St. Rose Philippine Duchesne

Who they were

Philippine Duchesne was a Grenoble Visitation novice expelled from religious life by the French Revolution, who spent the Terror hiding priests and nursing prisoners, then joined the new Society of the Sacred Heart and spent twenty years asking, letter after letter, for the American missions.

She sailed at forty nine, in 1818, to frontier Missouri, where everything was harder than the dream: log cabins, poverty, and English, which defeated her. She opened the first free school west of the Mississippi and governed the Society's American houses in a language she never mastered, judging herself in her letters a failure at nearly everything. The payoff came at seventy two. Finally permitted to join the mission to the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, Kansas, she found she could not learn their language either, and so she simply knelt, hours upon motionless hours, until the Potawatomi gave her the name the Church kept: Quahkahkanumad, the woman who prays always. Children, the accounts say, would touch her hem and find her unmoved an hour later. The name was theirs to give, and it is hers because they gave it.

Why people turn to St. Rose Philippine Duchesne

Everyone called late. Everyone serving where they cannot speak the language, literally and otherwise: the immigrant grandparent, the visitor in the intensive care unit, the parent outside a teenager's door. And with St. Ansgar, she is one of two patrons here of faithfulness that never sees its harvest.

How to ask their intercession

When the words fail. Her whole late vocation was wordless presence, and one silent decade, knelt, is her exact devotion.