10/3/2013 - Thursday of 26th week in Ordinary Time - Luke 10:1-12

      Jesus sends his disciples out into the world in order to spread his Good News.  He tells them that the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few, so the master sends the laborers out to the harvest.  The saint we celebrate today is a saint who brought the Good News to America in middle of the 19^th century, when a lot of the country was still a wilderness being settled immigrants from Europe. In 1839, the Bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, requested priests and nuns from Europe to help minister to the immigrants arriving in his diocese, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and France. Mother Theodore arrived from France and founded a new order of sisters in Indiana and founded an academy for girls called Saint Mary-of-the-Woods.  Her order helped found schools in many parishes throughout Indiana.  Mother Theodore died in 1857, but even today, the order she founded has more than 400 members ministering in different parts of the world. I love learning about the different members of our community of saints.  They have so much to teach us by the way they lived their faith.  Missionaries like Mother Theodore who traveled far away from their home countries for their love of the Gospel still speak loudly to us many years after they lived here on earth.  We give thanks to Mother Theodore today for the contributions she and so many missionary sisters brought to our faith.