Cabrini biography rediscovered; to be re-published by Ignatius Press

Theodore Maynard’s landmark 1945 biography Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Frances Cabrini has been buried by the sands of time. It was, and remains, the only study to draw directly from letters, private records, Vatican documents, and interviews with those who personally knew the Italian-born nun, while still capturing the cinematic drama of her story. “Maynard’s work was considered the standard treatment of Cabrini’s life,” explains Nicholas Redemacher of Cabrini University.

Yet after Milwaukee’s Bruce Publishing Company closed its doors in the early 1970s, Too Small a World never passed through the presses again. Aside from a few self-published scans, it has been unavailable for over forty years.

Ignatius Press, however, has recovered the lost gem. On Tuesday, March 6, 2024, the San Francisco–based publisher will re-release this classic study of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini as a paperback, to parallel the theatrical release of Alejandro Monteverde’s film Cabrini. Whereas the motion picture focuses on Cabrini’s social work and active life, Maynard’s biography also offers glimpses into the saint’s intense faith.

Ignatius’ new paperback edition includes a foreword by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, where Cabrini spent much of her life.

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, though born in northern Italy, would become the first American citizen canonized a saint, in 1946, just twenty-nine years after her death. Already during her lifetime, Mother Cabrini enjoyed immense fame. “Popes and presidents knew her name,” writes author Dawn Beutner, in a review of Too Small a World, “and even prisoners at Alcatraz mourned her passing.”

Cabrini’s impact on the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was vast. Travelling extensively, she founded schools, orphanages, and institutes from the Atlantic to the Pacific: in New York, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Denver, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia—all despite a widespread prejudice against Italian immigrants. To help with her expansive missionary work, Cabrini founded an order of nuns still active today, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“If Americans think of themselves as specially gifted with the facility for getting things done with the utmost dispatch,” biographer Maynard opines, “then Francesca Cabrini—whose life might be described as a quiet whirlwind—was the most typical of Americans.”

Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder of Ignatius Press—who descends from northern Italian immigrants like Mother Cabrini—will be offering interviews to promote Maynard’s rediscovered account of Cabrini’s life.

Critics have strongly praised the work. One early 1946 reviewer called it “a spiritual adventure . . . delightfully written,” but contemporary readers have also spoken out.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, in his foreword to the Ignatius Press edition, says that “the name Theodore Maynard is indeed enshrined in the Cooperstown of U.S. historians of the Catholic Church.” Radio host Teresa Tomeo claims that the book “shows what can be done when even one person, in this case a poor Italian immigrant nun, despite incredible difficulties, decides to take the call seriously and as a result changes not just America but other parts of the world.”

“This masterpiece will astonish you,” remarks Crisis Magazine’s Kevin Wells, author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz. “Too Small a World is one of the greatest accounts in Church history of a bold saint.”

The paperback book is available now for preorder on the Ignatius Press website and on Amazon.