INDIANAPOLIS — State officials are honoring Mother Theodore Guerin, a 19th-century Roman Catholic nun who is to be named a saint, by hanging her portrait in the governor's office.
Gov. Mitch Daniels called it a tribute to a woman "who was brave, selfless and gave her life of service to others." At a Vatican ceremony Oct. 15, Guerin will become the first person from Indiana and the eighth from the United States to be canonized in the Catholic Church.
Guerin was a French nun who left her homeland in 1840 for the then-frontier state of Indiana, and within a year founded the Sisters of Providence Academy — now known as St. Mary-of-the-Woods College — near Terre Haute. She died in 1856.
St. Mary-of-the-Woods is the oldest Catholic liberal arts college for women in the United States, and under Guerin's leadership, the schools were expanded into Illinois, Massachusetts and California. Several members of the congregation near Terre Haute attended the July 21 portrait hanging.
Pope John Paul II had accepted a nun's recovery from cancer as a miracle attributed to Guerin. One miracle is needed for beatification, and Guerin was beatified in 1998.
Earlier this year, Pope Benedict XVI approved a second miracle — the regaining of eyesight by an employee at the order's mother house — as the result of Guerin's intercession.
It takes two miracles to move forward on the path to sainthood. Both of the healings took place after prayers to Guerin long after her death.