Sister M. Therese Sedlock

july 18, 1931 - july 15, 2004

Sister Mary Therese (Anne Marie) Sedlock, a member of the School Sisters of St. Francis, died on July 15, 2004, in Black Canyon City, Ariz. She was in her 55th year of religious life and just days shy of her 73rd birthday.

Sister entered the community in 1949, professing first vows in 1950 and final vows in 1955. She held a bachelor’s degree in music from Mount Mercy College (now Carlow University) in Pittsburgh, Pa.; a master’s degree in music education from Duquesne University, also in Pittsburgh; and a master’s degree in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas.

Sister Therese taught in Catholic grade schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, before settling in for an extended tenure teaching music, English and religion at the former Mount Assisi Academy in Pittsburgh. She also taught for several years at the former St. Francis Academy in San Antonio, and served as youth ministry coordinator for the Archdiocese of San Antonio in the 1970s.

Sister served as a provincial councilor of the Pittsburgh Province from 1993 to 1997, and contributed to our provincial chapters over the years as a chairperson, secretary and delegate. In her later years of ministry, Sister Therese dedicated herself to contemplative prayer, channeling her commitment to prayer into establishment of the Our Lady of Solitude houses of prayer in Phoenix and Black Canyon City, Ariz.

“If you keep your eyes open expectantly every day for great and wonderful things to happen, it is astonishing that great and wonderful things will happen,” one Sister wrote after Sister Therese’s death. “Therese had deep faith, abiding hope and Christ-like love. That is how Our Lady of Solitude House of Prayer came to be.”

A fan of fireworks, football games, ice cream and good movies, Sister is remembered as a prolific writer and a deeply spiritual woman of prayer, serving as inspiration for at least one other Sister to pursue her vocation. “When you asked her for prayers, you knew she would pray intensely for what you wanted her to ask of God and, in some way, God heard her prayers of supplication,” one Sister recalls.

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