Rose Philippine Duchesne was a French religious sister and educator. Along with the foundress Madeleine-Sophie Barat, she was a prominent early member of the Society of the Sacred Heart. She founded the congregation's first communities in the United States. She spent the last half of her life teaching and serving the people of the Midwestern United States, then the western frontier of the nation.

After surviving a bout of smallpox, Rose Duchesne and her cousin Josephine were sent to be educated in the Monastery of Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut run by the community of Visitandine nuns in 1781. When she began to show a strong attraction to the monastic life, her father withdrew her from the monastery school the following year. In 1788, she entered into the Visitation of Holy Mary religious order, despite her family's opposition.

In 1792, revolutionaries shut down the monastery during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and dispersed the nuns. Duchesne returned to her family where she lived at their country home, along with two aunts, who had been Visitandines at Romans-sur-Isère. With the Catholic Church again able to operate openly in France under Napoleon, Duchesne attempted to re-establish the Visitation Monastery in 1801.

With Barat's blessing, Duchesne headed out to the United States with four other Sisters of the Society in 1818. They arrived in New Orleans and established a new Sacred Heart convent in a log cabin there, known as the Duquette Mansion, the first house of the Society ever built outside France.

She spent the last decade of her life living in St Charles in a tiny room under a stairway near the chapel. Towards the end of her life, she was alone, going blind, feeble, and yearned for letters from Mother Barat. She died on November 18, 1852, aged 83.

Pope John Paul II canonized her on July 3, 1988.

Other Saints of the Day
1. Saint Anslem
2. Saint Keverne
3. Saint Mabyn
4. Saint Maximus
5. Saint Nazarius

- catholic.org