Sister Sheila Anne Smith, 81, an Ursuline Sister of Mount Saint Joseph, died Saturday, July 5, 2025, at Mount Saint Joseph, in her 63rd year of religious life. She was a native of Butler, Pa., but raised in Farmington, N.M.

Sister Sheila Anne spent 35 years serving in the Southwest, where she had a special fondness for serving Native Americans. She was a gifted writer and tutor. She earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Brescia College in 1966.

She taught at St. Catherine School, New Haven, Ky. (1966-72), Our Lady of Mercy School, Hodgenville, Ky. (1972-73) and Lourdes Elementary School, Nebraska City, Neb. (1973-76). She served in health care at Maple Mount (1976-79). She then began serving in the Southwest, teaching at St. Joseph School, San Fidel, N.M. (1979-80) and St. Anthony School, Zuni, N.M. (1980-82). She was religious education coordinator at St. Charles Borromeo School, Albuquerque, N.M. (1982-85). She spent the next seven years in Arizona, serving in the Desert House of Prayer, St. Michael (1985-86), as a catechist at Saint Anne Mission, Klageton (1986-87), as a parish minister at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, Greasewood (1987-92), and director of religious education at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, Holbrook (1992). She returned to Albuquerque to serve in the Dominican Retreat House (1993-94), then worked as a private tutor (1994-2014), writer and consultant for Loyola Press (1994-2010). She moved to Maple Mount in 2014, serving as assistant to the archivist (2014-16), then crocheting filter covers for Water With Blessings (2016-23).

Survivors include the members of her religious community; sisters Barbara Kavanagh and Sheila Watt, both of San Andreas, Calif., Connie Deaver and Marianne Waage, both of Hayward, Calif.; nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents, Arthur and Ruth Smith; and a brother, Arthur Richard Smith.

The funeral Mass will be at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, July 15, at Mount Saint Joseph, where visitation will begin Monday at 4:30 p.m., with a wake service following at 6:30 p.m.

Glenn Funeral Home and Crematory, Owensboro, is handling arrangements.

Donations in memory of Sister Sheila Anne may be made to the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, 8001 Cummings Road, Maple Mount, KY 42356.

Wake Reflection

By Sister Sharon Sullivan

Congregational Leader

July 14, 2025

On Saturday, July 5^th, 2025, my evening prayer began with the refrain from Psalm 48:

Great is the Lord and highly to be praised in the city of our God, whose holy mountain rises in beauty, the joy of all the earth.

What a fitting refrain to accompany Sister Sheila Anne Smith as she celebrated her birth into heaven that very night. For Sister Sheila spent her life giving praise and finding countless opportunities for its joyful expression – especially in the mountains and in all aspects of the earth, of the universe, which surrounded her.

As we celebrate her life of praise, we’ll let Sister Sheila Anne’s own words describe how Judith Ann Smith (Judy) came to be the eldest daughter in the Arthur and Ruth Smith family. “I owe my existence to World War II. [Early in 1941, at a dance,] Ruth Maley [from Massachusetts], a secretary in Washington, D.C., met Sergeant Arthur Smith, a New Mexico farm boy stationed there in D.C. When the attack on Pearl Harbor created a sense of urgency, Ruth and Art married twenty days later, immediately after Advent.”

Sister Sheila continued: “A year and a half later [on Tuesday, July 20, 1943], I was born [in an Army hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania]. I was baptized [three weeks later by a U.S. Army Chaplain on Friday], August 13, in Deshon Army Hospital’s chapel, to the tune of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as the band played proudly in the adjacent auditorium!”

And more: “I was eight months old when Dad went overseas. Mom and I stayed first with her parents in Massachusetts; then we took a train to New Mexico to live with Dad’s parents on their pinto bean farm at Mountainair. When Dad returned, we moved to a farm adjoining Grandpa’s.”

“I was an only child until after Dad got home from the war. But by the time I graduated from high school, I had four sisters and a brother.” Yes, Judy was joined by Barbara, Sheila, Connie, Rick, and Marianne, completing the Smith family. And to you, Sister Sheila Anne’s sisters, her brothers-in-law – Jim and Gordon, and nieces and nephews we extend our sympathy for your loss and we offer our prayers, for we know that the love of her family was so important to Sister Sheila Anne.

Sister Sheila did not write much about her childhood years, but we know that Judy began her formal education in 1949 at Mountainair Elementary School, in Mountainair, New Mexico. Sister Sheila Anne explained, “But Farmington was in an economic boom. As I was starting third grade, we moved to Farmington, where I attended ‘catechism,’ met the Ursuline Sisters, received penance, Eucharist, and made Confirmation [on May 4, 1952, at Sacred Heart Church]. In the fourth grade I finally entered [Saint Thomas, the] Catholic school.”

Judy graduated from Saint Thomas in 1957, and the following year became a boarder at Sacred Heart Academy in Waterflow. For a few months in 1958, her family moved to Tacoma, Washington, but it was way too wet. They returned home to Farmington, and Judy returned to Sacred Heart Academy, graduating May 26, 1961.

Sister Sheila later reflected, “I can’t trace my attraction to religious life to anything specific; there were probably many factors involved. In third grade, I fought going to Mass; by the end of eighth grade, I went to Mass daily.” Even then, she recalled that at the end of the eighth grade she and her friend, Michele Morek, believed that “all that convent stuff was just a big fad – or so we thought!” But by the eleventh grade, Judy was seriously considering religious life with the Ursuline Sisters and made plans to enter.

Judy and two friends from Waterflow – Michele Morek and Evelyn Gomez (our Sister Sara) – traveled east to the green fields of Kentucky, and on Thursday, September 7, 1961, became postulants with the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph. One year later, on Tuesday, August 14, 1962, Judy became Sister Sheila Anne Smith and joined the novitiate with seventeen others. The class of 1962 was an amazing group; there were à Sisters:

Leo Mary Boone

Mary Michael Cecil

Mary Valeria Collignon

Angela Merici Cooper

Jean Mary Fulkerson

Sara Gomez

Sharon Jeager

Ann Jenkins

Mariella McAuliffe

Madonna Meyer

Michele Morek

Mary Albert O’Bryan

Francis Joseph Porter

Rose Jean Powers

Sheila Anne Smith

Katherine Gertrude Stein

Ritamary Stuedle, and

Mary Matthew Thomas

And to Sister Sheila’s remaining classmates – Sisters Michele, Rose Jean, and Kathy – and many other dear friends, we offer our love and our prayers.

Sister Aloise Boone shepherded that class of eighteen Novices through some interesting times, as the fresh air from the Second Vatican Council was beginning to stir. During those years Sister Sheila Anne began her studies at Brescia College. And in April 1964, she even published her first “article” – “Open House – Open Hearts, An Account of the First ‘Open House’ at Mount Saint Joseph” – written when the vow class broke open the cloister at Mount Saint Joseph for the first time ever. They welcomed 200 young women to come spend a day joining with them in all their activities. Unheard of! But the times they were a-changing.

Sister Sheila Anne made her vows, Saturday, August 15, 1964; and two years later, in May 1966, graduated from Brescia College, earning a baccalaureate degree in History and a minor in English, with teacher certification. In August of that same year, she started teaching at Saint Catherine School in New Haven, Kentucky.

By 1969, it seems Sister Sheila was further exploring how the Spirit might be calling her in different directions. She applied to and had even been hired by the National Park Service to work at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and was ready to begin her job. But, in her words, she “never started work because, through a miracle of grace, I ended up making vows instead of leaving the convent.” And she continued teaching in Kentucky and Nebraska through 1976 – gaining ten years of teaching experience, with seven of those years east of the Mississippi.

In the fall of 1976, Sister Sheila began a ministry with health care at Mount Saint Joseph, and in March 1977, was gravely injured in a tragic accident. She lost her leg, but not her heart or passion for ministry and service. In a poem titled, “Wedding,” written in March 1978, she concluded:

That was the end

of everything as I once knew it

But how could I have known, in that

                 searing moment of darkness

that of a love immeasurable beyond all

                                    imagining

it was but the beginning?

Sister Sheila would later write, “I’d heard one is supposed to ‘give up’ one’s homeland in the convent; nonetheless, I had always hoped to serve in New Mexico. At last, in November 1979, as I was considering a ministry change, a religion teacher was needed in San Fidel, New Mexico. Joyfully, I packed my bags [and travelled west].” And she never looked back.

Over the next thirty-five years, Sister Sheila Anne served the people of God in the Southwest in myriad ways. She taught a few years at Saint Joseph School in San Fidel, at Saint Anthony in Zuni, and at Saint Charles Borromeo in Albuquerque. For eight years she served in Arizona, first at the Desert House of Prayer and later in parish ministry at Saint Anne Mission in Klagetoh, Arizona, and our Lady of the Rosary at Greasewood, Arizona. Sister Sheila’s time at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Holbrook was cut short after some break-ins and vandalism made it wiser for her to return to Albuquerque in 1993.

During these early years, Sister Sheila worked with the Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, and Navajo peoples. She did parish ministry and retreat work, and became well-known for her practice of “home instruction.” She once wrote, “The heart of my ministry is home instruction with the local families . . . [it works so well for] it provides a time for prayer, sharing and togetherness in the family setting.”

For the next twenty years, Sister Sheila Anne would be based in Albuquerque to engage ministries of writing, tutoring, music, prayer and retreat work. She continued to minister among the Native American peoples, especially at Pueblo Isleta.

Her writing ministry blossomed. Sister Sheila became a contributing editor of My Friend, a Catholic magazine for young people. She published with periodicals Humpty Dumpty, Childlife, Hopscotch, and U*S*Kids; and was, for more than ten years, a consultant on staff with Loyola Press. She was responsible as well for both producing and editing requested histories, prayer collections, poetry, and teachers’ manuals.

Sister Sheila Anne was someone who lived in a world where something exciting, or engaging, or challenging, or entertaining, or outstanding, or awe-filled was ALWAYS happening. And it was her job – her responsibility – to make note of it and to share it with as many people as possible. Her annals for those years are pages and pages long, packed with information about everything from running a yellow light to finding a baseball crashed through a window to sunsets in the Sandias to bring music to strangers in need in the hospital to the visitors she received and the visits she was making.

Sister Sheila loved having visitors – her family, her friends, her Ursuline sisters (she once wrote, “personally, I like to pray with my sisters”) – and she loved visiting. No trip was too far (or too frequently taken) and no mountain was too high or too remote. She even once received a “graduation” letter from Vocational Rehabilitation when she was acclimating to a new prosthesis that said: “We hope your new prosthesis can maintain the mileage [we know] you will put on it.” They knew that Sister Sheila recognized no limits.

Sister Sheila embraced her life – once listing her interests as “music, poetry, writing, astronomy, nature, hiking, snowshoeing, photography, music ministry and prayer services for retreats, and leading prayer days when the opportunity arises.” When speaking of her spirituality, she affirmed, “[I] have always found God most easily in Creation, especially nature and the stars; pondering what scientists have learned about the Bib Bang, the first moments of Creation, the first fraction of the first second – meditating on the God who is present at the farthest reaches of the universe (14.5 billion light years away!!!!) yet also WITH us, in our hearts and in the Eucharist!!! Absolutely mind-boggling.”

Then in October 2014, Sister Sheila came home to Mount Saint Joseph; it was another adventure with which she engaged friends and family as she packed and moved and settled and unpacked and rediscovered herself. For the next years she would help in the Archives and the Angela Oratory, assist with music when possible, distribute mail, and – at the end – crochet countless filter socks for Water With Blessings, now Water By Women. As Sister Sheila’s health failed, she was less able to get around but still cherished her visitors. We give our deep thanks to all in our villa who cared for and supported Sister Sheila – and we offer our prayers and condolence as you mourn her loss.

And it is especially fitting that we wake with Sister Sheila on this day, July 14, for it is – since 2012 – the Feast Day of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American canonized by the Catholic church. Sister Sheila was for many years deeply involved with the Kateri Tekakwitha Conference and efforts to support her canonization. She was so proud that “her” church, Queen of Heaven at Isleta Pueblo, had become New Mexico’s “official” Tekakwitha Shrine.

In Give Us This Day, Saint Kateri is described as one who, though free to practice her faith, still groped her way in a world that supplied for her no clear models. Sister Sheila, perhaps, you were also like Saint Kateri, for you had no clear model for your unique and beautifully diverse ways to fulfill the Ursuline mission “to proclaim Jesus through education and Christian formation.” And yet, you did just that. So, this day, perhaps you have joined with Saint Kateri, as you both can say as Saint Kateri once did, “I am not my own. I have given myself wholly to Jesus. He must be my only love.”

Rest well, Sister Sheila Anne.