Tag: Little Italy

A statue of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini will be installed at Arrigo Park in Little Italy to replace a removed one honoring Christopher Columbus, Chicago Park District and city officials announced Wednesday.

The saint best known as “Mother Cabrini” won overwhelming support among voters during a process to determine which statue would be selected to replace Columbus, according to a statement from the park district and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

Mayor Brandon Johnson praised her work founding schools, orphanages and hospitals that cared for Italian immigrants in the city over a century ago.

“Mother Cabrini really embodies what I call the soul of Chicago,” he told reporters at an unrelated news conference. “We’re going to continue and always going to have conversations about how we honor cultural heritage in the city of Chicago, 77 neighborhoods, one of the most diverse cities not just in America, but around the globe.”

Cabrini, canonized in 1946, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Italian-American nun opened 67 orphanages, schools, hospitals and missionary orders before her 1917 death in Chicago.

The city will begin its search for artist proposals for the statue in the next two weeks, the statement said.

The Columbus statue at the park and another at Grant Park were taken down at the direction of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot amid racial justice protests in 2020.

Chicago’s three Christopher Columbus statues: A brief history

After the statues remained in political limbo for years, Johnson announced last May that they would not go back up and be replaced in an effort to show “our collective humanity.” He also said the city planned to loan the Arrigo Park statue to a planned Italian immigrant museum while clearing away the larger Grant Park statue’s base.

The decision was part of a deal that resolved a lawsuit filed by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans over the Arrigo Park statue removal.

At the time, the group’s president, Ron Onesti, said the deal gave his group a say in who would be memorialized and named Cabrini as a possible Columbus replacement.

“Sure we want it back where it was,” he said. “But the world has changed quite a bit.”

Vintage Chicago Tribune: Mother Cabrini’s Chicago milestones on her path to sainthood

But another community group, the Italian American Human Relations Foundation of Chicago, blasted the agreement to get the statue back as “cultural treason.” The group’s president Lou Rago said then that the deal between the Park District and the JCCIA, which he was formerly president of, “is not a return,” but “a burial.”

“The statue will be hidden away indoors — out of public sight — as part of an undefined ‘museum-style’ exhibit,” Rago wrote. “A sad final disposition of a statue of the heroic navigator whose voyages led to the introduction of Western European civilization and culture to a new world.”

Johnson defended the process for selecting Cabrini as open. City officials also considered memorials honoring Renato Dulbecco, Enrico Fermi, Phillip Mazzei, Maria Montessori, Florence Scala, Antonin Scalia and Amerigo Vespucci, according to the park district and DCASE statement.