Through Beauty, to Beauty's God.
Sancta Terra Society is a local, Catholic non-profit based in Steubenville, OH. Our mission is simple: to promote the beauty, the peace, and the strength of the Catholic faith within the public square. We seek primarily to evangelize through beauty and acts of public piety. Our particular work is to support our local community in the designing, funding, building, and maintaining of a series of small, public and wayside shrines to serve as a spiritual centers for our neighborhoods and communities.
The act of shrine-building is both an intrinsic religious instinct writ deep in human nature and an age-old practice of the Catholic Church. Today, should one travel to any historically Catholic country in Europe, South America, or the Near East, they shall find a vast network of public roadside shrines. These were primarily the work of their local Catholic communities, built with the intention of praising God, of strengthening religious identity, and proclaiming the reality of the faith. In our own time, with the rise of suburban living and the disjointment of life which follows, we see shrines as a way to reintegrate our private and religious lives. By partnering with the local community and building a series of neighborhood shrines, we seek to provide a spiritual and religious center right where we live. The shrines will be a place of peace, contemplation, and prayer which our children can walk to, our neighbors can see, and our community can benefit from. We ought not to restrict our religion to our churches any more than we ought to restrict our family life to our homes.