WATCH | A Century of Light: The Stained Glass Windows of Mother Cabrini Shrine Are Restored

By Scottish Group Companies

On a quiet hillside above Golden, something extraordinary happened in 1912. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the Italian missionary nun who became the first American citizen to be canonized, knelt on dry ground, prayed, and water rose from the rock. That spring has never stopped flowing.

More than a century later, the shrine that bears her name remains a place where faith and the physical world meet in unexpected ways. This year, a new chapter was quietly written into that story, not with a miracle, but with the careful, devoted work of human hands restoring something irreplaceable.

The four monumental stained glass windows at the heart of the Mother Cabrini Shrine chapel have been fully restored.

Windows Unlike Any Other

To see these windows for the first time is to understand immediately that they are something different. They are not traditional stained glass. They are dalle de verre, a mid-20th century art form in which thick slabs of colored glass, sometimes an inch deep, are set in epoxy and resin rather than lead. Where leaded glass filters light, dalle de verre fractures it. The result fills the chapel's interior with a living mosaic of color that shifts with every hour of the day and with every movement of the Colorado sun across the mountains outside.

Each window stands 91 by 144 inches and rises in a triangular form that follows the A-frame roofline of the chapel. Each weighs approximately 1,000 pounds and contains nearly 300 individual pieces of glass. The palette moves through deep cobalt and sapphire blues, with flashes of amber, ruby and opalescent white. Lighter tones ascend toward the apex in a progression that mirrors, in color and form, the very act of prayer.

A Journey That Began in California

The windows were fabricated around 1970, when the chapel was built. But their story begins elsewhere. The glass came from Villa Cabrini in Burbank, California, a campus of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, the order St. Cabrini herself founded.

When that campus eventually closed, the windows were carefully transported to Colorado, to the shrine on Lookout Mountain where Mother Cabrini had walked, prayed and found water in a place where no water should have been. Their arrival here was both a preservation and a homecoming.

The historic windows at the Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden were recently restored, ensuring continued beauty and devotion. (Photo provided)

The Work of Restoration

The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart raised the funds for this restoration through their 2025 Gala. The work was entrusted to Scottish Stained Glass, a Colorado-based studio with decades of experience caring for historic religious art. What the restoration team found was the quiet evidence of time: decades of Colorado weather, temperature shifts and the gradual stress that any material endures when it is asked to last forever. The epoxy matrix had weathered. The sealants had failed in places. The frames needed stabilization.

The restoration addressed each of these vulnerabilities without altering what the windows are. The glass itself, with all its history and its light, remains exactly as it was placed. What changed is that it will endure.

What These Windows Mean

There is a particular quality of attention that sacred objects require and deserve. These windows have stood witness to everything the chapel has held for more than fifty years. Every Mass. Every pilgrimage. Every family that climbed the 373 steps of the Stairway of Prayer to stand before the 22-foot statue of Christ at the summit. Every quiet moment of grief, of gratitude, of petition.

Restoring them is not a maintenance project. It is an act of continuity, of saying that what mattered to the people who came before us will continue to matter to the people who come after.

The spring on Lookout Mountain still flows. And now, the light through those windows will too.