Santa Sabina Center

The Congregation of the Most Holy Name of Jesus (Dominican Sisters of San Rafael) dates its foundation to the arrival of three Dominicans in San Francisco in December 1850 and to the opening of a convent, Saint Catherine (Santa Catalina in Spanish), in March 1851 in Monterey, California.  Sister Mary of the Cross Goemaere, a Belgian-French woman, had journeyed with two Dominican men from Liverpool to San Francisco for nearly 3 months by sea and over land at the isthmus of Panama to reach gold-rush San Francisco.  Between 1851 and 1854, Mother Mary set up the convent and a school and eight women joined the Dominican community of Mother Mary, the prioress of the first group of women religious in the new state.  After moving to Benicia in 1854, the sisters expanded their education ministry across Northern California and Nevada. In 1889, Mother Louis O’Donnell constructed a new motherhouse in San Rafael, on the site that would become Dominican University of California. By the 1930s, Prioress Mother Mary Raymond O’Connor identified the need for a Novitiate House that would reflect the “depths of Dominican monastic tradition,” and hired architect Arnold Sutherland Constable and liturgical artist E. Charlton Fortune to create a space that would foster contemplation and community. In the wake of Vatican II, the Novitiate House became a contemplative retreat center in 1970, and it has welcomed contemplatives of all faiths as the Santa Sabina Center since then.