Feast of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne (18 Nov 2008)

Today is another red-letter day for me, because it is the commemoration day of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne. And why? Because her life and mine have intersected in a number of ways.My cousin with whom I grew up like brother and sister attended high school and college conducted by the Religious of the Sacred Heart, a congregation of Sisters founded in France in the revolutionary period by Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. One of her associates in that early period was a very strong-willed French Sister who had a burning desire to bring the gospel of her beloved Lord to the new world. She badgered the foundress until finally Saint Madeleine Sophie let her take several others and go to the United States. They arrived in New Orleans in 1818 after a terrible crossing in which all aboard were seasick for weeks. The leader of the group was Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne who led her little group up to the Saint Louis area where she spent the rest of her life.

That long life of hers, so busy with her attempts to be an effective missionary in the Louisiana Purchase territory, was marked by one failure after another. Nothing seemed to go very well; things broke down, correspondence got lost; plans went awry; and to make it all worse, “Mother Duchesne” as she was known then and even now, could never master the language of the Potowatomy Indians whom she tried to evangelize. She thought of herself as a failure, and turned the direction of her Sisters in America over to others who, she hoped, would be more successful than she had been.

But God sees things differently. She might have failed at HER plans and projects, but evidently she was a great success in the eyes of her Heavenly Father. The Indians who could not pronounce her French name, so strange to them, called her “The Woman Who Always Prays.” She was beatified some years after her death and burial in Saint Charles, a Missouri town at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and then, just a few years ago, she was canonized—one of the first of our American Saints. I have had the joy of visiting her tomb there.

I keep in my room a little banner onto which I have pinned several relics of saints that have been given to me over the years. One of them is of Mother Duchesne. This woman who loved Jesus so much and wanted so much to make Him known to the ends of the earth saw herself as a failure. The Indians saw her as the woman who always prayed. And the entire Church sees her as one of our canonizables—men and women of heroic virtue who are held up as examples to the whole world of how our Christian life should be led. Let us turn to her when we are discouraged by our own lack of success in various endeavors; let us turn to her when we pray for our nation and its people; let us turn to her when we want to grow in our life of prayer. And let us turn to her when we seek the help of those in heaven. As she was eager to bring Christ to America, I think we can depend on her to bring Him to you and me—Americans two centuries after the coming of Mother Duchesne to our shores. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.