Holy Name of Jesus Church (San Francisco)

When you approach Holy Name of Jesus Church, you are standing near a site that began as a vast, windswept landscape of sand dunes. In the mid-nineteen twenties, the Outer Sunset District was sparsely populated, and the parish was founded to serve a small community of just one hundred and twenty-five families. Its first pastor, Father Richard Ryan, famously arrived to find an area so empty that the primary challenge was simply gathering a congregation from the scattered residents living among those dunes.