St. Anthony Chapel, a Romanesque-style church located in the Troy Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was founded by Father Suitbert Mollinger, a Belgian-born missionary and priest, in 1880. The son of a wealthy family, Mollinger used his inheritance to build St. Anthony’s as a place of worship that could host his growing collection of thousands of relics, which would come to be the largest collection of sacred relics outside the Vatican.

Before coming to the U.S., where he was ordained a priest in 1857, Mollinger had lived in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, where he studied medicine at the Universities of Rome and Genoa. After receiving the call to priesthood, he left Europe to become a missionary in the United States, eventually settling in Pittsburgh, where he founded a school and convent.