St. Anthony's Chapel

The story

Look at this brick neighborhood church in Troy Hill from the street, and you would mistake it for any standard 19th-century parish tucked onto a quiet Pittsburgh bluff. But step inside and look past the pews. You are standing in front of more than 5,000 officially certified Catholic relics—skulls of martyrs, teeth, bone splinters, and a thorn reputedly pulled from the Crown of Thorns. Outside the consecrated walls of the Vatican, no single sanctuary in the world holds more holy remains than this quiet chapel on Harpster Street.

The stash was assembled by Father Suitbert G. Mollinger, a physician-turned-priest with deep pockets and a relentless acquisition habit. During the political upheavals of 19th-century Europe, state forces were dismantling monasteries and discarding sacred artifacts. Mollinger used his personal wealth to buy up private collections and rescue thousands of reliquaries from Europe, shipping them directly to his parish on a Pittsburgh hill. By the time he died in 1892, he had housed them in hand-carved walnut altars that line the chapel walls, creating a gilded bone library that feels less like a neighborhood parish and more like a secret Vatican repository dropped into working-class PA.