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Biography

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Rose Philippine Duchesne was born in 1769 in Grenoble, in southeastern France, into a family of the provincial elite. Her father, Pierre-François Duchesne, was a lawyer who later sat in revolutionary assemblies, and her mother, Rose-Euphrosine Périer, belonged to a well-known commercial family. As a girl she was educated by the Visitandines at the convent of Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut overlooking Grenoble, and there she conceived a desire for consecrated life and for missionary work, influenced by accounts of Jesuit missions in the Americas. In 1788 she entered the Visitation community at Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut despite family opposition. The French Revolution suppressed the convent in 1792 before she could make final vows. She returned to her family and, through the 1790s and the early years of the Consulate, devoted herself to clandestine charitable and religious work in the Grenoble region, assisting the poor and the sick, visiting prisons, and sheltering priests.

After the Concordat she tried to revive Visitation life at Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut but could not gather a stable community. In 1804 Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart, accepted the house, and Duchesne entered the new congregation. She pronounced her vows in 1805 and spent the next thirteen years in France in teaching and community duties, all the while petitioning Barat to send her overseas. In 1818 Barat consented. Duchesne, then forty-eight, left Bordeaux with four sisters for the diocese of Bishop Louis William Valentine DuBourg. After a voyage of several months they reached New Orleans and then ascended the Mississippi to St. Louis and St. Charles in the Missouri Territory.

There, in a log cabin, the sisters opened a school that later writers have often called the first free school west of the Mississippi. Duchesne founded additional Sacred Heart establishments at Florissant, Missouri, in 1819, including a novitiate and an attempt at a school for Native American girls; at Grand Coteau, Louisiana, in 1821; and later in St. Louis. The American mission was marked by poverty, disease, bitter winters, and cultural isolation. Duchesne never gained fluency in English, which hampered both teaching and governance. She served as superior of the United States houses until 1840, when she was relieved of that office. Accounts from the period emphasize her personal austerity, her long vigils of prayer, and her difficulties as an administrator far from France.

In 1841 she was allowed to go with a small group of sisters to the Potawatomi mission at Sugar Creek, then in Indian Territory and now in Kansas. She was more than seventy years old, in poor health, and unable to learn the Potawatomi language, so she could not teach; she spent most of her time in the chapel. Later tradition among the Potawatomi remembers her as the Woman Who Prays Always. After roughly a year she was sent back to St. Charles, where she lived in retirement until her death in 1852. She was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1940 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988. Her tomb is at the shrine of the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Charles, Missouri, and she is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on 18 November.

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