Sister Benigna Solinsky, OSF

August 25, 1906 – September 1, 1973

Sister M. Benigna (Margaret) Solinsky, a member of the School Sisters of St. Francis, died on September 1, 1973, at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa. She was 67 and her in her 50th year of religious life.

She was born to John and Marie (Borza) Skalicky on August 25, 1906, in the North Side section of Pittsburgh. Margaret entered the community in 1922 from St. Gabriel on Pittsburgh’s North Side and received the name Sister Benigna. She professed first vows in 1923 and final vows in 1932.

Sister Benigna held a bachelor’s degree in education from Villa Maria College in Erie, Pa., and certificate in music from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

Over five decades in active ministry, Sister taught at Catholic grade schools in the Pennsylvania towns of Tarentum, McKees Rocks, Barnesboro, New Castle, Northampton, Erie, Ambridge and Charleroi, as well as in Lorain, Ohio; and in the New Jersey towns of Clifton, Carteret and Phillipsburg. She also served as the organist in nearly all of the parishes where she taught. In the 1950s and 1960s, she ministered at St. Francis Retreat House in Pittsburgh. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she returned to the Mount Assisi motherhouse, where she served as portress and as personal secretary to Mother Anselma Drab.

Sister Benigna is remembered for her beautiful sense of humor, her ever-willing spirit, and for being charitable and foregiving. During her time as portress, she greeted all who visited the motherhouse with her kind and cheerful smile and offered her full attention to whoever she spoke. Her Sisters in community also recall her sense of gratitude, her prayerful ways, and her reverence for all things of God.

Sister is buried in St. Francis Cemetery at Mt. Assisi Place in Pittsburgh, Pa.