While
touring the Troy Hill neighborhood on the city’s North Side, a close relative
and I had hoped to see the venerable shrine. Unfortunately it was closed when
we came around noon on a Friday, and we had to move on. But as I stood outside,
even its exterior filled me with an aesthetic and spiritual sense of wonder.
The
two-steepled Saint Anthony Chapel is laid out in a cruciform shape
(i.e., in the form of a cross), with a pointed Romanesque arch at its center.
You’d
never know that this modest house of worship, built to minister to a
predominantly German immigrant population towards the end of the 19th
century, contains what is believed to be the greatest collection of relics
outside the Vatican.
Although
the relic dealing directly with St. Anthony of Padua here is a molar (the only part of
the saint outside his hometown in Italy), more than 5,000 relics of other
saints are contained inside, arranged in altars and side cases constructed of
hand-carved solid walnut. Saints represented include the first martyr, Stephen;
Frances of Rome, Philip Neri, Macharius and Stephana.
The
dynamic force in collecting all of this was the shrine’s founder, the
Belgian-born Father Suitbert G. Mollinger. He was able to secure so many
relics because he traveled so widely and used his family’s great wealth for the
acquisitions.
After Fr.
Mollinger died in 1892, the chapel passed into the hands of the Archdiocese of
Pittsburgh, which considered closing it when it couldn’t afford repairs because
of hard financial times for the area in the late 1970s. Luckily the crisis was
averted and the shrine remains for pilgrims offering prayers.
