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41 2 Service to a Growing Catholic Community W H E N A N N E T H É R È S E G U E R I N ’ S parents celebrated her birth in the French village of Etables-sur-Mer in 1798, they never expected that their beloved daughter would find fulfillment as a woman religious in rural Indiana . Anne-Thérèse was convinced that she was called to religious life from an early age, but family responsibilities, including caring for her mother and maintaining the household, prevented her from entering the French order of the Sisters of Providence of Ruillé-sur-Loir until 1823 at the age of twenty-five. Given the name Sister Mary Theodore, she was assigned to teach, but also spent time visiting the sick and the poor. The course of Sister Theodore’s life would change considerably in 1839, when Simon Bruté, the bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, sent Reverend Célestine de la Hailandi ère to France to persuade a religious community that they were needed to minister to the Irish, French, and German Catholics settling in the diocese .1 Bruté needed sisters to teach, care for the sick, and provide religious instruction and sacramental preparation to those unable to attend a Catholic school. While in France, Hailandière learned that Bruté had died and he had been named bishop of the vast diocese. He asked the Sisters of Providence for help, and the superior general suggested Sister Theodore who, in her opinion, was the best person to lead a group of sisters to the United States. “We have only one Sister capable of making the foundation,” she wrote. “If she consents, we shall send you Sisters next summer.”2 Sister Theodore accepted her appointment as superior of the group, and in 1840 she and five other sisters departed France for a new land. Mother Theodore—she received the title after being appointed superior —and her companions traveled by stagecoach, steamboat, canal boat, and train before finally reaching Indiana. Accustomed to the cosmopolitan world of nineteenth-century France, she noticed the rugged, unsettled world that comprised her new home. Describing the sisters’ stagecoach ride to Vincennes, she wrote: “we entered a thick forest where we saw the most singular kind of road that could be imagined. It was formed of logs, of trees that had been felled to clear the way and then were brought together 42 Service to a Growing Catholic Community as though to form a raft. Where some of these logs had become rotten, there were large holes. The coach jolted so terrible as to cause large bumps in one’s head. This day, indeed, we danced without a fiddle all afternoon.”3 The sisters’ initial experience in their new city was challenging, to say the least. After settling in the household of the Sisters of Charity and putting on the habits they had not worn during their journey, the sisters requested to be taken to the cathedral, only to discover it was not quite the kind of edifice with which they were familiar. “Our barn at Soulaines is better ornamented and more neatly kept,” Mother Theodore explained. “I could not resist this last shock and wept bitterly, which relieved me somewhat . . . . The Bishop’s seat is an old red chair which even our peasants would not have in what they consider a nice room. . . . I can say nothing of the town except that I doubt whether it will ever grow much on account of its position. . . . It is said there are four thousand inhabitants, but I think they would have hard work to find that number.”4 On October 22, 1840 the sisters arrived at St. Mary-of-the-Woods, where they found several postulants waiting for them. Unconvinced that such a solitary place was suitable for both a novitiate to house and educate postulants and novices and an academy, Mother Theodore expressed her worries—and commented on the American character—to those involved in the work. “All have given reasons [for establishing the academy at St. Mary-of-the Woods],” she wrote, “that are not entirely satisfactory [to me]; yet I dare not disregard them. The spirit of this country is so different from ours that one ought to be acquainted with it before condemning those who know more about it than we do; so I await the issue before passing judgment in a positive manner. If we cannot do any good here, you know our agreement, we will...

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