Diocese of Lafayette
Author shares insights on a frontier saint with students
Author Julie Young signs copies of her book, A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guerin, after her presentation at CC. (Photo by Kevin Cullen)
By Kevin Cullen (The Catholic Moment)
LAFAYETTE — St. Theodore Guerin died in 1856, but to Julie Young, she’s alive — a special friend who’s holy, plucky, intelligent and fun.
“The fact that she was able to establish 10 schools was a tribute to her abilities,” said Young, an Indianapolis-based freelance writer who in 2007 wrote A Belief in Providence: A Life of Saint Theodora Guerin, a 200-page biography for younger readers. She spoke to students at Central Catholic Junior-Senior High School, St. Boniface Middle School and St. Lawrence Elementary School on Feb. 26.
“I didn’t know how hard it must have been for St. Theodore Guerin,” said Cody Schrader, a ninth-grader at Central Catholic. “I’ll probably want to read about it.” “I’m glad to see women represented in the young person’s biography series,” said CC history teacher Mary Anthrop, who has a special interest in Indiana history.
The book was commissioned by the Indiana Historical Society Press. Anthrop hasn’t read it yet, but she speculated that it was “a good introduction to a woman of stature.” St. Theodore Guerin left France in 1840 to found Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, near Terre Haute, and her congregation, the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. She endured anti-Catholic prejudice, primitive conditions, disease and arson fires to bring Catholic education to frontier Indiana.
Young told the CC students that she didn’t know anything about the future saint until she enrolled at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in 2002. At that time, she was 30, the mother of two, and eager to earn a degree in professional writing through an Internet-based program. While inside the Church of the Immaculate Conception on campus, she spotted the tomb of the college founder. There, Young recalled, she and then-Blessed Mother Theodore struck a deal.
“I said, ‘I’m not getting any younger. If you get me through my education, and not in 100 years, I’ll make it up to you.’ Silly me — I thought it would be a check,” said Young, who graduated in three years. Her “payback” she told the Central Catholic students, was the biography. She persuaded the Indiana Historical Society Press to let her write it.
Her book was the first Guerin biography written in recent times, and the only one that includes information on St. Theodore Guerin’s sainthood. Young flew to Rome in October 2006 to witness the canonization and shake hands with Pope Benedict XVI. She showed the students several slides from that trip. Young has done freelance work for various magazines and several newspapers, including The Catholic Moment. She also teaches creative writing and freelance writing at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis.
St. Theodore Guerin, she said, is an important figure to the Catholic Church, and to the state of Indiana. “She didn’t volunteer (to come to Indiana),” Young said. “Her mother superior said, ‘We believe in you.’ She was in poor health, but she said, ‘OK, I’ll go.’”
France was one of the most advanced nations in the world. Leaving it for southern Indiana was akin to “traveling to another planet,” she said. “There is no way to describe what life in Indiana was like.” It took Mother Theodore 60 days to cross the Atlantic and make the long trip to the heavily wooded, sparsely settled Terre Haute area. When she finally got there, she stepped out of her stagecoach and found nothing.
“There wasn’t a farmhouse in sight,” Young said. “Every winter, she was beside death’s door.” “It is astonishing,” Mother Theodore conceded, “that this remote solitude has been chosen for a novitiate and especially for an academy. All appearances are against it.”
She and five other nuns overcame severe weather, crop failures, cholera, smallpox, locusts, floods and culture shock to help the poor, treat the sick, and establish the Catholic women’s college, 10 schools and two orphanages. In the process, the congregation grew from six sisters and four postulants in 1840 to 67 professed members, nine novices and seven postulants by the time of her death in 1856.
Once, following a run-in with the local bishop, Mother Theodore was locked into a room and told she could no longer serve as a religious sister. Young said that as she read through old letters and journals, she felt a kinship growing.
“She was real. ... She was very human,” she said. “She wasn’t perfect; she didn’t always get it right.” Young said she was delighted by one passage, in which Mother Theodore talked about a bloody battle with a ferocious enemy … mosquitoes.
She also was touched by Mother Theodore’s holiness, dedication and resourcefulness. “We must put our faith in providence, which, so far, has never abandoned us,” St. Theodore Guerin once wrote.
“She really does have something to offer the young, the old, whoever,” Young said. “She is truly a Hoosier, in every sense of the word.”
(Go to the website of The Catholic Moment) †