On January 15, the Villa Duchesne sophomore class visited the United States – Canada Province Archives to learn more about their school’s history. Villa Duchesne has a house system, in which students are grouped into Maisons. Each Maison is named for an RSCJ patron: Madeleine Sophie Barat; Rose Philippine Duchesne; Janet Stuart; and Mamie Jenkins. The archives put out a display featuring a number of artifacts and documents for each patron.
Among those treasures featured:
- In honor of the centennial of Madeleine Sophie Barat’s canonization in 1925, an original invitation to the Canonization at St. Peter’s in Rome.
- A beautiful letter from Philippine to a Grand Coteau Student, Félicie Chrétien, 1830
- Several examples of Janet Stuart’s writing of fiction, her poems and plays
- A set of articles regarding Mamie Jenkins’s guitar classes at Villa Duchesne in the 1970s
Some of the students also had relatives who were Religious of the Sacred Heart, and so we were able to pull the files on those individuals for them. Genealogy is a frequent request of the staff at the archives, so it’s always a joy to make those connections.
On January 23, Villa’s senior class visited to learn more about the Society’s spirituality and history. We had a chance to dive more deeply into the experience of past and present Sacred Heart students. We viewed clips of Life at the Sacred Heart, a film from the early 1960s profiling life at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at El Cajon, California. Students were particularly enamored of the school uniforms from the 1940s.
The students were accompanied by Villa teachers Jen MacArthur and John Powell. It was a particular pleasure to see these seniors, as they had first visited as sophomores two years ago, when Villa was beginning regular visits to the archives.
