Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne: A Heart on Fire across Frontiers

Two hundred years ago, Rose Philippine Duchesne set out across the Atlantic to establish the Society of the Sacred Heart and educate the children in the new world. Opening the first Catholic school west of the Mississippi, Mother Duchesne, known as “the woman who prays always,” crossed frontiers to bring faith, love, and education to the world. From a convent in France to the frontier of the New World….a child and then a nun in a convent boarding school dreamt of bringing the Gospel to the native peoples. She persevered through Revolution, uncertainty, and long years of waiting, finally to follow her dream on the Missouri frontier, only to find it not at all what she had imagined. The life and relationships of Rose Philippine Duchesne reveal the heart and soul of a pioneer woman of faith on fire with love of God, in the context of the rapidly-expanding settlement of the Midwest in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its catastrophic effects on the native peoples in its wake.