Sacred Heart History

Just as the Society of Jesus, famed for its urbane, astute fathers, is one of the most useful male orders of the Roman Catholic Church, so the Society of the Sacred Heart, with its dozens of well-run schools and colleges which attract Protestants as well as Catholics, is outstanding among orders on the distaff side. The French woman who founded the order in 1800, Madeleine Sophie Barat, was sainted in 1925. Her resourceful and impetuous colleague, Philippine Rose Duchesne, who founded the order in the New World in 1818, lies buried in front of the frame convent she built on the Missouri River at St. Charles, Mo., and her cause for beatification was approved by the Church nearly three years ago (TIME, March 25, 1935). Out last week was a readable and exhaustive 809-page chronicle of the order in North America by Mother Louise Callan, one of the order's most scholarly minds, who developed her history from the thesis she presented for her doctorate of philosophy at St. Louis University three years ago. She was dispensed from her semi-cloistered regimen so that she might inspect the Mississippi Valley sites where her valiant colleagues labored during the past century.

Discouragement, delay, the difficulties of learning English, a sea voyage enlivened by the sight of pirates did not cool Mother Duchesne's ardor for civilizing the "savages" of the New World. The first thing she did when she stepped ashore was kiss the boggy soil of Louisiana. It took her and her four colleagues 40 days to ascend the river to St. Louis. The nuns were placed aft on the steamboat because of the ever-present danger of exploding boilers. The account of Mother Duchesne's work--which did not come to an end until 1852--occupies half of Mother Callan's book. It is full of homely detail: the French nuns' first encounter with corn bread; Mother Duchesne's purchase of a slave, Rachel, from her bishop "as a favor" when he left for France, later reselling her to help pay for a dormitory.

The last half of the history is devoted to the order's expansion in the U. S.--32 houses from Montreal to New Orleans, from Boston to San Francisco. Completed in 1929 was Villa Duchesne, the pride of the order, appropriately built at Clayton, St. Louis suburb, in the heart of the Great Valley.

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