Description

Oil Dedicated to St Rose Philippine Duchesne

St Rose Philippine Duchesne born in Grenoble, France, of a family that among the new rich, Rose learned political skills from her father and a love of the poor from her mother. The dominant feature of her temperament was a strong and dauntless will. Which became the material—and the battlefield—of her holiness. She entered the Visitation of Mary convent at 19. And remained despite family opposition. As the French Revolution broke, the convent was closed, and she began taking care of the poor and sick, opened a school for homeless children, and risked her life helping priests in the underground.

When the situation cooled, Rose personally rented the former convent, now a shambles, and tried to revive its religious life. The spirit gone, however, and soon there only four nuns left. They joined the infant Society of the Sacred Heart, whose young superior, Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat, would be her lifelong friend.

In a short time Rose was a superior and supervisor of the novitiate and a school. But since hearing tales of missionary work in Louisiana as a little girl, her ambition was to go to America and work among the Indians. At 49, she thought this would be her work. With four nuns, she spent 11 weeks at sea en route to New Orleans, and seven weeks more on the Mississippi to St. Louis. She then met one of the many disappointments of her life.

Though Rose was as hardy as any of the pioneer women in the wagons rolling west, cold and hunger drove them out—to Florissant, Missouri, where she founded the first Catholic Indian school, adding others in the territory.