The history of the sanctuary dates back to the time of Ladislaus the Short, who founded the Norbertine monastery and Gothic church in 1400. The church partially destroyed by fire in 1611 and was rebuilt in Renaissance style, with Gothic preserved only in the presbytery. After the dissolution of the Norbertine Order in 1784, the Austrian invaders turned the church into a military storehouse and the altar with the image of Our Lady of Consolation was boarded up. The cult of the Madonna image was revived by the Jesuits, who took over the monastery in 1832, renovated the church and extended the monastery with a college. The originally Gothic church, with a polygonal closed chancel and a lattice vault supported by buttresses, had a nave added in the 17th century and a tower and portal in the 18th century. The monastery courtyard, with 1970s cloisters and adorned with bas-reliefs, is surrounded on the street side by a wall with wrought-iron baroque gates dating from the 18th century. It features a statue of Our Lady and Child, a 1988 field altar, a wooden missionary cross and a bas-relief of Mary on the church wall.

The image of the Madonna is housed in a neo-Gothic main altar dating from 1890 and is one of the most beautiful Marian images in the country. It was painted on linden plank in the Gothic-Renaissance style by an unknown 16th-century artist who probably executed it in a Kraków or Nowy Sącz workshop. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, the monastery abbot was Jan Jordan of Zakliczyn, and therefore, Zofia Jordan was the painting’s patron. In 1963, the image was crowned by the Primate of the Millennium, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński; the metropolitan of Kraków, Bishop Karol Wojtyła, assisted at the coronation. Since the 16th century, the inhabitants of the Nowy Sącz region have made pilgrimages to the sanctuary.

Indulgence feasts at the sanctuary fall on Pentecost and the feast of Our Lady of Consolation, the Sunday after the memorial of St Augustine on 28 August.