Feast day: November 18

St. Rose Philippine Duchesne

Virgin, Religious · 1769–1852

Patron of —

A French nun who at last realized her lifelong dream of the American missions at fifty, founding frontier schools along the Mississippi and serving the Potawatomi in her old age.

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born in 1769 at Grenoble, France, into a prosperous family, and entered a convent of Visitation nuns as a young woman — only to see her community scattered and religious life outlawed by the French Revolution. Through those dangerous years she lived her vocation in hiding, nursing the sick and ministering to imprisoned priests.

When the storm passed she joined the new Society of the Sacred Heart, founded by St. Madeleine Sophie Barat, but her heart was set on a single burning desire she had cherished since childhood: to be a missionary to the Native peoples of America. At last, in 1818, at nearly fifty, she sailed for the United States.

On the rough Missouri frontier she founded the first convents and free schools of her order in America, beginning in a log cabin at St. Charles, enduring poverty, cold, hunger, and the immense difficulty of a strange land and language. For decades she built up Catholic education across the frontier through sheer dogged perseverance.

Only at seventy-two did her lifelong dream come true, when she went to live among the Potawatomi people in Kansas. Too old now to learn their language, she could do little but pray — and the Potawatomi, seeing her motionless in prayer hour after hour, called her 'the woman who prays always.' She died in 1852 and was canonized in 1988.

Too old and frail to learn the language, she spent her days among the Potawatomi simply praying — and they named her 'Woman Who Prays Always.'

Image: AnonymousUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05182a.htm