How two 19th-century Blesseds truly read the “signs of the times”

Two Blesseds appear on national liturgical calendars this week: Blessed Marie-Rose Durocher this past Sunday, October 6, in Canada and Blessed Angela Truszkowska on Thursday, October 10, in Poland. Both women deserve our attention.

Both women lived in the 19th-century and both were foundresses of religious congregations. Both came from relatively more secure homes and both, as a result of childhood illnesses, benefitted from the tutoring we would today call homeschooling.

Bl. Marie-Rose was born Eulalie Mélanie Durocher in southern Québec in 1811. Like Truszkowska, she came from a pious family: three brothers of the 11 children were priests. Having attended two boarding schools (in early 19th-century Québec this was not so much a sign of affluence as of the lack of schools), she intended to enter religious life. but her health was deemed too poor to finish school. So, she returned home. With the death of her mother shortly afterwards, she assumed domestic responsibilities for her family and, a year later, the family moved closer to her brother, who was a priest in a Montréal suburb, Belœil.

It was in Belœil that Durocher became aware of the shortage of schools and teachers in Québec. The situation of illiteracy was especially pronounced among girls. But how to address it?

There were plans to bring a teaching congregation from France, but they fell through (and with it, Durocher’s hope to join the group). She then came under the influence of Fr. Jean-Marie Allard, an Oblate (the Oblates did yeoman work in building up the Church in Canada) who served as her spiritual director, guided her, and eventually helped her and Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montréal to collaborate on the founding of a new religious congregation, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1843 in Longueuil, Québec.

Durocher was always of fragile health and died only six years into religious life, at age 38 on her birthday, October 6, in 1849. But by that time, her congregation was already established and flourishing. It exists [ https://snjm.org/en/ ] to this day, primarily in Canada but with a province in Lesotho.

Bl. Angela Truszkowska was born in 1825 in that part of Poland then under Russian rule. She, too, came from a religious but financially stable family (father was a judge). Poland, which had been chopped up by its Austrian, Prussian, and Russian neighbors, suffered both political repression and socio-economic retardation because of the partitioners’ exploitive policies. Epidemics occasionally spread. Farmers were impoverished. Many children were orphaned.

Truszkowska was sensitive to what was going on around her and, while she had considered entering cloistered religious life, her contact with the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Warsaw turned her towards work with poor women and children in the former capital. She also came under the spiritual direction of Capuchin Honorat Kozminski and became a Third Order Franciscan, imbibing the spirituality of St. Francis.

It was at this time that she began gathering homeless women and poor children in Warsaw in two rooms she rented to provide care for their spiritual and temporal needs. Her “Institute” would eventually to her and her cousin committing themselves to an order Angela founded under the patronage of the 16^th century Capuchin Felix of Cantalice. The Felicians [https://www.felician.org/ ] were born in 1855.

Her community grew in Poland and, by 1874, arrived in Wisconsin to tend the first of hundreds of schools being built by the rapidly expanding Polish American community, whose first heyday of North America bound mass immigration (the “emigracja za chlebem,” the “emigration for bread”) took place from 1870-1920. Mother Angela herself was involved in dispatching five Felicians to Pulaski, Wisconsin for that initial venture. She died in 1899. The Felicians also still exist although, in recent years, they have reduced their eight provinces in North America to one.

Why do these women deserve our attention, apart from their historical impact on the Church in the United States and Canada?

First, they recognized their vocation when they were laywomen. Both Durocher and Truszkowska eventually founded religious congregations. But they did not start out to make ecclesiastical history. They responded in their actual circumstances to obvious needs with concrete help: Truszkowska at first with her “Institute,” Durocher by wanting to join an existing French order to teach Québec children. Only when they discovered that the extant and available ecclesiastical resources were inadequate did they act to fill in the gap by their founding efforts.

In other words, both women presaged what Vatican II reminds us of clearly: the vocation of the layperson. Both women recognized the needs of their times when they were lay women and responded accordingly by giving their lives, in each case, as religious. It was what they discerned as lay persons that crystallized their decisions to enter religious life. Tellingly, both women also recognized that their mission was to bring people, including themselves, through their schooling and social ministries, to the altar, not to be on the altar.

Second, they read the signs of the times. In this, they again anticipated Vatican II, which called on Catholics not to adapt to the “world” but to “read the signs of the times,” valuing and purifying what was good in the world while also trying to fix what was lacking or bad in it. Durocher was not unique in recognizing the need for education in Québec: Marie-Anne Blondin, founder of the Sisters of St. Anne, also recognized the problem of illiteracy in French Canada and found support in Bishop Bourget to address it in roughly the same era. Truszkowska was not alone in recognizing the dire situation of women and children in 19th-century partitioned Poland: Bl. Edmund Bojanowski also worked with that cohort in those times and founded several congregations of female religious to continue that mission.

The point is that the people we remember in the Church today are those who not only read but responded to the signs of the times as the signs of what God wanted them to do in their era and their lives to advance His Kingdom. They did not just merely “accompany” their era; they made it better, which, obviously, first requires a judgment upon the weal and woes of their times.

Third, their response to the demands of their times was in the midst of a complicated socio-political dynamic whose influence figured into their “reading” of the times without dominating it. Theirs was not the simplistic analysis of “liberation theology” that imagines “structural reform” as accelerating the Second Coming. Truszkowska was acutely aware that one reason for the poverty of 19th-century Poland was its political suppression as an independent state: three foreign powers occupied it and did their best to erase its national identity, language, and culture. Durocher was acutely aware that one reason for the educational backwardness of Québec was that the British (and probably many Americans) regarded it as a fifth column of anti-English sentiment best kept stupid and contained.

Truszkowska was not going to drive the Russians out of Kalisz and Warsaw; Durocher was not going to change Québec’s status in Longueuil. Neither planned to. Each tackled the concrete problems of real persons within the realm of the possible in their circumstances aware, as our Lord reminds us, “the poor you will have with you always” (Mt 26:11).

In both instances—Poland and Québec—it was the Church that protected its children and their culture. In partitioned Poland, the Church was the one public institution where one could be and speak Polish. In Québec, the Church was the mainstay of Francophone language and culture. No doubt, there will be objections that the Church “ghettoized” those communities, closing them in on themselves in order to maintain ecclesiastical moral strictures that stifled cultural growth and creativity.

Those who make such objections generally miss three things:

• They don’t tell us what other institutions existed, much less lifted a finger, to address the need the Church did.
• They don’t tell us why it should have been the Church’s responsibility to promote a vision of culture sanitized of the religious. (Do the woke always insist on equal time for a religious vision?)
• Finally, they don’t usually mention that, in the absence of other protective institutions, it was usually the Church that also sheltered those dissidents who, once things are safe and even more so when they have power, bite the hand that protected them, accusing it of imposing a “confessional state” or undermining “laïcité.” Rarely do they want to admit that it’s not a question of “freedom” or “values” as much as the desire to usurp the role of other institutions like the Church to define (indeed, impose) the axiological norms of a given society. They want God’s Power–without God or even competition from Him.

Durocher and Truszkowska arguably had a richer vision of culture because the education they strove to give their charges offered an integral vision of the human person, one that accounted for his vocation rather than simply just taught him one. They were not just offering social benefits with a religious topping: they saw what they were doing as of one piece. And if you think this is just an historical reflection on two 19th-century women, think again: their pedagogical vision is very much at odds and in contention with the modern world’s, which likewise sees the classroom as the venue to shape the minds and “values” of the young, except that it wants to do that uncompetitively and maybe even clandestinely.

In the United States, that has taken the form of the “public school” as a nominally agnostic institution that “educates” without addressing the ultimate meaning or purpose of human life. Canada has enjoyed a different educational trajectory, in part because the provinces have kept the federal snout out of school matters and in part because Canadian constitutionalism traditionally afforded public protection to religiously affiliated schools and school systems.

Farney and Banack’s Faith, Rights, and Choice provides a balanced view of this problem historically, although it seeks to parcel out the motives behind why parents chose non-public schools. For them it was at first faith; then in pluralistic world, rights to cultural identity; finally, in a world of cacophonous “values,” individual “choice” about schooling. The authors detail how, in the past 30 years, there have been conscious efforts to dismantle religiously-based school systems in various Canadian provinces. More pointedly, the subtitle of Robert Crocker’s Religion and Schooling in Canada, tellingly reveals the end goal they deem desirable: “the long road to separation of church and state.” Of course, the illustration on the cover is of kids jumping rope on a school playground under the gaze of three nuns.

In Poland, the new Tusk Government has decided to roil a problem that has sat in the craw of Polish secularists since 1990: the presence of religious education in public schools. Secularizers have been ballistic ever since the Polish government, just after the fall of communism, permitted religious instruction on public school premises. The instruction is voluntary and can be replaced by “ethics” but, of course, to secularizers any presence of religion is automatically a pandemic contagion threatening children. It’s not unlike the current effort in Québec to teach “ethics” sanitized of religious influence—but thoroughly permeated with liberal “values.”

So, even though they were 19th-century women, Durocher and Truszkowska recognized the stakes: addressing human needs, including social needs like education, with or without God. That significance remains, even if both women seem merely footnotes on national liturgical calendars in early October.