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You have come, you say, seeking the Cross. Well, you have taken exactly the right road to find it. A thousand unforeseen difficulties may arise. Your establishment may grow slowly at first. Physical privations may be added, and those more keenly felt such as lack of spiritual help under particular circumstances. Be ready for all. . . .You and I shall spend our lives in this thankless task; our successors will reap the harvest in this world, let us be content to reap it in the next.
Letter from Louisiana Bishop William Du Bourg, January 1817.

“This is my pleasure,” explained the young Rose Duchesne to her father. He was criticizing her for giving some of her toys and coins to poor children that he had given her for her own pleasure. The tension between Rose’s vocation and her father’s anti-Catholicism had begun.

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born on August 29, 1769 in Grenoble in southeastern France. She was named after St. Rose of Lima since she was born on the eve of her feast day. She was the daughter of Pierre-Francois and Rose Duchesne, both of whom were from prominent families. She was the second of eight children. There were seven girls and one boy. Her older sister died when she was nine, her youngest became a Visitation nun. The rest of her siblings married.

The family lived a comfortable life while most of France suffered from want. Rose’s father was a lawyer, a businessman and a prominent civic leader in Grenoble. However, he was a liberal who did not receive the sacraments. Her mother, however, raised her children to be faithful Catholics. Sometimes Rose accompanied her mother on visits to the sick and poor. When she was eleven, she began to give her allowance to them.

Rose’s early education was at home by private tutors. From them she learned arithmetic, history, geography and literature and her mother taught her the fundamentals of the Catholic faith.

      Rose loved nature, preferring to climb in the hills near her house than to playing with dolls. She developed a capacity for solitude early in life, enjoying long walks while dreaming of traveling to far off lands. She had a strong personality and was a natural leader with the other children.

     Rose also enjoyed reading the lives of saints and martyrs. Jesuit missionaries visited her home and told stories of their experiences with the American Indians. This so intrigued her that she was determined to serve them someday.

     At the age of twelve, she went with her sister to board in the convent of the Visitation nuns in Grenoble. When she received her first Holy Communion, she decided to become a Visitation nun and a missionary to the American Indians. When her parents found out about this, they took her out of the convent and she continued her studies at home. For the next five years, she was allowed to study under tutors with her male cousins who were preparing for careers in business and politics. This was unusual for a young girl at the time and she became a highly educated woman.

                                                         Vocation

     Around the age of nineteen, Rose's parents chose a young man for her to marry. However, she felt called by God to the religious life so she refused to marry him. Determined to follow her calling, she began to live like a nun within the family home. She refused to wear fancy clothing, performed the most unpleasant of the household chores and followed a routine of daily prayer.

     One day Rose went back to visit the Visitation convent and stayed there. Her parents came a few days later to try to persuade her to return home but she declined. The next year when she was about to take her first vows, her father objected so much that she did not make her profession of vows. She remained a novice in the convent until the upheaval of the French Revolution.

In September of 1792, when Rose was twenty-three, the French revolutionary government suppressed the religious orders of women. Rose had to take off her religious habit. She returned to her family and lived as a laywoman for the next nine years. Her father’s support of the Revolution must have been a great heartache for her. In the Reign of Terror that followed between 1793 and 1794, priests were imprisoned and the guillotine decapitated many. The survivors went into hiding.

Rose bravely formed the Ladies of Mercy, an association to provide material and spiritual help to the priests. They took them to the dying, gave them refuge, helped the sick and poor and performed the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. She established a school for poor children. Rose continued this work for nine years that included the nursing of her mother during her last illness. After her father’s death, Rose inherited a yearly income that gave her the independence and support that she needed to continue her charitable work.

Profession

     In 1801 Pope Pius VII and Napoleon signed a concordat that restored some freedom to practice Catholicism in France. Rose began legal proceedings to regain possession of the convent in Grenoble that had been turned into a prison during the Revolution. She succeeded and reopened the convent and went back to try to re-establish it as a home for nuns. However, most of the nuns who had lived there were now dead, gone or too old and she faced criticisms from those whom she thought would be thankful.

     She explained her problems to her sister in a letter to her in February 1802. “You are very kind to take an interest in the difficulties inseparable from an undertaking such as ours. What I feel most keenly is the opposition of some persons from whom I had expected gratitude. I have gotten myself talked about, both favorably and unfavorably; but as I did not act through worldly motives, I am not upset by blame nor elated by praise.”

     Finally in 1802, the former Superior of the community came back with a few nuns. They stayed until the end of August 1802 and then left Rose alone. It was too difficult to re-establish the convent. Rose was deeply saddened. She wrote, “I was crushed. I was the subject of scandal. Gossip had it that I had driven away the religious, that I would not yield in anything, that no one could bear to live with me.”

     Eventually, the little community heard of the Ladies of the Faith, later the Society of the Sacred Heart, a religious society founded in 1800 by Madeleine Sophie Barat under the direction of Father Joseph Varin. Rose and her companions were anxious to join them.

     Father Varin visited Rose and in 1804 wrote to Mother Barat, "You will find someone in this house...were she alone and at the remotest corner of the world, you should go after her."

     To insure the future of the convent, Mother Barat was invited to become its superior in 1804. Rose resumed her novitiate that year. She had been an independent laywoman for nine years and for three years after that had tried to re-establish the convent unsuccessfully. She was now under the direction of Mother Barat who was ten years younger than she was. But Rose humbly accepted her superiority and made her profession of her vows the next year when she was thirty-six years old. She later wrote, “Humility is the virtue that requires the greatest amount of effort."

     Rose lived under the direction of Mother Barat for the next twelve years. Rose was described as impatient, irritable and highly sensitive. Mother Barat tempered her impetuous nature and helped her to be more flexible in accepting the will of God. Both of them were strong willed and intellectually independent. They complemented each other and became life long friends.

     Mother Barat wrote to her one day, “Do not fear, I shall never lose patience with you…I know you cannot correct yourself suddenly. How could you become meek, stripped of all attachment to your own judgment, etc., when the contrary faults have been rooted in your character for so long?”

In another letter to her in 1806, Mother Barat, wrote, “I realize my dear Rose, that for the moment our Lord seems to leave you to yourself, and this makes virtue more difficult to practice” In November of the same year, she wrote to her again and said, “The thought that I might be able to lessen your interior sufferings by a little advice urges me to write today … The trial which your divine master is now putting you through is one that calls for some help.”

Rose was very active in her early years in the Society. In 1806 she was secretary to the Superior, head of the boarding school, teacher of the older children, business manager for the school and the convent and nurse for the nuns and the students. What distressed her the most, however, was her lack of time for prayer and so she often gave up sleep in order to make time.

In 1815 Rose was assigned to found a convent in Paris. She was now Mother Duchesne. By the time the French Napoleonic Empire fell in 1815, there were eight Sacred Heart houses in existence.

In her first year as a nun, Rose still had the desire to go to the American missions. In a letter she wrote to Mother Barat, she confided a spiritual experience she had had during a night of adoration before the Eucharist on Holy Thursday. "I spent the entire night in the new World ... carrying the Blessed Sacrament to all parts of the land ... I had all my sacrifices to offer: a mother, sisters, family, my mountain! When you say to me 'now I send you', I will respond quickly 'I go’.”

However, she still had to wait for another twelve years to realize her dream. She renounced her own will and accepted the will of God.

She bore her cross patiently. Later she wrote, "Let us bear our cross and leave it to God to determine the length and the weight."

Many times during the next twelve years, Mother Duchesne shared with Mother Barat her dream of becoming a missionary to the American Indians. The dream was ignited when Bishop William Du Bourg visited the motherhouse in Paris in May of 1817. He was the Bishop of a diocese in the Louisiana Territory. This Territory had been purchased by the United States from France in 1803. It was a vast geographic area with mostly French-speaking people and very few priests. Bishop Du Bourg came to the motherhouse to beg the French nuns to establish schools for the French children and Indians in his diocese.

     Mother Duchesne pleaded with Mother Barat for permission to go and she finally consented. The Sisters’ mission was to educate and form girls into Christian women who could transform society through their daily actions and Christian witness.

     Mother later stated her philosophy of Catholic education. “You may dazzle the mind with a thousand brilliant discoveries of natural science; you may open new worlds of knowledge which were never dreamed of before; yet, if you have not developed in the soul of the pupil strong habits of virtue which will sustain her in the struggle of life, you have not educated her, but only put in her hand a powerful instrument of self-destruction.”

                                       The Beginning of the Missouri Missions

     A year later, on March 14, 1818, Mother left Bordeaux at the age of forty-nine with four other nuns on the sailing vessel Rebecca. The Atlantic crossing was a stormy and hazardous journey that lasted seventy-six days. Mother compared the noise, confusion and terror on board to that of Judgment Day. Finally on May 29,1818, Feast of the Sacred Heart, these nuns of the Sacred Heart sailed from the Gulf of Mexico into the Mississippi River and anchored near New Orleans. Only three years before, General Andrew Jackson and his American frontiersmen had defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and ended the War of 1812.

     The Sisters arrived to serve in the frontier of the American West at the same time that Mother Elizabeth Seton was ending her service in the rural East in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Coincidentally, Bishop Du Bourg had once served as Mother Seton’s spiritual director in Maryland.

     Like many immigrants, Mother Duchesne had arrived too sick to travel any further. The Ursuline nuns hospitably welcomed the Sisters until they were able to travel upriver to St. Louis, Missouri.

     On July 12 they boarded a riverboat and continued their journey north up the mighty Mississippi River to St. Louis. The River was discovered by the French explorer Father Jacques Marquette in 1673 and he originally named it the River of the Immaculate Conception. The Sisters traveled on the boat for twelve hundred miles past Indian villages and islands that teemed with eagles, hawks, osprey and deer. It took them forty days to get to St. Louis, then only a frontier fur trading post. When they arrived, Bishop Du Bourg informed them that he had not arranged an Indian mission for them as they expected. Instead, he sent the disappointed Sisters twenty-five miles west up the Missouri River to primitive St. Charles to open a school for frontier girls. Once again, Mother had to postpone her dream to serve the American Indians.

At St. Charles, Mother Duchesne established the first convent of the Sacred Heart in America. On September 14, she opened a free day school for girls. It was the first of its kind west of the Mississippi River. St. Charles was a frontier settlement of a few hundred families. They also opened a boarding school there with the hope that its revenues would support the day school. The Sisters taught catechism, reading, writing and arithmetic. An open fireplace heated the school. Both the Sisters and the students slept on mattresses on the floor.

Mother understated the Mission when she characterized it as an inconvenient location in a letter that she wrote on October 8, 1818.

"Our free school numbers twenty-one, which in proportion to the population equals a school of a hundred in France. The children have never heard of Our Lord, of His birth or His death, nor of hell, and listen agape to our instructions….

”We are very inconveniently lodged and shall have to go elsewhere at the end of a year, for we are paying nearly 2000 francs in rent for a house consisting of six very small rooms badly in need of repairs. The large garden and orchard are uncultivated and we have no one to work them.”

The Sisters lived an austere lifestyle. Their supplies were limited, money, food and water were scarce and living accommodations were uncomfortable. They endured cold and inclement weather, cramped living quarters with a lack of privacy and the crudeness of their frontier students.

Mother wrote to her sister in France, "Neither doors nor windows close tight and there is no one who knows how to make a foot warmer. Our logs are too large for the fireplace and there is no one to chop them for us and not a saw with which we might cut them ourselves. We have maize, pork, and potatoes but not eggs, butter, oil, fruit or vegetables. We should value a case of altar wine and some olive oil - the only edible oil to be had here is bear grease and it is disgusting."

The Sisters had to do the work normally done by men and still keep up with their spiritual program. It was a combination of grueling manual labor and a demanding spiritual regimen. Mother later wrote in 1821, that if the Jesuit missionaries in Siberia “are looking for a mission field with the same type of work and the same climate during a good part of the year, they might come to our section of the globe.”

When her brother offered to pay her way back to France, Mother wrote to her sister, “Tell him to use the money to pay the passage of two more nuns coming to America.”

Enrollment in the free school increased but not in the boarding school because the parents who lived in St. Louis were reluctant to send their daughters and pay for schooling in this remote settlement located across the often-unnavigable Missouri River. It became increasingly obvious that the boarding school, the nun's only source of revenue, was a failure. After only twelve months, it was closed. This was a great disappointment that Mother docilely accepted.

“One must spend here a winter - even a mild one such as this - to realize that for the time being at least we can only vegetate in St. Charles, doing none of the good that is promised elsewhere. But it would cost me too much to abandon, so many interesting children, many of whom will one day belong to the Sacred Heart . . . .

"As the country beyond the Missouri River cannot furnish pupils able to pay, we can only have one [free] day school. We see the poor children coming, famished and barefoot, to school along frozen roads and wearing only the lightest dresses. You see, Reverend Mother, that, obliged as we are to give up our boarding school here, it would be dreadful to leave these poor children without giving them instruction.”

     Mother Duchesne took the closure of the St. Charles Mission very hard and blamed it on herself. She had always thought that she was unfit to be Superior. She was a stranger in a strange land and endured slow communication of correspondence in her struggle to remain closely united with the Society in France.

                                                  The Florissant Mission

     After the St. Charles Mission closed, Mother asked Bishop Du Bourg to let her come closer to St. Louis so that a school would attract more girls from there. In late summer, the Sisters rafted down the Missouri River and arrived at Florissant for their next Mission. Florissant was a farming community located about ten miles northwest of St. Louis. For the first three months, the Sisters and the five children who had accompanied them lived on the Bishop's farm in a log cabin that was even worse than their home in St. Charles. They remained there until their new home was ready in late 1820. Here Mother established another boarding school and opened the Society’s first novitiate.

The school’s facilities were a big improvement over St. Charles. It had a classroom, reception room, kitchen and a dormitory upstairs where the students slept. Mother’s room was located under the stairs in a windowless closet-like space. This school was a success and eventually filled.

In 1823 Jesuit missionaries came to Florissant and established their novitiate for a dozen of them, including the great missionary, Father Pierre de Smet. The Sisters had a convent and school in one corner of the Bishop’s farm, the Jesuits their house in the biggest section and the parish church of St. Ferdinand filled another part. Mother helped them to get established with their novitiate and in domestic work, cooking and sewing for them. Father William Robinson S. J., said of her, “She saved the struggling Missouri mission and prevented it from failing through absolute lack of resources.”

     Mother learned to let others share in the work even if they didn’t do it as well as she might. She wrote, "Learn to let others do their share of the work. Things may be done less well, but you will have more peace of soul and health of body. And what temporal interest should we not sacrifice in order to gain these blessings?"

                                                        More Missions

     The first house established after Florissant was the Grand Coteau convent in Opelousa, Louisiana in 1821. Soon more nuns were on their way from France and by 1824, within six years of the beginning of their mission, twenty-two young women had entered the Society of the Sacred Heart. With more nuns, more houses were established and it was necessary for Mother to visit them in her supervisory role.

     These visits often were difficult journeys up and down the Mississippi River. For example, in 1822 she left St. Louis to visit the house at Grand Coteau downriver in Louisiana. Her return trip lasted eighty days during which she suffered from yellow fever. The first boat that she traveled on became disabled. The next one ran aground on a sandbar. They waited five days for the water to rise enough to float the boat once again. In 1830 she visited the Louisiana houses once again and on her return upriver to St. Louis she only got as far as the Ohio River. From there she had to travel to St. Louis by oxcart.

     By 1830, twelve years after the beginning of their American mission, the Society had six convents in the Mississippi valley with sixty-four nuns and more than three hundred and fifty students. In 1834 Mother moved from St. Louis and returned to Florissant where she remained for the next five years during which she was the Superior of the novitiate convent. Mother Eugenie Aude then became Superior of all of the American houses and Mother was finally relieved of her leadership duties.

     In 1839 Mother returned to St. Louis. She had governed all her scattered houses with firmness and discretion but now she was in poor health. But her spirits lifted when she learned that she could go to the Sugar Creek Indian mission in 1841. Finally, at the age of seventy-two, twenty three years after arriving for the American Mission, Mother was to realize her life-long dream of serving the American Indians.

                                      The Sugar Creek Indian Mission

     Fr. De Smet needed religious women for the Indian missions. When he was in St. Louis in 1841 he asked Mother to establish a school for the Potawatomi Indians in Kansas. She received permission to go from her Superior and left with three Jesuits and four Sisters for the long and difficult journey of almost two hundred miles west over the Missouri River into Indian Territory to the Sugar Creek Mission in what is now eastern Kansas.

     Some wondered about the wisdom of sending an elderly nun on such a difficult journey to a difficult Mission. However, the priest of the Mission wrote, "But she must come too. Even if she can use only one leg, she will come. Why, if we have to carry her all the way on our shoulders, she is coming with us. She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work."

     After five days on the river the party got off the boat at present day Kansas City, Kansas and traveled overland for four days by wagon south to Sugar Creek. Two Indians on horses met the party at the Osage River when they were eighteen miles from Sugar Creek. Every two miles for the rest of the way, a pair of mounted Indians met them and guided them on to their new Mission. When they were a mile away, five hundred braves in ceremonial dress waited for them and led them into their village where they were greeted by another seven hundred Indians who welcomed them.

     One of the priests presented Mother to the assembled Potawatomi, “Here, my children, is the Sister who for thirty five years has been asking God to let her come to you.” The Indians then greeted each of the Sisters individually. It must have been a tiring ceremony for Mother after such a long journey.

     These poor Indians came from northern Indiana in 1835 after the United States government began moving Indians west of the Mississippi River in President Andrew Jackson’s removal policy. Soon after, the Jesuits began their mission there.

     By the time of the arrival of the Sisters, the Indians had not completed their construction of a log house for them. So for the first few months their home was an Indian’s small cabin in which they slept on the ground.

     The Sisters opened a school for the Indian girls and their mothers came to learn housekeeping. All the Sisters except Mother learned the native language and the children learned hymns and prayers. One of them wrote, "As soon as we could, we taught our Indians the prayers of the Church, and especially the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, as it is sung on Sundays after Vespers. Soon our cabin could not hold all our scholars and we made a large room with green branches. Our children are intelligent and understand easily."

     The Sisters suffered during the severe winter and Mother’s infirmities became worse. She visited the sick and helped the Indian girls but was not able to do much else. Worse, she was unable to learn the Potowatami language and could only communicate with them by signs. She lived a life of prayer and sacrifice. The Indians called her “Woman-Who-Prays-Always” because she spent so much time in the church praying. There is a legend that as Mother knelt motionless in prayer for long periods in the Church, the Indians would sneak in, lay feathers around the hem of her habit and return later to find them undisturbed. Mother Galitzin, her Superior, said, “If she cannot work at the mission, she will forward the success of the mission by her prayers.”

     Mother wrote to Mother Barat in France and told her about the fifty First Communicants, the seventy adult converts, the two hundred who received the Brown Scapular, and how they gathered for morning and evening prayers, Mass, and catechism. "They tell us there are many saints buried in the little cemetery,” she wrote, “ I beg God the favor of being buried beside them."

     But her favor was not granted. Mother’s health deteriorated during the winter due to the meager food and severe cold. Mother Galitzin arrived on Palm Sunday and decided that Mother should retire to the convent back in St. Charles, Missouri. Mother sadly resigned herself to God’s will once more and left with Father Verhaegen on June 19. They arrived in St. Louis exactly one year after Mother had left for Sugar Creek. Her life-long ambition to serve the American Indians resulted in a stay of less than one year with them. Once again, she considered herself a failure.

                                                              Rest

     And so at age seventy-three, Mother returned to the Sacred Heart Community at St. Charles. She would spend the last ten years of her life there either praying long hours before the Blessed Sacrament or writing and sewing in her small room. Her letters reveal a deep sense of personal failure, diminishing health and frequent loneliness.

     Her heart never lost its desire for the missions. "I feel the same longing for the Rocky Mountain missions and any others like them, that I experienced in France when I first begged to come to America...

     "For thirty eight years my great desire was to work among the savages...Then after one year of uselessness at the Indian mission, I came back here by order of my Superior General, without accomplishing anything.... It seems to me that in leaving the Indians I left my real element, and now I can only yearn for that land from which there will be no departure. God knows why I was recalled, and that is enough.

     “I live now in solitude and am able to use my time reflecting on the past and preparing for death. I cannot put away the thought of the Indians and in my ambition I fly to the Rockies.”

     During her last years Mother lived in a tiny uncomfortable room. She had one window in which paper replaced the broken panes, a thin mattress laid out nightly on the floor for a bed and one old coarse blanket as a coverlet. Mother never complained about it, she praised it. In 1851 she wrote to Mother Barat, "If you could see the pretty place we have here, standing beside the church as it does, you would not have the courage to take it from us, even if there were only four of us to carry on the work."

     Mother had labored in the American missions for thirty-five years. She had patiently performed all of her duties, suffered many disappointments and failures and saw others reap the harvest that she had sown. Failure was her success. She wrote,

     “.... the dear Lord has favored us with a share of His cross. The greatest and undoubtedly the hardest to bear is the lack of success in our work here. If a saint had been in charge, all would have gone well.” Another time she wrote, "We cultivate a very small field for Christ but we love it, knowing that God does not require great achievements, but a heart that holds back nothing for self."

     Such was her heart that she was finally satisfied with what appeared to be failures. She learned the value of devotion to daily duty and doing her duties well. She learned that our standards of success are not important and that faithfulness is more important than fruitfulness.

     A Sister wrote to Mother Barat in France, “I have seen a great saint, who is nearing the end of her life. I found her very feeble and her voice very faint.”

     Mother Rose Philippine Duchesne died peacefully on November 18, 1852, at the age of eighty-three. Father de Smet said, "No greater saint ever died in Missouri, or perhaps in the whole Union." Father Verhaegen wrote, “Eminent in all virtues of life, but especially in humility, she sweetly and calmly departed this life in the odor of sanctity.”

     As she lay dead in 1852, her nuns had a daguerreotype photo taken of her "in case she may one day be canonized."

                                                         Virtues

     Mother Duchesne persevered through all the obstacles placed in the path of her vocation. She entered religious life despite her father’s vehement objection and she returned to it after nine years of absence caused by the French Revolution. She humbly accepted Mother Barat as her superior even though she was ten years younger than her. She patiently waited for twelve years to depart for her dream of serving the American Indians. She patiently waited another twenty three years before it was realized, only to be ordered to return after only one year. She docilely accepted the disappointments of the failure of the first Mission at St. Charles and the order to leave her last Mission at Sugar Creek.

     We must appreciate what a trial was Mother Duchesne's whole American missionary experience. She arrived in America when already forty-nine years old, a highly cultured French woman who never learned to speak English and found Americans hard to understand. Her apostolate involved many trials of cold, sickness, slanders and disappointments. However, she used these frustrations as means to achieve still greater detachment and docile acceptance of God’s will.

     In her twenty three years on the American frontier, Mother Duchesne, in addition to teaching and administrative duties, undertook the hardest tasks that needed doing. She tended livestock, chopped wood, dug potatoes, mended shoes and clothing, nursed the sick, and made soap and candles. She survived loneliness, yellow fever and persistent feelings of failure. She interceded during her last ten years for all of the needs of the missions that she had not been able to meet herself.

                                                      Fruits

     After Mother’s retirement in 1841, the Society began establishments in the eastern states. A convent was founded in New York City in 1841. In 1846 property was acquired in Manhattanvilee and other convents were founded.

     In 1843 there were about sixty pupils in each of the Society’s schools. The girls were taught elementary education as well as home skills including carding, spinning, sewing, knitting, embroidering and even artificial flower making. They learned to make clothes, to bake bread and to make butter.

     By 1847 there were thirteen hundred Christian Potawatomi coming to the Sugar Creek Mission. There were many confraternities and public devotions in the Mission.

     The schools that she started in St. Louis became models for later educational institutions in the city. By the end of the century, more than 600 girls had been cared for and educated there.

Saint

      Following her death in 1852, Mother Duchesne was buried on the grounds of the Academy at St. Charles. After three years, her body was exhumed, found to be miraculously intact and reverently interred in a crypt within a simple octagonal shrine in the front yard of the Academy.

     Rose's path to sainthood began in 1895. She was pronounced venerable in 1909 and was beatified on May 12, in 1940 by Pope Pius XII. In 1949 Mother’s remains were removed from the little octagonal shrine and placed in a marble sarcophagus housed in an oratory.

     In 1951, at the age of 60, a Sacred Heart Missionary named Mother Marie Bernard suffered from a malignant cancerous neck tumor. She was sent from Japan to St. Joseph’s Hospital in San Francisco, California for treatment. The tumor was too large to be surgically removed, so the doctors released her for radiation therapy with a prognosis of a life expectancy of six months to two years.

     The Society prayed a novena for Mother’s cure to Blessed Rose Duchesne. The student body of the Society’s school in San Francisco joined as well as Mother Marie herself. She wore a relic of Blessed Rose around her neck. After Mother returned to Japan the tumor disappeared. She lived for another ten years after that. In June of 1987 doctors reviewed her cure and stated that it was complete and scientifically inexplicable. The healing was approved for the cause of Blessed Rose’s canonization. She was canonized a saint on July 3, 1988 by Pope John Paul II. Her feast day is November 18.

The Shrine of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne was completed on June 13, 1952. It houses her tomb.

Shrine of St. Philippine Duchesne
619 North Second Street
St. Charles, MO 63301
636-946-6127

Opening Prayer for the Mass honoring Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, Virgin, Religious and Missionary

Gracious God, You filled the heart of Philippine Duchesne with charity and missionary zeal, and gave her the desire to make you known to all peoples. Fill us who honor her memory today with that same love and zeal to extend your kingdom to the ends of the earth.

Callan, L., Philippine Duchesne: Frontier Missionary of the Sacred Heart, 1769-1852, (Westminster, Md. 1957).

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Dan Lynch Copyright 2003 Permission granted for non-commercial reproduction

Saint

Dan Lynch
Copyright 2003
Permission granted for
non-commercial reproduction