Santa Sabina Center

The Congregation of the Most Holy Name of Jesus was founded in Monterey, California between 1851 and 1854, by a group of nine Dominican sisters. After moving to Benicia in 1854, they expanded their education ministry across Northern California and Nevada. In 1889, Mother Louis O’Donnell founded 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 1969, and it has welcomed contemplatives of all faiths as the Santa Sabina Center since then.