About Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born into a wealthy family in Grenoble, France in 1769.  Early in life she developed a concern for the less fortunate, and by age eleven she was giving them her weekly allowance.  She loved to read books about missionaries and dreamed of helping Native Americans someday.  By the time she was twelve Philippine knew that she wanted to pursue the religious life.  Much against her father's wishes, she entered the Visitation Order at the age of seventeen.

During the French Revolution, all religious orders in France were disbanded; yet the young Philippine continued her service to others.  She cared for the sick and the poor, sheltered fugitive priests, visited prisoners and taught children.  After frustrated attempts to re-establish the Visitation Order at Grenoble, she and a small group of nuns joined the Society of the Sacred Heart, a community recently-founded by Madeleine Sophie Barat, in 1804.

In 1816, Bishop William DuBourg visited the Paris convent, seeking nuns to come to America and open schools on his frontier mission.  (He lived in St. Louis, but the Louisiana Territory comprised his diocese.)  Philippine enthusiastically volunteered; and so, at the age of 48, she and four other nuns embarked on a ten-week voyage across the Atlantic, followed by a forty-day trip up the Mississippi to St. Louis.  Upon their arrival there in 1818, however, the Bishop informed the weary nuns that he had chosen the town of St. Charles, some twenty miles farther west for their first mission.  Disappointed in her desire to work with Native Americans, Mother Duchesne obeyed the Bishop and worked admirably in the midst of abject poverty.

The log cabin that had been rented for the nuns became convent for five nuns, boarding school for three young ladies from St. Louis and a free school for local pioneer children who sometimes numbered as many as twenty-one.  After one year of unstable enrollment the decision was made to abandon St. Charles and open a school on the St. Louis side of the Missouri River in Florissant.  It was not until 1828 that the nuns were urged by the Jesuits to return to St. Charles and reopen the school near their newly established parish church.

Although she was plagued by a sense of inadequacy, Mother Duchesne went on, in the next twenty years, to establish schools in Missouri and Louisiana that would survive to the present time.  Her schools became models for educational excellence in the cities where they existed, and Philippine's missionary zeal was the beginning of the spread of the Society of the Sacred Heart to countries all around the world.

Her childhood desire to work with Native Americans never faltered; and in 1841, at the age of seventy-two, Philippine was finally permitted to accompany other Sacred Heart nuns and Jesuit priests to a Potawatomi mission in Sugar Creek Kansas.  Although she considered herself a failure because of her inability to master the Potawatomi language, she deeply impressed the natives by her habit of constant prayer.  They reverently named her Quah-kah-ka-num-ad, "Woman who prays always."

Mother Duchesne spent only one year on the Kansas prairie.  In frail health, she returned to her beloved St. Charles, where she lived ten more years in prayerful, humble service before dying on November 18, 1852, at the age of eighty-three. On July 3,  1988 she was canonized a saint by the Catholic Church.