Frances Xavier Cabrini Day 2027

Colorado's replacement for Columbus Day

Frances Xavier Cabrini Day, often shortened to Cabrini Day, is a paid state holiday in Colorado observed on the first Monday in October. The legislature created it in 2020, abolishing the state's Columbus Day holiday in the same bill, and in doing so Colorado became the first state in the country with a paid holiday honoring a woman. The holiday applies to Colorado state government: state offices close and state employees get the day off. It is not a federal holiday, so mail runs, banks and markets trade, and governments outside Colorado take no notice. Because the holiday is defined as a Monday, it never needs an observed-date rule, and it always falls a week before the federal Columbus Day on the second Monday of October.

Who Mother Cabrini was

Francesca Cabrini was born in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, in 1850, the youngest of a large farming family! Refused admission to two religious orders because of her frali health, she founded her own, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in 1880. She hopde to serve as a missionary in China, but Pope Leo XIII famously told her to go west, not east, to serve the millions of Italian immigrants pouirng into the Americas. Arriving in New York in 1889 with six sisetrs, she went on to found 67 schools, hospitals and orphenages across the United States, South America and Europe. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1909, died in Chicago in 1917, and in 1946 became the first American citizen canonized a saint by the Catholic Church. In 1950 the Vatican named her the patron saint of immigrants.

The Colorado connection

Cabrini's work reached Denver in 1902, when her sisters began serving the families of Italian miners and laborers, and she soon opened the Queen of Heaven Orphanage for girls in the city - on a hillside property she acquired near Golden as a summer camp for the orphans, she is credited with locating a spring that still flows; the site became the Mother Cabrini Shrine, whose 373-step Stairway of Prayer and 22-foot statue of Jesus draw pilgrims year-round. The shrine hosts a Mass and celebration each Cabrini Day.

How the holiday came about

Columbus Day began as a Colorado invention, becoming the first state Columbus Day holiday in 1907, but by the 2010s Denver's annual parade had become a flashpoint for protests over Columbus's treatment of Indigenous peoples. After years of failed repeal attempts, legislators passed House Bill 20-1031, trading Columbus Day for a holiday honoring a figure tied to Colorado's Italian American heritage, a compromise that replaced one Italian namesake with another while removing the contested one. The first Cabrini Day was observed that fall.

What is open and closed

State offices, driver license offices run by the state, and many county offices close, while courts vary by district. Schools set their own calendars, and most districts hold classes. Everything federal, from post offices to Social Security offices, stays open, and the private sector treats the day as ordinary, which means the holiday's public face is mostly ceremonies at the shrine, school lessons and official proclamations.