“When one has nothing more to lose, the heart is inaccessible to fear.”
Anne-Therese Guerin was born in 1798 to well-respected and faithful parents, Laurent and Isabelle Guerin. They lived in a thatched cottage near a little field by the seashore in Brittany, France. Her father served in the French Navy and was gone for long periods of time while her mother took care and taught the family. The vastness of the ocean compelled Anne-Therese to pray and to one day give herself totally to God.
Her family endured many hardships including the loss of several children due to fire and the father, who was robbed of all of his earnings and murdered after returning from a long stay. The mother was overwhelmed and so Anne-Therese took over the household. When siblings were able to help, she took a job in a factory to help support the family.
She yearned to follow her heart and at the age of 25, entered the Sisters of Providence and took the name, Sister Theodore. She suffered grave illnesses and 3 times she was to the point of death having received the last Sacraments, but recovered.
Benefactors asked for the Sisters to set up a school in a very poor and devastated area of Rennes. They struggled until Sister Theodore came as their superior. She was full of zeal and a firmness of strength that was able to carry through. She made great changes and improvements but after confronting a priest who was using the Sister’s funds to start up his own brotherhood, she was dismissed as Superior and sent away to a mission to help the sick where she learned medicine and remedies under a local doctor.
In 1839, a new bishop of Indiana, asked for sisters to help start a mission, educating the pioneer children. Sister Theodore thought she was too weak and feeble to go but she trusted in God’s Providence and she was sent anyways, leading the mission. They left their families and all that they knew.
Little awaited them when they arrived and they did not speak the language nor know the customs. Continuing on in difficult pioneer conditions and extreme weather, they built their first academy which continues on today as Saint Mary of the Woods College. They clashed with an unjust system from the local clergy and they struggled. Mother Therese journeyed to France seeking donations but returned with less than needed and many unfavorable changes were made in her absence.
Struggles with the local clergy escalated and the bishop excommunicated and removed her. Word reached the pope and he stepped in, accepting the local bishop’s resignation. She returned to her role and the community thrived.
She died on May 14, 1856 when she was 58 and in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI canonized her as the 8th American saint and the first from Indiana.
“You will be happy yourself in making others happy.”
She is the patron saint of the Diocese of Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
Her feast day is October 3.
For God’s Glory.
