Anita Draper
Catholic Herald staff
Vocations to the religious life can inspire a community, a country and the world. In her passion for teaching impoverished girls, Bl. Marie Rose Durocher left just such a legacy.
This month marks the feast day of the Canadian nun, who was beatified in 1982. Foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, she is patron of the sick and those who have lost a parent.
Bl. Marie Rose’s feast day is Oct. 6, which was both her birth and death date. Born Eulalie Durocher, she lived from 1811 to 1849 in Quebec; according to her great-great-great niece, Mary Durocher Hudson, “of her 10 brothers and sisters, all became either priests, nuns or died … except one sister who had only one child … and a brother, Edouard, who had about eight children, one of whom was my great-grandfather.”
Hudson, 92, who lives in Ashland, said she grew up knowing Mother Marie Rose’s story and admiring her. According to the biography posted by the Sisters of the Holy Names, Eulalie tried to enter religious life several times but was prevented by frail health. She lost her mother at age 18, and later she and her father moved into the presbytery where her brother, a priest, lived.
In her 12 years serving her brother’s flock, Eulalie kept busy. She taught religious education, organized, evangelized, visited the poor, worked with a religious community to form an association and planned to join an order that was asked to send sisters from France. When that didn’t happen, the bishop approached her about starting a new religious community. She agreed.
“Under the name Mother Marie Rose, Eulalie was able to reach out to talented women and to provide them with excellent pedagogical preparation,” her biography says. “The Brothers of the Christian Schools and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate lent vital assistance. According to her vision, each child must receive a well-rounded education: spiritually, academically, artistically and socially.”
In her six years with the Sisters of the Holy Names, Mother Marie Rose established four convents and gained a reputation for leading courageously despite poverty and slander. She died on her 38th birthday; she was later declared venerable and then beatified after a man in Detroit who was crushed by a truck and pronounced dead recovered with her intercession.
Today, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary continue their education ministry in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec, as well as in the U.S. and the southern African country of Lesotho.
Being related to Mother Marie Rose has been a source of pride for Hudson’s family, who sought to learn more about her life.
“My father’s two sisters visited the Holy Names Motherhouse in Outremont, Montreal, after the (second World) War,” she said. “They brought home relics, mimeographed copies of the Durocher family tree, and pictures of Mother Marie Rose. By that time, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary had begun her cause of sanctification. That is a very expensive process … and it takes a long time. They must have had proof that at least one miracle had been wrought through MMR’s intercession.
“After the aunts return from Montreal, they shared all they had learned about Mother Marie Rose with the rest of the family,” she continued. “Our dad was long dead by that time, but our mother kept a picture of Mother Marie Rose on her dresser, and made her biography, ‘Rose of Canada,’ available for us to read.”
In her great-great-great aunt’s story, Hudson saw a woman who did God’s work without drawing attention to herself.
“If I was influenced in any way by Mother Marie Rose, it was by her ‘littleness,’” Hudson commented. “I feel she would have been embarrassed by her order’s struggle to have her elevated to the rank of Saint. I feel she was much happier being a saint with a small ‘s.’ She simply went about trying to fulfill a need (the education of girls), as she saw it. That is what we all should be doing: endeavoring to make our immediate surroundings a better place simply by how we live our own lives.”
Hudson, 92, set off on her own winding vocational journey, one that included both religious life and matrimony. She was a Benedictine sister with the St. Scholastica community for 30 years, teaching in elementary schools in several states until she felt called to move on.
“I left the Benedictines because I wanted a closer connection to ‘the people,’” Hudson explained. “I felt I could do more by living outside the convent, mingling with the people and experiencing, firsthand, their daily struggles, than I could in an enclosed life … even though the Benedictines were an active order. They had schools, hospitals, a mission in Chile, were ‘with the people’ but always returned to the comforts of the institution. I wanted to be ‘out there’ on the front line. From my earliest years, the missionary lifestyle had appealed to me.”
The Benedictines are a papal order, Hudson added, and in 1983 when she left, a dispensation from religious life could only be obtained from Rome due to intent to marry. The unexpected occurred, and Hudson was married in the ensuing years.
“My husband died 20 years later,” she said. “I have led a lot of lives: daughter, student, Sister/nun, married, widowed and now that of an elder.”
Mother Marie Rose is most remembered in Canada and in parts of the U.S. where her congregation ministered, including in Duluth, where her order taught at St. Jean’s in the 1940s to 1960s, but also in the Diocese of Superior. Hudson’s family donated a first-class relic – a tiny fragment of her bone – for the reliquary in front of the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the King, Superior, during the cathedral renovation.
Hudson has also tried to maintain her ancestor’s legacy in their family.
“My nieces and nephews are all aware of Mother Marie Rose, know her story, and share it on occasion. I don’t think the other cousins (my generation) made the story well known to their children. I’m probably the only one who keeps it alive in the family,” she said. “The younger generations are so far removed from Mother Marie Rose.”
When Hudson shares her great-great-great aunt’s story, as she did for this article, she emphasizes the nun’s everyday goodness.
“I prefer my saints to be the ‘ordinary, run-of-the-mill’ variety, the people you meet every day of your life, who are striving, by their kindness, compassion to enable others to know they are special, loved by God,” she concluded. “Like Dorothy Day did. Mother Marie Rose lived that way, too.”
Bl. Marie Rose Durocher (snjm.org)
