The film was screened by the nuns of Mother Cabrini's order, some of whom were in their nineties. By the end of the film, many of them were reported to be crying with several of them exclaiming, "THAT'S Cabrini!"
According to John Lithgow he agreed to make the film because he liked the script, explaining, "It's wonderful to see a single person, a single character from history who is a real fighter and who will not give up and has right on her side and who makes enormous changes. This is Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglass, people like that, and we are just not that aware of Mother Cabrini."
The line, "The world is too small for what I intend to do," is a direct quote from the actual Frances Cabrini.
Frances Cabrini is the first United States citizen to have been canonized a saint by the Catholic Church.
Several scripts had been turned down by producer J. Eustace Wolfington because they portrayed Mother Cabrini as a flawless saint in the making and less as a human trying to do the right thing in a flawed system.