Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born at Grenoble on August 29, 1769, and baptized in the church of Saint-Louis with the names of the apostle Philip and of Saint Rose of Lima. Her father, Pierre-François Duchesne, was a prominent lawyer, and her mother, Rose-Euphrosine Périer, was the sister of the industrialist Claude Périer. As a girl she was a pupil of the Visitation nuns at the monastery of Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, and in 1788, against her family’s wishes, she entered the community there as a novice.

During the Revolution the community was dispersed and the monastery closed. Philippine went back to her family and, at great risk, nursed prisoners, helped priests reach the faithful and taught and fed poor children. After the Concordat of 1801 she tried with a few former sisters to restore the community at Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, without success. In 1804 she offered herself and the house to Madeleine-Sophie Barat, who came to Grenoble in December and received her and several companions as novices of the Society of the Sacred Heart. In 1815 she founded the Society’s house in Paris and served there as mistress of novices.

Bishop Dubourg of Louisiana was seeking teachers for his diocese, and in 1818 Philippine sailed with four other religious on the Rebecca. They reached New Orleans on May 29, 1818, and on September 14 she opened, in a log cabin at St. Charles, Missouri, the first free school west of the Mississippi, the Society’s first house outside France. In 1819 the community moved to Florissant, where she opened a school and a novitiate. Foundations followed in Louisiana from 1821, at Grand Coteau and elsewhere, and in St. Louis, where she opened the city’s first orphanage.

In 1841, when she was over seventy, she joined the Jesuit mission to the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, in present-day Kansas. She could not learn the language well enough to teach and gave herself to prayer, and the Potawatomi named her “Woman Who Prays Always.” Her health failed, and in July 1842 she returned to St. Charles, where she spent her last ten years. She died there on November 18, 1852, at the age of eighty-three.

She was buried in the convent cemetery at St. Charles, and in 1855 her remains were moved to a small shrine on the grounds. Pope Pius XII beatified her on May 12, 1940. In 1949 her remains were placed in a marble sarcophagus, which was moved in 1952 into the new Shrine of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, at 619 North Second Street, on the campus of the Academy of the Sacred Heart. Pope John Paul II canonized her in Rome on July 3, 1988, and the next day told pilgrims, “Even beyond the age of seventy she was still a valiant pioneer of the Gospel.” Her optional memorial on November 18 is in the proper calendar of the dioceses of the United States. At Florissant, the Old St. Ferdinand Shrine still shows the small closet under the stairs where she slept. In Grenoble the Society kept a school at Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut until 1832, and the building now houses the Musée dauphinois.

The chapel of Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, the monastery of her youth, keeps the wall paintings by Toussaint Largeot completed in 1662, the year the beatification of Saint Francis de Sales, founder of the Visitation, was celebrated. In Missouri, Patricia Reid, a Religious of the Sacred Heart, painted an icon of her, Milton Frenzel painted her mission at St. Charles, and for the bicentennial of 2018 a sculpture of her by Gianfranco Tassara was set in the garden of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.

• Grenoble, Sainte-Marie d’en-HautThe former Visitation monastery where she was a pupil, a novice and a Religious of the Sacred Heart, now the Musée dauphinois at 30 rue Maurice-Gignoux, with its painted chapel; free, closed on Mondays.
• Grenoble, Saint-LouisThe parish church where she was baptized in 1769.