Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Saint Theodore Guérin, who was born in Brittany, France, on the Feast of the Guardian Angels in 1798.
The same day she was baptized and the rest, she was inclined to prayer.
She would go down as a child to the shore, look at the sea, and think of eternity.
She felt a call to religious life, but her early years were marked by tragedy that would force her to delay her response.
One brother burned to death at seven, and the other died before she was thirteen.
That left her with her parents and a younger sister.
Her father was a naval officer, and when she was fifteen, he was on furlough and was heading home when he was waylaid by brigands who robbed and murdered him.
Soon after that, her mother became seriously ill.
So at fifteen, Anne Therese had to take care of her mother and her nine-year-old sister.
After five years, her younger sister was now old enough to take care of the house.
So Anne Therese began asking her mother for permission to leave and become a sister, not become a nun.
But it was another five years before her mother agreed.
So finally, at twenty-five, she was received as a postulant to the Sisters of Providence in 1823 and given the name Sister St. Therese.
Almost immediately, she fell seriously ill, yet another obstacle to her vocation.
She survived the illness but would be unable to eat solid food for the rest of her life.
After finishing her formation, she took her vows on the Feast of Our Lady's Nativity in 1825.
She was soon made superior of a school in Rennes, in a rough part of town.
It was a difficult place to teach, but she excelled and helped establish more schools.
Then due to misunderstandings in the religious community, the Mother Superior lost confidence in her, and she was reassigned to a small country school.
Here she had more free time, which she dedicated to prayer and to studying medicine and pharmacy so that she could help the poor with those skills.
After only a year there, in 1836, the French Academy Board of Education voted medallion decorations for the good job she was doing.
In the previous year, Bishop Bruté, the first Bishop of the Diocese of Vincennes, which later became the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Bishop Bruté had gotten to know the Sisters of Providence on a trip to France.
In 1839, he sent his Vicar General to France to find missionaries who would work in the Diocese.
When Rev. Hailandière arrived in France, he learned that the Bishop had died.
He was the Coadjutor Bishop already and became the second Bishop of Vincennes.
He invited the Sisters of Providence to send a group of missionaries to his Diocese to open schools and orphanages for girls, which were badly needed.
Six sisters would go, and Saint Theodore was chosen to lead them.
She was the only one who seemed to have the necessary combination of talents and skills to lead the mission.
It took someone prudent, courageous, capable of acting independently without supervision, but not so independent that she would stray from the order's charism or the congregation's But she wasn't convinced that she could do it.
A missionary must have robust health, and her health hadn't been robust for a long time.
She was now 41, which was not young back then.
She prayed about it and eventually got the courage to say yes to this missionary call.
Saying goodbye to France was hard, and the crossing was rough.
There was a storm, and the sisters were banged around in their room on the ship.
After over a month at sea, they landed at New York on September 4th, 1840.
They traveled by train, by stagecoach, and by steamboat to Madison, Indiana, where they learned that they would not be opening a school in Vincennes as they expected.
The bishop told them that Terre Haute needed their services more, so they would be going up there.
After another three weeks traveling, they arrived.
The first thing that they wanted to do was to go to the church.
First, they would speak to Our Lord, and then they would speak to men.
But when they went into the church, they were surprised that this was a church.
It had no tabernacle and no altar.
The site of their school, which they were then shown, was in the middle of the woods.
There were no villages in sight, no houses in sight, so why would anyone build a school there?
You need to have people to go to a school.
But that was where they were sent, so that's where they started having the school built.
They lived with a farmer while the school and the mother house were being built.
When they got to St. Mary of the Woods, they found four young girls who aspired to religious life who already hoped to join them as sisters.
The bishop there, Hailandière, legally recognized St. Theodore as the mother superior of a religious congregation, and that meant that she could begin forming vocations.
So on May 1st, 1841, she clothed her first postulant, and on September 4th, 1841, just eight months after they had arrived there, they were able to open the school.
The following year, they opened a boarding school for girls in Jasper.
During St. Theodore's lifetime, they would open another 18 schools, overcoming great difficulties.
On October 2nd, one of these difficulties was on October 2nd, 1842, when a fire destroyed their barns and granaries, which held the food that they needed for the winter.
Arson was suspected.
They made it through the winter, but now were out of money, so St. Theodore returned to France in April 1843 with some other sisters in order to try to raise funds.
They were able to meet with Queen Maria Amalia of France, who helped them, and continued after the departure to collect more funds from other people, which would eventually be used to open more schools.
By the time St. Theodore was ready to return to America, it was winter, and winter crossings were rough.
The ship was going to New Orleans, and the crossing was rougher than expected.
They ran into an unusually late hurricane.
It was December, and the ship nearly sank.
When they finally reached New Orleans, St. Theodore fell ill with a fever.
When she recovered, the sisters traveled up the Mississippi to Terre Haute, arriving on April 1st, 1844, almost a year after they'd departed.
That is, after they departed from Terre Haute.
In 1846, the Articles of Incorporation for their academy or seminary for girls were signed by the governor of Indiana.
The property could now be transferred from the bishop to the corporation, but the bishop refused to do this.
His idea of what the sisters should be was rather different from what the sisters ruling in Constitution said.
He wanted the sisters much more dependent on him and on the priests, whereas their ruling constitutions gave them a certain autonomy, but women in America at that time didn't have much autonomy.
They were expected to stay at home.
People were surprised when they saw Sister St. Theodore go into stores and buy things herself instead of sending a man to do it.
Things came to a head in 1847.
St. Theodore went to see the bishop to try to resolve the problems, but when they couldn't come to an agreement, the bishop demanded that she resign.
She replied that she'd only resign if the sisters wanted her to.
So the bishop deposed her from the position of Mother Superior, excommunicated her in addition for her supposed disobedience, locked her up, and kept her from communicating with the sisters.
He planned to throw her out of the diocese, and if that had happened, the congregation would have followed her.
On the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the crisis abruptly ended when the bishop resigned.
He returned to France, and St. Theodore had no serious problems with the next two bishops.
On May 14, 1856, a final illness brought St. Theodore's earthly life to an end at the mother house.
Her Latin epitaph says, I sleep, but my heart keeps vigil over the house I built.
Fifty-one years later, her remains were moved from the grave to a crypt.
On this occasion, it was found that her brain was still intact.
God preserved the tongue and the larynx of St. Anthony to show the value of his preaching.
So if God preserved the brain of St. Theodore, perhaps he wants us to understand the importance of her teaching.
The following year, 1908, a sister who had cancer prayed at St. Theodore's tomb for another sister who was ill, but she was the one who got a miracle.
The next day, her pain vanished, and a subsequent exam found no sign of the tumor.
News of this led the diocese to start working on St. Theodore's cause.
This was the miracle for her beatification, but it would be another 90 years before that happened.
Her canonization followed much more quickly thereafter in 2006.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.