Canada was one diocese from coast to coast during the first eight years of Marie-Rose Duroche’s life. Its half-million Catholics had received civil and religious liberty from the English only forty-four years before. When Marie-Rose was twenty-nine, Bishop Ignace Bourget became bishop of Montreal. He would be a decisive influence in her life.
He faced a shortage of priests and sisters and a rural population that had been largely deprived of education. Like his counterparts in the United States, he scoured Europe for help and himself founded four communities, one of which was the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Its first sister and reluctant co-foundress was Marie-Rose.
She was born in a little village near Montreal in 1811, the tenth of eleven children. She had a good education, was something of a tomboy, rode a horse named Caesar and could have married well. At sixteen she felt the desire to become a religious but was forced to abandon the idea because of her weak constitution. At eighteen, when her mother died, her priest brother invited her and her father to come to his parish in Beloeil, not far from Montreal. For thirteen years she served as housekeeper, hostess and parish worker. She became well known for her graciousness, courtesy, leadership and tact; she was, in fact, called “the saint of Beloeil.” Perhaps she was too tactful during two years when her brother treated her coldly.
As a young woman she had hoped there would someday be a community of teaching sisters in every parish, never thinking she would found one. But her spiritual director, Father Pierre Telmon, O.M.I., after thoroughly (and severely) leading her in the spiritual life, urged her to found a community herself. Bishop Bourget concurred, but Marie shrank from the prospect. She was in poor health and her father and her brother needed her.
She finally agreed and, with two friends, Melodie Dufresne and Henriette Cere, entered a little home in Longueuil, across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal. With them were 13 young girls already assembled for boarding school. Longueuil became successively her Bethlehem, Nazareth and Gethsemani. She was thirty-two and would live only six more years—years filled with poverty, trials, sickness and slander. The qualities she had nurtured in her “hidden” life came forward—a strong will, intelligence and common sense, great inner courage and yet a great deference to directors. Thus was born an international congregation of women religious dedicated to education in the faith.
She was severe with herself and by today’s standards quite strict with her sisters. Beneath it all, of course, was an unshakable love of her crucified Savior.
On her deathbed the prayers most frequently on her lips were “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Sweet Jesus, I love you. Jesus, be to me Jesus!” Before she died, she smiled and said to the sister with her, “Your prayers are keeping me here—let me go.”
She was beatified in 1982.