Our Lady of Peace Church was founded on June 24, 1961, by Father Joseph G. Sullivan, who oversaw construction of the church, hall, and rectory. In 1969, the Archdiocese of San Francisco reassigned Sullivan and sent Father Sweeny to take his place. It was the beginning of a thirty-two-year pastorate that would transform a modest parish into a regional landmark. Sweeny arrived as Santa Clara was changing rapidly -- the orchards that had defined the valley were giving way to subdivisions and semiconductor plants. He recognized the church's location along a major corridor as an opportunity for spiritual outreach to a booming population, and he began thinking about something that would stop people in their tracks.

Sweeny's approach to fundraising was unusual: he asked for prayers, not money. He solicited one million rosaries from the faithful, trusting that the donations would follow. They did. Approximately 3,500 supporters who shared his vision began mailing in unsolicited contributions, eventually totaling over $340,000. In 1976, the same year he established twenty-four-hour Eucharistic adoration at the church -- a practice that has continued unbroken ever since, the doors never locked -- Sweeny contracted sculptor Charles Parks to build the statue. Parks, a Delaware-based artist, had caught Sweeny's attention through a friend who saw his work at an exhibition in San Francisco. The original vision of a ninety-foot figure gradually shrank to something the parish could actually support, but at thirty-two feet the steel Madonna was still monumental.

Charles Parks completed the statue in 1982, but it did not come straight to California. That winter, it was erected outside the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. Newspaper accounts from the time describe crowds gathering to see the new Madonna, which drew attention from across the city. The layover was practical -- the statue needed a temporary home while the shrine site in Santa Clara was prepared -- but it became an unplanned East Coast debut. By the time the figure finally arrived in Santa Clara, it had already been consecrated by thousands of eyes that would never see it in its permanent home.

What makes Our Lady of Peace distinctive among Bay Area churches is not only the towering statue but the commitment to perpetual access. Since 1976, the church has maintained twenty-four-hour Eucharistic adoration, keeping its doors open around the clock, every day of the year, except during the celebration of Holy Mass. In a region defined by frenetic innovation cycles and the relentless pressure of the technology industry, the shrine offers something deliberately countercultural: a place that is always available, always quiet, always the same. The statue's outstretched arms, which Father Sweeny described in terms any parent would understand -- "What child hasn't responded to the open arms of a mother?" -- remain visible day and night, a fixed point above a valley that reinvents itself every few years.