Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne

Virgin

Feast Day

November 18

Life

1769–1852

Canonized

1988

Order

Society of the Sacred Heart

Born

Grenoble, France

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born on August 29, 1769, in Grenoble, the second daughter of a prosperous lawyer-politician of revolutionary sympathies. At nineteen she entered the Visitation monastery of Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut despite her father's opposition. The French Revolution suppressed religious life in 1792 and the community was dispersed; for the next twelve years Philippine lived at home, carrying on a clandestine ministry to imprisoned priests, the sick, and refugees.

After the Concordat of 1801 she attempted to refound the Visitation at Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut but failed; she then in 1804 offered the empty monastery to Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat as a foundation house for the newly formed Society of the Sacred Heart and joined the Society herself. Her lifelong desire was missionary work in the Americas; in 1818, at age forty-nine, she sailed with four companions for Louisiana and within months opened the first free school for girls west of the Mississippi at Saint Charles, Missouri. Over the next thirty-four years she founded six houses of the Society in the United States. In 1841, at age seventy-one, she finally went as a missionary to the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, Kansas; unable at her age to learn the language, she spent her year there in such constant prayer that the Potawatomi named her Quahkahkanumad - Woman Who Prays Always. She returned to Saint Charles and died there on November 18, 1852. Pope John Paul II canonized her on July 3, 1988.