The Catholic Patriotic Minute #17: Saint Theodora
Catholics For Catholics Special Edition | October 27th, 2025
Saint Theodora: A French-American Saint
Canonized in October of 2006, Saint Theodora answered God’s callings for her to religious life, to educate children, and even to move to the United States, in spite of her cross of severe chronic illness. Amongst her many reflections in her journal, one specifically speaks to how Saint Theodora lived. She wrote, “[r]eflect seriously on what you desire to do; above all pray much that our dear Lord may make known to you what [God] wishes you to do.”
On October 2, 1798, Anne-Therese Guerin was born in Brittany, France, in the village Etables-sur-Mer. The Guerin family lived in a cottage near the sea. As a child, Anne-Therese would often pray while sitting by the sea, a place where she discovered God’s wishes for her. At the age of ten, she told her priest that she felt called to religious life on the day she received her First Communion.
However, deaths in her family prevented Anne-Therese from entering an order immediately as a young woman. Both of her brothers died from two separate house fires. When Anne-Therese was fifteen, her father, a French naval officer, was travelling home with his wages from the previous three years. Bandits robbed and murdered him, leaving Anne-Therese fatherless and the Guerin family financially unstable.
Because her mother became consumed with sorrow, Anne-Therese became the head of the family, requiring her to look after their home and her mother, teaching her sister, and working in a factory or as a seamstress to bring money home. When she was twenty, Anne-Therese asked her mother if she could enter religious life, but her mother asked her not to. Anne-Therese waited till she was twenty-five, when her mother finally gave her approval.
Anne-Therese entered the Sisters of Providence at Ruillé sur-Loir on August 18, 1823, becoming Sister St. Theodore. Although she was finally joyous at this new stage she dreamed of living since she was ten, Sister St. Theodore became extremely sick from a chronic illness. Her fellow sister, Sister Mary Cecilia Bailly, recounted later that she was given a remedy that saved her life but also forever damaged her digestive organs.
She wrote of Sister St. Theodore, “From that period she suffered continually from the food she took. The lightest diet and in small quantities was her only nourishment. It [w]as a subject of astonishment to those who knew her that she could live with so little sustenance. She seldom passed a year without having a severe illness; three times she was on the point of death and received the last Sacraments.”
The Sisters of Providence specifically served the poor, sick, and uneducated, and so Sister St. Theodore began teaching six months into her formation. In 1826, she was made Superior of a demanding mission to bring academic and religious instruction to Rennes, a city where most people were poverty-stricken, miserable, and without a church largely due to the French Revolution. The Sisters of Providence, who served the people of Rennes the four years before Mother Theodore’s arrival, remained unsuccessful. They would often cry before class, as the children could not be disciplined and certainly not taught.
The sisters were convinced that their new Mother Theodore would also break down in front of the unruly children. Even though the students mocked and laughed at Mother Theodore during her first day teaching, she appeared untroubled and composed. The next day, when the children started dancing in class, she took the switch off the wall and broke it into pieces. The children fell silent out of shock. She won them over. “Love the children first, and then teach them” was Mother Theodore’s motto, and she was able to lead the children in their studies and bring hope to Rennes for the next nine years.
Sister St. Theodore was sent to a mission in Soulaines in 1834, and for the next six years she taught and studied medicine alongside a doctor. In 1839, in response to the Bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, asking for a group of sisters to teach the pioneer children, the Sisters of Providence superiors asked for volunteers. Although Sister St. Theodore did not volunteer because of her illness, her superior explained that they could not send sisters overseas without her. Her superior was confident the mission would only be successful if Sister St. Theodore led it. After some prayer, Sister St. Theodore obeyed.
Mother Theodore and five sisters left France for the United States on July 12, 1840, and landed in New York City a few months later. She wrote in her journal, “On the eighth of September, fifteen years ago, the day when for the first time we received Our Divine Savior in this land of America, at that very moment, America ceased to be for me a stranger-land. It became the land of my adoption.” The sisters completed the journey to their new home in Indiana by October 22.
They lived in a small two-room house with a farming family in the woods, instead of the partially-built home promised for them. Mother Theodore resolved the situation by offering to purchase the two-room home from the farming family, so that the sisters could live there and the newly-built house could be used as a school. After a difficult winter, on July 4, 1841, the sisters began their first school, which remains today as Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. From 1841 to 1852, this academy was the only Catholic boarding school for girls in Indiana.
Mother Theodore had a few unwelcome challenges during her time in Indiana. The chaplain and bishop both attempted to usurp Mother Theodore’s leadership of the congregation. She even endured a temporary excommunication from the bishop because he wanted to impose changes to the congregation that would interfere with their Rule of Life and she refused to comply. The sisters were going to escape this situation with Mother Theodore by moving to another state, but shortly thereafter Mother Theodore was welcomed back by the bishop’s successor. Mother Theodore’s mission never wavered. She founded “parish schools at Jasper, St. Peter’s, Vincennes, Madison, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Lanesville, Columbus and Terre Haute, [Indiana], and St. Francisville, [Illinois], along with two orphanages in Vincennes” before her last days. She passed away on May 14, 1856, after living more than half her life sick with chronic illness.
Fifty years later, the first bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis requested that her body be exhumed, after learning of her life of devout prayer and service. Upon finding out that her body was perfectly intact, the bishop opened the Cause for Canonization for Mother Theodore. Once two of the reported miracles involving her intercession were approved, Saint Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Theodore on October 25, 1998. On October 15, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI canonized her, making Saint Theodora the eighth American saint.
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