Riepp, Mother Benedicta (Sybilla) (1825–1862)

Mother Benedicta (Sybilla) Riepp was the founder of the Roman Catholic Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict in North America. During her time as Superior of the first foundation in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, she sent a group of Sisters to St. Cloud, Minnesota, where they began a new convent. This group moved to St. Joseph in 1863. By 1946, Saint Benedict’s Monastery was the largest community of Benedictine Sisters in the world.

Sybilla Riepp was born in Waal, Bavaria, on June 28, 1825. In 1844, she entered St. Walburg Convent in Eichstätt, Bavaria, and received the name Benedicta. She taught in the girls’ school of Eichstätt during the eight years she lived there.

When a request came to send Sisters to teach the children of German immigrants in Pennsylvania, Benedicta volunteered. She and her companions arrived in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, in 1852. There they established the first convent of Benedictine Sisters in North America.

The six years Mother Benedicta spent as Superior at Saint Joseph Monastery in St. Marys were filled with physical hardship and misunderstandings between herself and Abbot Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., of St. Vincent Abbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She resisted his interference in the internal matters of the women’s community. He, in turn, questioned her authority as the Superior of the convents she founded. Nevertheless, her leadership during those years resulted in the establishment of three new foundations in Erie, Pennsylvania (1856), Newark, New Jersey (1857), and St. Cloud, Minnesota (1857).

In 1857, Mother Benedicta travelled to Europe. She hoped her superiors in Eichstätt and Rome would help her resolve the controversy surrounding the independence of the new convents in North America. She and her companion were not favorably received in Eichstätt. They were prevented from traveling to Rome to present her case before the Pope.

Mother Benedicta returned to the United States in 1858, broken in spirit and failing in health. She was no longer welcome in the convents she had founded in the East. At the invitation of Mother Willibalda Scherbauer in St. Cloud, she moved to the Minnesota city in the spring of 1858. Four years later, she died of tuberculosis on March 15, 1862. In 1884, her remains were transferred from St. Cloud to the convent cemetery in St. Joseph.

The only extant writings of Mother Benedicta are fourteen letters written between the years 1852 and 1861. These letters reveal her conviction that her Benedictine vocation was a privilege.

Three federations of Benedictine women in North America, totaling about two thousand members in the early 2000s, remain the legacy of Mother Benedicta Riepp.