While the restored Visitandine community was floundering, in northern France,
Madeleine-Sophie Barat founded the new
Society of the Sacred Heart—whose members were long known as the "Madames of the Sacred Heart" from their use of that title, due to the hostility to religious communities which lingered in post-Revolutionary France. She wanted to establish a new foundation in Grenoble. Encouraged by her mentor, the Jesuit priest, Joseph Varin, to meet Duchesne in 1804, she traveled there. Duchesne accepted Barat's offer to merge the Visitation community into the Society of the Sacred Heart. The new congregation had a similar religious mission as that of the Visitandines, educating young women, but without being an
enclosed religious order. The two women became immediate and lifelong friends.
Missionary in America During her childhood, Duchesne had heard many stories in her
parish church from missionary priests of life in
Louisiana, founded as a colony of
New France, and had long felt a desire to serve the
Native Americans who lived there. In 1817,
Louis DuBourg,
Bishop of the
Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, visited the convent in Paris. Bishop DuBourg was looking for a congregation of educators to help him evangelize the Indian and French children of his diocese. After meeting him, Duchesne, who had never lost her desire to serve as a missionary, begged permission from Barat to serve in the bishop's diocese.
Missouri In 1818, with Barat's blessing, Duchesne headed out to the United States with four other Sisters of the Society. After ten weeks at sea, they arrived in
New Orleans. To their shock, however, the bishop had made no provisions for housing them. After they had rested briefly with the
Ursuline nuns, they took advantage of the newly established
steamboat service up the
Mississippi River to travel to
St. Louis, and finally settled in
St. Charles, in what was then the
Missouri Territory, a journey of seven weeks. She was later to describe the location as
"the remotest village in the U.S."; nonetheless the community 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, The following year DuBourg moved the community across the river to the town of
Florissant, Missouri, where they opened a school and a
novitiate. The United States had
purchased the area from France only fifteen years earlier, and settlers, many poor but others with money and slaves, were streaming in from the East. Their new foundation faced many struggles, including lack of funds, inadequate housing, hunger, and freezing weather, and the Sisters struggled to learn English. By 1828, the Society's first five members in America had grown to six communities, operating several schools. Other foundations in
Louisiana followed: at
Grand Coteau, near Opelousas, at
Natchitoches, at
Baton Rouge, at
New Orleans, and at
Convent, Louisiana. In 1826
Pope Leo XII, through a
decretum laudis, formally approved the Society of the Sacred Heart, recognizing their work. The Jesuits acquired the Sisters' former school property in St. Charles in 1828, where they built a parish church, and asked the Sisters to returnto that same log cabin where they had lived because it was still the biggest house in townand conduct the parish school.
Kansas In 1841, Jesuit priest
Pierre-Jean De Smet asked the Sisters to join the Jesuits in a new mission with the
Potawatomi tribe in eastern Kansas, along
Sugar Creek, where
Christian Hoecken was taking charge. At age seventy-one, Duchesne was not among those initially selected for the trip.
Peter Verhaegen insisted, "She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us." Since Duchesne was unable to master their language, she could not teach, so she would spend long periods in prayer. The children named her
Quahkahkanumad, which translates as
Woman Who Prays Always. == Slaveholding ==