Br. Polycarpus of Mary

Anthony Rosseau was born on Christmas Eve of 1819 at Saint Isidore, Canada, the son of Jean Baptiste and Theresa Belanger Rosseau. He saw two of his brothers become priests and one of his sisters become a nun while he taught school in Canada. He entered the Montreal Novitiate at age thirty on September 23, 1849. In November of that same year he received his religious name and the habit of the Brothers. He immediately began his teaching career in January in New York. He moved to Detroit in 1852 and to Troy, New York, in 1854. In 1862 he was called to St. Louis to be Director of the orphanage established by Archbishop Kenrick in the former seminary building which later (in 1866) became the Carondelet Novitiate. He served there until 1866 when he was assigned to the orphanage at Bridgeport in Chicago as Director. He returned to St. Louis in March of 1868 as infirmarian and was assigned to Carondelet where he remained until 1875 when he was assigned to Glencoe, Missouri. In 1875 he became procurer at Bridgeport in Chicago in 1877. He returned to Glencoe in 1879 where he served as Sub-Director and "econome" until he was transferred to the orphanage at Feehanville in 1885. He returned to Glencoe in 1889 for the last time to the infirmary there, afflicted by asthma. He died on February 9, 1890, at age seventy-one and in his forty-first year as a De La Salle Christian Brother. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery at Glencoe, Missouri.