Benedictine College Announces Sister Deirdre Byrne as its 2025 Commencement Speaker
Sister Deirdre Byrne, POSC
Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, is pleased to announce that Little Workers of the Sacred Heart Sister Deirdre “Dede” Byrne will be the keynote speaker at the college’s Commencement Exercises, set for May 17, 2025.
Sister Deirdre is a missionary, surgeon and retired U.S. Army colonel. She has been a fearless advocate for the unborn and the chronically ill and disabled, and she has worked tirelessly to defend conscience protections for medical doctors. She told her story in the recently published biography, Sister, Soldier, Surgeon: The Life and Courage of Sister Deirdre Byrne, M.D. by Leisa Marie Carzon, Ph.D.
Sister Dede will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree, along with three other women, Denise Burke, Kellie Fiedorek and Erin Hawley, who are staff members of the Alliance Defending Freedom and were involved in various ways with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case in Mississippi that eventually went to the Supreme Court and resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Due to limited seating, Commencement Exercises at Benedictine College are private events for family and friends of the graduates. Tickets are required for entry into the Ralph Nolan Gymnasium, where the ceremony takes place.
Sister Dede grew up in McLean, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from our nation’s capital, in a devout Catholic family as one of eight children. She is the older sister of Bishop William Byrne of the Diocese of Springfield. Sister Dede graduated from Virginia Tech before being accepted to Georgetown School of Medicine and then joining the U.S. Army as a medical student on a military medical scholarship.
After three years of family medicine residency at the U.S. Army hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, she served as a full-time officer for 13 months in the Sinai Peninsula, acting as a liaison between the U.S. Army and the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai.
Following her time in the Middle East, she practiced family and emergency medicine in South Korea. She served as a full-time Army officer from 1982 to 1989 and then remained in the Army Reserve until her retirement in 2009.
In 1989, Sister Dede spent a year performing missionary medicine in India and Mexico. She undertook surgical training at Georgetown University and went on to practice in Ventura, California, completing her board certification in surgery in1999.
In 2000, she returned to Washington to discern her religious vocation where she met the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. She began her formal formation in 2002 and completed her first religious vows in 2004.
After completing her religious formation, she was given special permission from her community and the Vatican to both serve as a religious sister as well as an Army reservist for the Army Medical Corp in 2004. In three separate deployments, she served at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Fort Carson in Colorado, and Afghanistan, where she cared for wounded citizens. When not serving our soldiers, she continued her service for the poor with her community in far off places like Kenya, Haiti, Sudan, and Iraq, as well as her home front in Washington, D.C.
After returning from Afghanistan, Sister Dede retired from the U.S. Army at the rank of colonel in 2009. After a full career of medical military service, she professed her final religious vows two years later.
Since then, she has found a fruitful collaboration between her religious vocation and her medical and military service. It brings Sister Dede joy to serve the sick and suffering in a religious habit, noting the special effect that it has on people. Her charitable medical service includes ministering to the wounded amongst the rubble of the twin towers following the September 11 terrorist attacks, caring for the sick in the wake of the 2011 earthquake in Haiti, and annual medical missions to Haiti and Iraq.
She currently serves as the local superior of the Washington, D.C., house of the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts as well as the institute’s medical missions. The sisters in D.C. run a pro-bono physical therapy clinic and diabetic eye clinic and a retirement home for elderly sisters as well as abortion pill reversal.
