Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Putting Into the Deep
November 21, 2008
During this month in which we celebrate all saints, it is fitting of course that we have some Americans to cheer.
Last Thursday we celebrated the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first canonized American saint, about whom I wrote a year ago.
On Tuesday, we observed the memorial of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, another great spiritual matriarch who came from Europe to plant the Gospel in the rich soil of our country. Canonized 20 years ago by Pope John Paul II, she remains a “living source of inspiration,” he said, “for all Christ’s disciples, especially those who live in the richest areas of the world.” Together let’s see why.
She was born in Grenoble, France in 1769. Her father was a wealthy lawyer and businessman and her mother belonged to a noble family that eventually produced a French president. At her baptism, she was prophetically given the name Rose, after St. Rose of Lima, the first canonized saint of the Americas. She received an extraordinary education from the nearby Visitation Sisters supplemented by tutors at home. At the age of eight, her family received a visit from a family friend whose stories changed the whole trajectory of her life. He was Jesuit priest who had returned from the Louisiana Territory. He told them about the heroic work the Jesuit missionaries were doing with the Indians and little Rose was filled with a desire one day to join them on the frontier.
When she was 17, her parents began looking to find her a fitting husband, but she told them of her intention, rather, to dedicate herself fully to Christ. When her parents resisted, she ran against their will to join the Visitation Sisters. Her father eventually relented on her desire not to marry, but he refused to allow her to make her religious vows; it was at the time of the French Revolution and he did not want to see his daughter killed or exiled during what seemed to be an upcoming reign of terror. In this he was prescient, for a short time later all Visitation convents were closed and the nuns banished. For a decade, Rose lived the life of a prayerful nun at home while dangerously dedicating herself to caring for clandestine priests, helping poor families and catechizing orphans and other children she would find on the streets.
When Napoleon signed a concordat with the Vatican in 1801 allowing religious life to resume in the country, Rose sought to reestablish the Visitation Monastery with some other young women. It didn’t work. After a year, she offered the monastery to a new religious congregation, the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that had just been founded by the saint who was then known as Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat. Mother Barat accepted, Rose became a postulant of the new community, and the two began a holy friendship that would lead both to canonization.
As her desire for union with Christ in prayer deepened, so did her growing awareness that she was being called to bring Christ to the Indians. One Holy Thursday, she had an ecstatic experience while adoring Jesus in the altar of repose. “I spent the whole night in the new World … carrying the Blessed Sacrament to all parts of the land,” she said to Mother Barat. “I had all my sacrifices to offer: a mother, sisters, family, my mountain [Grenoble]! When you say to me ‘Now I am sending you,’ I will respond quickly, “I am on my way.’” As strong as her desire was, she needed to wait 12 years and erect, first, a house for her order in Paris.
Her prayers were eventually answered in 1818 when Bishop Dubourg of the Louisiana Territory wrote Mother Barat asking her to send sisters to set up schools in Missouri. Five sisters were chosen, the 49 year-old Rose was appointed superior, and they embarked on a grueling 20-week journey across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. Rose was sick the entire voyage and twice was near death, but she soldiered on until they arrived in St. Louis. The bishop established them in St. Charles and gave them a one-room log cabin, which they used to found a school for poor children, the first free school west of the Mississippi.
Thus began 34 years of missionary toil in brutal conditions. The sisters needed to battle cold, hunger, sickness and deprivation, not to mention opposition to their French teaching methods, ingratitude and even calumny. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here,” she wrote succinctly back to the motherhouse, “and trials are the riches in this land.” About the calumny, she joked, “They say everything about us, except that we poison the children.” All of these crosses, however, served merely to prove and magnify her Christian virtue. Vocations from among her students started to come in large numbers and she was able to establish new houses, schools and orphanages in Florissant, Grand Côteau, New Orleans, St. Louis and St. Michael.
As hard as she was working among the settlers in the frontier, she still longed to bring the Gospel to the Indians. She got her wish when she was 72. By this point, she had become ill enough that she had asked to step down as superior. When a request came in from the famous Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet to help establish a school for the Patawatomi in Sugar Creek, Kansas, she volunteered to go. Her fellow sisters wanted to prevent her from the difficult work in her frail condition, but not only did she insist on going but so did Fr. De Smet. “She must come,” the black-robed apostle demanded. “She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work.”
That’s precisely what she did. It had been hard enough for her to learn English upon coming to America at about the age of 50. It was near impossible for her to learn the Indian dialect, but she did the best she could to teach the young Indian girls about Jesus. What she couldn’t convey in words, she conveyed in action. She spent most of her days and nights on her knees in prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist, which taught the Indians more about the real presence of Christ than hundreds of catechism classes. Once, young squaws placed small pieces of paper on the back of her habit to see if she’d move during the night and go to bed. They came back in the morning and the pieces of paper were exactly where they had placed them. So moved were they by her example that they gave her a precise nickname: Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “the woman who always prays.”
After a year, because of the harshness of the conditions, her local superior sent her back to St. Charles. She did not want to leave, but she accepted under obedience. “God knows the reason for this recall and that is enough,” she said. Though she had physically left that mission, her heart remained. “I live now in solitude and am able to use my time reflecting on the past and preparing for death,” she wrote back to France. “I cannot, however, put away the thought of the Indians and in my ambition I fly toward the Rockies.” She died about a year after her return in St. Charles, on November 18, 1852
Her attitude was always humble and faithful. In summing up her life, Pope John Paul said, “She didn’t think about how much she was leaving behind but about those to whom she was sent and who was sending her. “ In this she is a model for all those believers in the first world.
“We cultivate a very small field for Christ,” she said, “but we love it, knowing that God does not require great achievements but a heart that holds back nothing for self…. The truest crosses are those we do not choose ourselves…. He who has Jesus has everything.”