Saint Theodore Guérin

Anne-Thérèse Guérin was born on October 2, 1798, at Étables-sur-Mer, on the north coast of Brittany, a town that is now part of Binic-Étables-sur-Mer. Her mother, Isabelle, taught her at home. Her father, Laurent, an officer in the French navy, was robbed and killed by bandits on his way home when she was fifteen.

On August 18, 1823, she entered the Sisters of Providence at Ruillé-sur-Loir, in the Sarthe, and took the name Sister Saint Théodore. During her novitiate she fell gravely ill, and the remedies damaged her digestion, so that for the rest of her life she could eat only soft, plain food. She received the habit on September 6, 1825, and made her first vows two days later. In 1826 she became superior of the school of the parish of Saint-Aubin in Rennes. She later led the school at Soulaines, in the diocese of Angers, where she also cared for the sick and the poor, and in 1839 the Academy of Angers honored her teaching.

In 1839 Bishop Célestin de la Hailandière of Vincennes, Indiana, a native of France, asked Ruillé for sisters. She left with five companions in July 1840, sailed from Le Havre on July 27 aboard the Cincinnati, landed at New York on September 4, and reached Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, near Terre Haute, on the evening of October 22, 1840. Of the day she left France she wrote in her journal, “The moment of separation and of death had come at last.” On July 4, 1841, she opened the academy that became Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in 1909, and by 1842 the sisters had schools at Jasper, Indiana, and St. Francisville, Illinois.

Her sixteen years in Indiana brought hard trials, among them prejudice against Catholic sisters, a fire that destroyed the harvest, frequent illness, and the separation of the Indiana community from Ruillé, which made it a new congregation under her leadership. In 1843 she went back to France to raise funds. She died at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods on May 14, 1856, at fifty-seven, leaving sixty-seven professed sisters, nine novices and seven postulants. One of her sayings, quoted in the Holy See’s biography, is “Put yourself gently into the hands of Providence.”

She was buried on May 15, 1856, in the sisters’ cemetery, where a Celtic cross bears the words “I sleep, but my heart watches over this house which I have built.” In 1907 her remains were moved to the crypt of the Church of the Immaculate Conception at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Sister Mary Theodosia Mug, who prayed there on October 30, 1908, was healed of cancer and other ailments, and this cure was the miracle for her beatification by Saint John Paul II on October 25, 1998. The healing of the eyesight of Phil McCord of Terre Haute in 2001 opened the way to her canonization by Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter’s Square on October 15, 2006. That month her remains were moved into the church. On October 3, 2014, they were moved again, to the new Shrine of Saint Mother Theodore Guérin in the Providence Spirituality and Conference Center, beneath the sisters’ Blessed Sacrament Chapel; the Shrine was blessed on October 22, 2014.

Her feast on October 3 is kept by the Sisters of Providence and in several dioceses of Indiana; in 2010 the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend inscribed it in its calendar as an obligatory memorial. She is not in the national calendar of the United States. The two congregations remain close, and in 2024 the leaders of the Indiana sisters were invited, for the first time in their history, to the general chapter of the Sisters of Providence of Ruillé.

Teresa Clark, a sculptor of Terre Haute and a Providence Associate, made the bronze statue of her outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods and another, dedicated on May 10, 2008, in Mary’s Garden at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. In France, a bronze replica of the Indiana statue, six and a half feet tall and weighing 1,047 pounds, was dedicated in May 2017 at the mother house of Ruillé-sur-Loir, set on a marble base facing the house.

• Binic-Étables-sur-MerHer family house at Étables, a stone cottage where she was born and grew up, still stands and has been cared for by the Sisters of Providence, the Association Providence-Armor and volunteers for over a hundred years.
• Ruillé-sur-Loir, mother house of the Sisters of ProvidenceThe house where she was formed as a novice in 1823 and from which she was sent to Indiana in 1840, with her bronze statue before it since 2017.