Faith in History / Sean Gallagher

St. Rose Philippine Duchesne was dedicated to prayer on American frontier

Continuing our exploration of American saints, this month we learn about St. Rose Philippine Duchesne.

Born in 1769 in Grenoble, France, Rose was drawn to religious life as a youth and joined the Visitation nuns near her hometown in 1788.

It was not a good time to enter religious life in France. Revolution broke out the following year. By 1792, the revolutionary government closed the houses of religious orders across the country, including the one where Rose lived.

For the next nine years, she tried to continue living the rule of her order in her family’s home. When the Church in France was able again to minister openly in the country starting in 1801, Rose tried to restart the Visitation monastery where she had lived, but met with little success.

Around that same time, St. Madeleine-Sophie Barat founded a new women’s religious order in France, the Society of the Sacred Heart. Rose met Barat, 10 years her junior, in 1804 and soon agreed to merge her small Visitation community into Barat’s.

Rose and Barat, both declared saints by the Church, remained lifelong friends and surely contributed to each other’s growth in holiness.

In 1815, Rose moved from Grenoble to Paris where she opened a school for her community. Two years later, she got the chance to fulfill a childhood dream: to serve as a missionary in the New World.

A bishop from Louisiana had come to Paris seeking religious sisters to come and educate French and Native American children in his enormous diocese, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to British North America.

In 1818, with Barat’s approval, Rose set out with four sisters on a 10-week ocean journey to New Orleans. They then traveled for seven weeks by an early steamboat to St. Charles, Mo., then at the edge of the American frontier, which Rose later described as “the remotest village in the U.S.”

Rose was 48 at the time of her coming to America, certainly not a young age in 1818 to start such an arduous ministry. But her faith and dedication to her vocation, which she showed from her earliest days in religious life, helped her persevere through many challenges in America.

In 1841, Jesuit missionaries invited the Sacred Heart Sisters to send some of its members to Kansas to minister among the Potawatomi people there. One of the missionaries wanted Rose to be part of the group, even though she was 71 at the time.

“She may not be able to do much work,” the priest said, “but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us.”

Indeed, Rose could do little formal ministry in Kansas, both because of her age and her inability to learn the language of the Native Americans there. But she gave such a great witness in her dedication to prayer that the native children called her “Woman Who Prays Always.”

A year later, her health declining, Rose returned to St. Charles, where she lived for another decade in a small room near her convent’s chapel, spending her days in solitude and prayer.

Even then, when her body was old and close to death, her youthful missionary spirit was still filled with life. “I cannot put away the thought of the Indians,” she wrote in a letter, “and in my ambition I fly to the Rockies.”

Rose died in St. Charles on Nov. 18, 1853, at the age of 83. She was declared blessed by Pope Pius XII in 1940 and a saint by St. John Paul II in 1988.

St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, pray for us. †