M Judith Svoboda

Our beloved Sister M. Judith Svoboda died peacefully at Immanuel-St. Joseph's Hospital, Mankato, Minnesota, Thursday, February 7, 2008, at 12:45 a.m., of congestive heart failure. Her niece, Sister Lucille Matousek, and Sister Jane Thibault were present with her when she was called home to God, the God she loved and served so generously over her long life of 94 years. Earlier in the week she had been hospitalized with several heart complications, and her condition deteriorated rapidly.

The funeral Mass for Sister Judith, with Father Syl Brown as celebrant, will be on February 11, with community vespers the evening before. Burial will follow at a later date after cremation. Loving sympathy to her sister, Sister M. Aquin, the last of the Svoboda family, to Sister Lucille and her other nieces and nephews and their families, and to her sisters in community, the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Sister Judith was preceded in death by her parents, Joseph and Anna (Moravec) Svoboda, her sisters Josephine Bandas, Anna Cumming, Agnes Matousek, Magdalen Fisher, Margaret Svoboda and Christine Maxwell, and her brother William, who died at age seven.

Sister Judith was born July 2, 1913, and baptized Amelia later that month in St. Joseph's Church, Silver Lake, Minnesota. Speaking of her birth, Sister Judith wrote, "perhaps the Blessed Mother wished to announce to my parents by my birth on the Feast of her Visitation that I would remain with the family only for a short time before answering her Son's call to Our Lady's own order." She was the seventh of nine children born to Joseph and Anna Svoboda, who farmed near Silver Lake until Amelia was seven. She attended country school, and, after moving to town, the local public school, "because we had no Catholic school in our parish." Serious about their responsibility to educate their children in the Catholic faith, her parents saw that the children "attended regularly the Catechism instruction given by the pastor every Saturday morning and also those given on Sunday afternoons."

At the age of seven, she represented a little bride when Father Rudolph G. Bandas celebrated his first Mass at St. Joseph's on June 21, 1921. Sister Judith felt that the prayers of this young priest must have been especially pleasing to God, "for eleven years later, this same priest was celebrating a Solemn High Mass at another altar" This time in a convent chapel on the occasion of [my