Laura Elbert, a parishioner of St. Hubert in Chanhassen, has experienced “a continued deepening call to surrender to God” in the months following a retreat she took at Bethany Center for Prayer and Renewal in Scandia.
Elbert learned of Bethany Center through a friend who had gone on a retreat there. Elbert, who had previously gone on retreats at a retreat center in South Dakota, appreciated the closer proximity of Bethany Center and the fact that “it was more of a directed retreat, a little more individual as far as meeting one-on-one with a spiritual director,” she said.
Elbert went on a five-day retreat at Bethany Center in September 2025 during which daily Mass and 24-hour adoration were offered alongside daily spiritual direction and personal prayer time.
“(W)hat stuck with me the most over the past few months is just that deepening surrender to God that I was really called to while I was there and just the knowledge of God’s particular love for me,” Elbert said. “I have always gazed in love at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and (I was) having this realization while I was there that he was gazing back at me with an even deeper love than I was gazing at him (with).”
The 349 retreatants Bethany Center has seen since it was officially founded in the fall of 2021 — who, like Elbert, have shared their experiences — have created strong word-of-mouth interest in the retreat center.
“About 98% of all the inquiries (made to Bethany Center) are from a direct referral of someone whose life was touched, and they couldn’t wait to share the good news of how the Lord worked in their life and invite others to come to Bethany to receive these beautiful graces,” said Yen Fasano, a parishioner of All Saints in Lakeville who became Bethany Center’s first executive director in May 2024.
“Our hope and our desire are that people would come in and be able to pray at the feet of Jesus like Mary did. That we would serve them like Martha did. And that God would provide resurrection for them as he did for Lazarus,” said Sheryl Moran, a parishioner of Our Lady of Grace in Edina who helped found Bethany Center, is a spiritual director for the retreat center, and is on the retreat center’s board. “Those are the things that we hope happen for people coming on retreat.”
Silent, guided prayer on 110 acres
Roughly a 45-minute drive north of the Twin Cities, Bethany Center sits on 110 acres of what was once a tree farm within the St. Croix River Valley. Walking paths wind along Sea Lake, through grassy and forested areas, and near the property’s three main buildings — a renovated farmhouse that includes lodgings for retreatants, adoration chapels, and a kitchen in which meals for retreatants are prepared; a renovated barn for retreatants to gather for talks, prayer and adoration; and a former granary converted into a chapel.
“It was a granary for over 100 years — it housed wheat and now it houses the bread of life,” Fasano said of the chapel, whose renovations are nearly complete.
Twin Cities-based Catholic artist Megan Whipple painted six panels of biblical figures in the chapel. Moran — who also paints and sculpts — talked with Whipple about being inspired by John Singer Sargent’s mural panels at the Boston Public Library, particularly his paintings of the prophets there. That inspiration ultimately helped guide the art now present in the chapel.
“(P)eople are really moved by it and it turned out so beautifully,” Moran said. “(E)ven though it’s only one wall so far, you feel like you’re surrounded by holy heroes.”
Father Brian Fischer, a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis who currently lives on the property, leads retreats and offers spiritual direction for priests. Along with two full-time staff members, there are five contracted employees and regular volunteers at Bethany Center, Fasano said.
Bethany Center currently has three main offerings, said Fasano: week-long retreats for priests, three- to five-day retreats for the laity, and single-day Days of Reflection for various small groups of individuals, including those on the waitlist.
Fasano said Bethany Center operates “on a freewill donation” model.
“As a nonprofit, we really rely on the generosity of faith and of gift in order to serve the retreatants, especially our priests, and to cover fully those operational costs,” she said. “We operate on that freewill donation because one, we will never say no to anyone, but also in this model of generosity, it’s our way of giving gratitude for the Lord’s generosity.”
Each three- to five-day silent, directed retreat at Bethany Center typically serves three to four retreatants, Fasano said. “It’s very intimate, it’s very individualized,” she said.
Moran said that this kind of individualized experience is intended “to make sure that all the needs of the person are met as best we can. We want to make sure that we provide for people, body and soul.”
Moran said a typical silent, directed retreat schedule includes a welcome and an initial hour of spiritual direction for each retreatant. “In that hour of spiritual direction, the director, through the Holy Spirit, is listening to this person’s story and then praying,” Moran said. Through that direction, retreatants are given Scripture passages or various devotions with which to pray. From there, the days of the retreat include daily Mass, spiritual direction, personal silent prayer, and mealtimes, Moran said.
“Retreat work is not about producing emotional experiences. It is about making room to hear what God has already been speaking,” Father Fischer said in a reflection he shared with The Catholic Spirit. “Scripture gives language. Discernment helps separate what is from the Lord and what is not. Over the course of a retreat, there is often a gentle movement: from noise to quiet, from control to trust, from striving to surrender. The fruit is interior freedom — the freedom to let Christ live within us rather than trying to manage everything ourselves.”
A silent, directed retreatant at Bethany Center is often a person of habitual prayer, Moran said; a retreatant “needs to have the capacity to be in silence for 24 hours or for multiple days.”
“That’s one of the reasons we do have a pretty lengthy intake form because we want to make sure that the people (who) are coming on retreat are at a place where they can be disposed to it,” Moran said.
“The pace of the retreat is intentional but unforced,” Father Fischer said. “It allows a person to slow down enough to recognize what has been influencing their interior life — perhaps fear, self-reliance, fatigue, or an unspoken longing. What happens is usually not dramatic. It is clarifying.”
Moran said she is currently working on a prayer journal to help prepare retreatants in advance for their time at Bethany Center, including those on the waitlist. The waitlist for Bethany Center is running a couple hundred people long, which Fasano said “just shows you the depth and the yearning of the human heart longing for the Lord.” She added that retreatants “no matter how long they’ve waited, they say it was just the right time.”
Father Leonard Andrie, pastor of St. Therese of Deephaven in Deephaven, views the annual retreats he has taken at Bethany Center as “a little spiritual well that I can draw from throughout the year.”
“As you can imagine, there are times, like all priests, when I get tired or overwhelmed. During those times, the Lord uses my time at Bethany, and like drawing from (a) spiritual well, to help nourish and sustain me,” Father Andrie said in a reflection he shared with The Catholic Spirit.
“The silence and setting” at Bethany Center “rejuvenated my love for our Lord and my desire to serve him as a priest by taking care of the parish” Father Andrie said.
Father Andrie highlighted Bethany Center as being among the few places in the archdiocese “where priests and others can be spiritually refreshed … where we can intimately journey with the peace and needed space to rest in the silence with a gifted spiritual director.”
Fasano said, “I don’t know what’s more important than our spiritual being with the Lord.”
“I really believe God’s first language is silence,” she said. “And to have that dedicated time away with him, it’s never wasted time. It’s always a blessed time. And we can’t bless others without being first blessed by the Lord.”
Father Fischer views silence as necessary to listen more closely to God.
“Silence is not emptiness. It is space. And without space, the soul has no room to breathe,” Father Fischer said. “Silence does not create God’s voice; it reveals it. And what is God often saying in the depth of our hearts? He says: ‘I love you with an everlasting love. I am here. And you are not alone.’ … Silence does not remove us from our lives. It returns us to them more grounded, more attentive, and more at peace.”
The Holy Spirit’s guidance
Bethany Center is relying on guidance from the Holy Spirit in its next steps — on the table are discussions about expansion and growing its team of spiritual directors to serve retreatants.
First up, Fasano said a home on the north side of the property has been renovated into a couple of hermitages for priest retreatants, which are expected to open by April’s end. Meanwhile, plans are forming for continued farmhouse and barn renovations, to be able to serve groups of eight to 12 retreatants.
“We have some capital projects that will require generosity and investment, but we really truly believe that the Lord desires Bethany, and so we remain confident that he will be faithful because all good things come from him,” Fasano said.
Amid these conversations, Moran said she is trusting God’s design.
“I really have to stay in the place of letting it unfold and not get ahead of the Lord’s work,” she said. “I just want him to continue to be glorified. I want his people to continue to encounter his transforming love.”
Fasano agreed: “I know whatever it is that I think may be ahead for Bethany is nowhere near the plans that the Lord has for Bethany.”
Unfolding for Elbert, meanwhile, have been the graces she gathered at Bethany Center in her daily life.
“(E)very day since then, I’ve gone back at some moment in my day to being at Bethany, whether it’s something that comes up in prayer or just a reminder of some of the Scripture that I prayed with there, or some of the phrases.” One such phrase Elbert says consistently comes up for her “is, ‘Lord, I can’t, you can, please do,’ which I know Father Brian (Fischer) gives to a lot of people there, and that’s one of their phrases that are the prayers that really have stuck out in my daily life since my time at Bethany.”
Her memory of visiting “that little adoration chapel and gazing at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament there” has also been strong, she said.
“I can go back to that in my mind often.”
Learn more about Bethany Center online at bethanyretreats.org.
BETHANY CENTER’S BIBLICAL INSPIRATION
In a conversation with Tom Ryan, former director of development at The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Sheryl Moran shared that she wanted to find a way to support seminarians and priests more.
“I was describing a place … where priests could go to be refreshed, they could spend time with the Lord,” said Moran, who helped found Bethany Center for Prayer and Renewal and is a board member and one of its spiritual directors. “(A) place that they felt at home, that we could serve them, we could cook them good meals, we could see to their needs, and they could just get away for a little bit and get renewed by the Lord”
“And Tom (Ryan) said, ‘Sheryl, it sounds like you want to create a Bethany,’” Moran said — a place like what Sts. Mary, Martha and Lazarus provided for Jesus during his ministry.
“That’s exactly what I want to create,” Moran recalled saying. “So that’s how the term Bethany came to be.”
Another important step along the way to realizing Bethany Center came about during a silent retreat guided by a spiritual director that Moran took in 2017. On this retreat, Moran said, “I encountered the love of the Lord in a way that I didn’t know was possible.
“I always had known that God loved me since I was baptized, I knew that, but I knew it in the general sense that God loves the world, so he loves me. But when I went on this retreat, I encountered his particular love for me, his personal love for me, that he actually delights in me. He told me that so clearly, and that just changed everything for me.”
It was at this retreat that Moran met Brian Fischer — a fellow retreatant who was on the path to priesthood.
“(T)hat was our first connection in this journey to where God has brought us now,” Moran said.
Father Fischer was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in May 2021 and sought the path of spiritual director; he and Moran continued to keep in touch over the years, including having conversations about what would become Bethany Center.
“(A)t this point, we’re working together on this vision and letting God use us to carry out this vision,” Moran said. God “really unfolded this gift, which is Bethany.”
“Bethany did not begin as a career move or a personal project. It emerged through prayer, discernment, and a shared sense that the Holy Spirit was asking for a place of silence, renewal, and encounter,” Father Fischer said in a reflection he shared with The Catholic Spirit. “Sheryl Moran and I joined together because we both recognized that invitation.”
Moran and Father Fischer further discerned the mission behind Bethany Center, that “it’s to serve priests, religious, and laypeople — all. We want it to be a place that everyone can come and be served,” Moran said. Father Fischer said many — including Archbishop Bernard Hebda and the late Father Jeff Huard of the archdiocese, Bishop Andrew Cozzens of the Diocese of Crookston, and Msgr. John Esseff of the Diocese of Scranton in Pennsylvania — offered their encouragement, support, wisdom, counsel and prayers.
The two started searching for property in June 2021. “I thought it would take a good five years to find a place, bring in utilities, clear the ground,” Moran said. “We found this property the second day we looked.” The Scandia property purchase was completed in the fall of 2021 — right around the feast day of St. Thérèse of Lisieux — and the establishment of Bethany Center as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit took place at that same time.
“It was definitely God. I (have) felt along the way that God has said, ‘I want this for my people now, so I’m just going to make it happen now,’” Moran said.
Father Fischer agreed: “Bethany belongs to the Lord, and whatever good has come from it is the fruit of his Spirit working through many.”
