Father Pitt

Father Suitbert Mollinger was the founding pastor of of Most Holy Name of Jesus parish on Troy Hill. He was also rich: he had inherited a good bit of money, and he used it in travels through Europe to buy up saints’ relics that were otherwise being tossed out in the waves of revolutions that were washing across the continent in the middle 1800s. He built this chapel to house the collection, which is probably the largest accumulation of relics in one building in the world.⁽¹⁾ He dedicated it to his patron St. Anthony of Padua.

Here is St. Anthony of Padua himself, shown as he often is in art with a book on which the Christ child is sitting, referring to the story that Anthony was once meditating on Scripture when the child Jesus himself appeared to him.

Building in honor of St. Anthony of Padua…

…erected 1882, enlarged 1890.

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Footnotes

1. It is usually said that this is the second-largest collection after the Vatican’s. But the Vatican is a whole city of churches and palaces; the concentration of relics here is unique. (↩)