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St Rose Philippine Duchesne

Feast day: 18 November

Rose Phillipine Duchesne was born in 1769 in Grenoble, the capital of the ancient province of Dauphiné in France. Her father Pierre Duchesne was a prominent lawyer during the Day of the Tiles, an uprising in Grenoble, which is thought to be one of the catalysts of the French Revolution. Her mother, Rose Euphrosine Périer, was the sister of Claude Périer, an industrialist who helped finance the rise to power of Napoleon. His son would become a prime minister of France and his great grandson a president.

She survived a bout of smallpox which left her scarred, after which in 1781 she and her cousin Josephine were sent to be educated in the Monastery of Sainte Marie d’en Haut, which was built on a mountainside near Grenoble. It was known for the social status of its members. When her father learnt that she was attracted to the monastic life, he withdrew her from the monastery and had her tutored at home. However, in 1788 she decided to enter the Visitation of Holy Mary Order, despite the opposition of her family, and an aunt who accompanied her there was left to report to her father what had happened. The convent was shut down during the Reign of Terror and the nuns dispersed. Rose returned home where two aunts, also nuns, had also sought shelter. She attempted to continue to observe the Rule of Life of her order, while ministering to her family and those imprisoned in the monastery.

In 1801 Napoleon allowed the Catholic Church to operate openly and Rose tried to re-establish the Visitation monastery, acquiring the building from the new owner. However, conditions there were so harsh that Rose, now Mother Superior, was left with only three companions. She was then joined by Marie Sophie Barat, who had founded the Society of the Sacred Heart. Its members were called Madames of the Sacred Heart because there was hostility to religious communities which lingered in post revolutionary France. The Visitation community was merged into the Society of the Sacred Heart. The two orders had a similar mission: educating young women without being an enclosed order. Rose and Marie Sophie became life-long friends. Rose, on Marie Sophie’s instructions, founded a convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars. She opened a school and became mistress of novices.

When she was a child Rose had heard many stories in her parish church of missionaries in Louisiana, founded as a colony of New France. In 1817 the Bishop of Louisiana and the Two Floridas visited the convent in Paris. He was looking for a congregation of educators to help him evangelise the Indian and French children of his diocese. Rose’s interest in missionary work was revived and she asked Marie Sophie’s permission to volunteer. Rose received Marie Sophie’s blessing and she set out for America with four sisters of her community, arriving finally in Louisiana. However, they found that the bishop had not provided accommodation for them, so after a brief stay with the Ursulines, they travelled by steam boat on the Mississippi to St Louis and then St Charles, which was in the Missouri territory and is now a suburb of St Louis. There they established the first Sacred Heart Convent, known as the Duquette Mansion, which was the first house of the order ever built outside France. It was also the first free school west of the Mississippi. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here," she wrote of the site, “and trials are the riches of priests in this land.”

In the following year the bishop moved them across the river to the town of Florissant, Missouri where they opened a school and noviciate. The area had been purchased by the United States from France fifteen years previously, and settlers were flocking in from the east. Some were poor but others had money and slaves. The nuns suffered many hardships; they had little money, were hungry, their housing was inadequate and the weather was freezing. In spite of this there were now six communities, grown from the original five members. Other foundations followed. In 1826 Pope Leo XII formally approved the Society of the Sacred Heart. The Jesuits acquired the property of the sisters in St Charles in 1828; they built a parish church and invited the sisters to return to run the parish school.

In 1841 the Jesuits asked the sisters to join them in a new mission with the Potawatomi tribe in eastern Kansas, along Sugar Creek, where Father Christian Hoecken was taking charge. Rose was not initially selected for the project but Father Verhaegen insisted that “while at seventy one years of age she may not be able to do much work but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us.” Rose could not master the tribal language, so she was unable to teach, but she spent hours in prayer. The children named her “Quahkahkanumad” or “The Woman who prays always.” Inspired by stories of the famous Jesuit Pierre Jean de Smet, she became determined to continue helping the native Americans, as far as the Rocky Mountains.

In 1842, after a year among the Potawatomi, it was evident that Rose was too frail to withstand the rigours of village life and she returned to St Charles. She spent the last decade of her life there in a tiny room, under a stairway near the chapel. By this time she was blind and feeble. She died on 18 November 1852, aged 83. She was buried at first in the convent cemetery but later exhumed and reburied in a crypt with a small shrine in the convent grounds. The cause for her canonisation was begun in 1895, but this did not come about till nearly a hundred years later when Pope John Paul II pronounced her a saint in 1988. By this time she had been moved to a bigger shrine by order of the Holy See.

Rose left about six hundred and fifty six letters, four journals and several smaller writings. In 2008 two sisters, one American and one French, began the process of producing a complete edition of her writings. These provide a valuable insight into life in the American South at that time and colourful descriptions of plants and animals. She also showed that she wanted to have black and white people educated together but this was impossible in the society of her day.

St Rose Phillipine Duchesne, pray for us.