nurse, social reformer, electoral strategist, real estate developer, fundraiser, and property owner. Throughout the story, our protagonist battles against a near constant onslaught of corruption, crime, and her own terminal illness to establish an orphanage and hospital for New York City’s most impoverished residents. Her fidus Achates along the way is a redeemed prostitute who begins living in service of Mother Cabrini’s order of nuns, washed clean in one of many recurring motifs of baptismal water that flow through the plot.
If all of this intensity sounds far from even the modern conservative archetypal woman, it may well be. Too much of the current reaction to modern feminism involves a vision largely created by narrowing the boundaries of womanhood rather than repurposing them for higher ends than the self. While this vision correctly achieves the glorification of forgotten roles for women like homemaker, mother, and caretaker, it risks unhelpfully and legalistically narrowing the scope of womanhood if it encourages women to bury their talents instead of stewarding them.
“The film’s depiction of its title character is a rebuke of the self-worshiping ‘girl boss’ archetype, but it also serves as an important reminder against overly narrowing the scope of women’s vocations.”
Though there exists no lack of depth in the Church and in the academy, the grassroots conservative effort to restore the fabric of femininity has of late focused chiefly on its aesthetics. “Conservative woman” has become recognized in certain areas of public discourse as near-synonymous with the term “trad wife,” a term originating in meme culture that many women now find endearing. Much of this movement is focused on advertising positive aspects of womanhood, like marriage, motherhood, and homemaking, that have been peppered with the shrapnel of the sexual revolution, and indeed, the project of making these things once again appealing to young women is an important one. Yet this is still an incomplete definition, and a works-based concept of womanhood focused on baking and birthrates is one that will only ever be capable of restoring the facade of the fairer sex.
To be sure, it is not that some women are simply called beyond the pastel filters and chosen for something greater than the role of wife and mother. This assertion that the traditional woman is simply the factory model upon which liberated woman builds her real identity is exactly what got women into this mess. Rather, womanhood itself has more grit, complexity, and facets than a single idyllic aesthetic is capable of capturing. That is itself no moral failing, but we have work to do to better define what a feminine role looks like, lest the unmarried, tomboyish, infertile, childless, or culinarily hopeless woman think herself definitionally at odds with her design.
At the same time, the modern empire of the girl boss reminds us that more is not always more, presenting an image of female ambition wholly incompatible with God’s design for the sexes. The third-wave feminist understanding of the gender binary, to the extent it is acknowledged at all, is one that objectifies men, seeing them as obstacles rather than counterparts. Men by this worldview are rungs on a ladder to climb, glass to shatter, and pawns to vanquish on corporate chessboards. In Barbie’s world they are passive punchlines, after all, he’s just Ken.
Our hero Cabrini even offers the rare look at platonic relations between the sexes, and a variety of them at that. Her story is frequently structured by the authority of men in the Church, a restraint to which she largely remains obedient. Their relationships are not examples of blind submission, rather the men in whose care Mother Cabrini rests are depicted as benevolent and competent, if not always in agreement. Even outside the Church, Cabrini rather frequently makes allies of men, whom the story depicts as rational and helpful. Unlike all too many Marvel movies, we do not see a nun kicking down doors, putting a stilettoed heel to a man’s jugular, or uttering sexy catchphrases from inside a latex suit. Men, the film argues, are a complement, not a competition, and at times an authority, though not an adversary.
Women, too, have a role in shaping manhood, something the film somehow manages to also explore in its 2hr 35min runtime. The film plays on Edith Stein’s understanding of motherhood as a vocation beyond biological relation, emphasizing its title character’s influence on the small but powerful story arcs of the boys in her care. Whether she is winning boys’ hearts with home cooked meals and a motherly smile or coaxing boys into men more virtuous than the fathers who abandoned them, Cabrini’s approach to the opposite sex is one that would be unrecognizable to most of todays’ female film heroes. And yet these relationships seem refreshingly more like a dance than a crusade, an indication that perhaps the olive branch in the gender wars is the feminine touch of which the modern soul is starved.
Cabrini demonstrates both the purpose and texture of well-ordered femininity and does so with a characteristically gentle hand. The film’s message encourages woman to go where God calls her, not where she has been told to stay, suggesting that while woman may have an ordained role in God’s kingdom, she is not by her sex confined to one corner of it. In a discourse that so badly requires a definition of womanhood beyond chromosomes, the story of the first American saint paints a faith-inspiring picture of the depth and breadth of femininity without ever once needing to steal fire from men.
