St. Rose Philippine Duchesne

Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne (1769-1852) was a French religious of the Society of the Sacred Heart who crossed the ocean at forty-nine to bring Christian education to the American frontier, and whom the Potawatomi people came to call the Woman Who Prays Always. Born in Grenoble, France, on August 29, 1769, into a prosperous family of merchants and lawyers, she was educated by the Visitation nuns and, over her father's objections, entered their monastery of Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut at eighteen. The French Revolution shattered that first vocation: the convent was closed, and for a decade Philippine lived a hidden apostolate, caring for prisoners, the sick, and homeless children while sheltering priests at risk. When attempts to restore her Visitation community failed, she offered the monastery, and herself, in 1804 to Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the young Society of the Sacred Heart, beginning a lifelong friendship between the two women. Philippine had long dreamed of the missions, and in 1818, at the age of forty-nine, she sailed for America with four companions at the invitation of the bishop of Louisiana. Landing at New Orleans and traveling up the Mississippi, she settled at Saint Charles, Missouri, where in a log cabin she opened the first free school west of the Mississippi River. In the years that followed she founded schools, academies, and an orphanage in Missouri and Louisiana, enduring poverty, harsh winters, and her own persistent sense of failure, including her frustration at never mastering English. In 1841, aged seventy-one and in failing health, she joined the mission to the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, Kansas. Unable to learn the language or teach, she gave the mission what she had: hours of motionless prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. The Potawatomi gave her the name Quahkahkanumad, rendered as the Woman Who Prays Always, and tradition tells of children scattering bits of leaves on her habit to see, hours later, that she had not stirred. After a single year her superiors recalled her for her health, and she spent her last decade in prayerful obscurity at Saint Charles, where she died on November 18, 1852. Philippine Duchesne was beatified in 1940 by Pope Pius XII and canonized on July 3, 1988, by Pope John Paul II. Her feast is kept on November 18, and she is honored as a patroness of frontier missions and of perseverance amid adversity. Her remains rest in the Shrine of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne at Saint Charles, Missouri, a place of pilgrimage near the site of her log-cabin school.