Father Thomas Sieg, 79, used to tell his family and others with humor that he would be the first American pope.
After the retired archdiocesan priest suffered a serious fall May 8 and was taken to a hospital in St. Louis Park, his younger sister, Maggie McDonnell, broke the news that Chicago native Cardinal Robert Prevost had been elected that day as the first American to lead the Church.
Father Sieg, who served for nearly 54 years at seven archdiocesan parishes and at The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, didn’t seem disappointed that the election of Cardinal Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — ended his childhood dream, his sister noted. That might have been because God was calling Father Sieg, considered a gifted homilist and teacher by his family, colleagues and friends, to his eternal rest. Father Sieg died May 9.
Archbishop Bernard Hebda was scheduled to preside at Father Sieg’s 4 p.m. May 28 funeral at St. Michael in Prior Lake.
Father Sieg was born Sept. 28, 1945, in Albert Lea, into a family of teachers. After his priestly ordination in 1971, he served as an assistant pastor at Holy Spirit in St. Paul for two years and then as an associate pastor of St. Peter in North St. Paul for five years before going to Washington, D.C., in 1978 to pursue graduate studies in homiletics at the Catholic University of America.
Father Phillip Rask, a retired priest of the archdiocese, said he got to know Father Sieg at Catholic University while Father Rask was there studying the Bible. Father Rask’s later faculty work at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul overlapped with Father Sieg’s as Father Sieg served at the seminary as associate professor of sacramental theology and homiletics during the first half of the 1980s.
Father Rask, who will offer a eulogy at Father Sieg’s funeral, noted one of his friend’s instructions to seminarians was to write out their homilies to help organize their thoughts, but not use the notes during the homily “because it’s deadly to read it,” he said.
Father Sieg “was devoted to the Word and then interested in improving the preaching of the priests and followed that example in the sermons that he gave,” Father Rask said. “He worked at it and what he told the students to do, he did.”
Father Sieg returned to parish work in 1985, serving as pastor of Presentation of Mary in Maplewood for three years. He was briefly parochial administrator of St. Thomas the Apostle in Minneapolis before being assigned as pastor of Risen Savior in Burnsville in 1988. During the latter assignment, Father Sieg completed a semester-long sabbatical program at Notre Dame University’s Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies in Jerusalem.
In 1998, Father Sieg began a six-year assignment as pastor of St. Patrick in Edina and then served as pastor for 11 years at his final parish assignment at St. Michael in Prior Lake. He retired in 2015.
While at St. Michael, Father Sieg also served from 2008 to 2013 on the Archdiocesan Chancery College of Consultors, a diocesan body of priests required by canon law that advises the archbishop on major decisions.
Apart from his ministry, Father Sieg enjoyed collecting icons and traveling, often with his friend, Father George Grafsky, also a retired archdiocesan priest and one of his seven ordination classmates. The “odd couple” friends frequently talked on Saturday mornings about their weekend homilies and regularly traveled together in the winter to visit friends in Florida or on cruises.
“We were the opposite in many ways,” said Father Grafsky, who lives in Montgomery, noting that Father Sieg liked art and classical music while he prefers sports.
“We did learn in being together, but people always say we became connected because we make each other do things that we would never have done.”
