At Trinity Heights Queen of Peace Shrine, a 30-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of Mary, Queen of Peace, welcomes 80,000 visitors a year with an outstretched hand. With the other, she points across the shrine’s statues and gardens to the source of peace — a slightly taller statue of Jesus revealing his Sacred Heart.
Dial back to the fall of 1979. A new pope, John Paul II, set out to embark on a nine-day apostolic journey to the United States that included a special visit to Des Moines, Iowa, only 230 miles from the Twin Cities.
John and Natalie Sonnen have seen many Catholic shrines, but when the St. Paul couple visited the Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption in northern Iowa on their way home from a convention last September, they were particularly impressed.
Trappist Brother Paul Andrew Tanner remembers the day 24 years ago when he drove to the New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa, to attend his first retreat there. “Until I pulled into the parking lot, I had my CD player going and my radio going,” he said. “And then I turned that off and had a weekend of quiet — religious quiet.”
Eight of us Minnesotans were sharing stories with a community of Indian sisters over tea, bananas and savory pastries at their kitchen table when they began to detail a catastrophic flood that affected their convent in the fall of 2018. And then one sister, who had a generous smile, turned serious. She closed her eyes and started to sing a solemn song, her voice trilling the melody. The other sisters joined in.
