The rectory for Most Holy Name of Jesus Church, built in about 1875 in an elaborate Second Empire style—quite possibly with Father Suitbert Mollinger’s own money, since he had quite a fortune and nothing to spend it on but his parish and his collection of relics.
This picture is impossible, but old Pa Pitt did it anyway. Claim Street in front of the church is narrow, with Japanese knotweed and a drop on the opposite side from the church; so there is nowhere to stand except more or less right in front of the church to get its picture. Naturally some technical hocus-pocus involving multiple photographs was necessary to make this picture, but Father Pitt has never been one to let any rigid ideas of photographic honesty stand in the way of getting a picture of what a thing actually looks like.
The famous Father Suitbert Mollinger, best known for his enormous collection of relics housed around the corner in St. Anthony Chapel, was the founding pastor of this church. The date stone tells us (in German, of course, since this is Troy Hill) that the church was founded in 1868 and enlarged in 1896.
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. 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.
