Madonna Shrine & Don Orione Home
One of the most recognizable icons of East Boston is the 35-foot (11 m)-high statue of the Madonna. The Madonna Shrine, at the top of Orient Heights overlooking the airport and Downtown areas, is the national headquarters for the Don Orione order. Constructed in 1954, the statue is a full-size replica of one at the Don Orione Center in the Montemario district of Rome, Italy. It was constructed in 1954 by Jewish-Italian sculptor Arrigo Minerbi, who wanted to show his gratitude to the Catholic Church for having shielded him and his family from the Nazis during World War II. Across the street from the Shrine is the Don Orione Home, a nursing home which, like the Shrine, was founded by the Don Orione priests. The Shrine and Home were founded in 1951 by the Don Orione priests, led by Fr. Rocco Crescenzi (January 6, 1916 - April 3, 2011), who was sent from Italy for this purpose. Crescenzi had been an errand boy for St. Orione himself.The nonagenarian Crescenzi was still active at the Home and Shrine.
Read more about this topic: Orient Heights
Famous quotes containing the words madonna, shrine and/or home:
“In our minds lives the madonna image—the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model—the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“Things are always better at home than a mile away.”
—Chinese proverb.