St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church (Wilmington, Delaware)
| St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church (Wilmington, Delaware) | |||
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| National Register of Historic Places | |||
 St. Anthony's, south facade with entrance portico |
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| location | Wilmington , Delaware | ||
| Coordinates | 39 ° 45 '9.3 " N , 75 ° 34' 0.2" W | ||
| Built | 1926 | ||
| Architectural style | Neo-romance | ||
| NRHP number | 84000851 | ||
| The NRHP added | May 3, 1984 | ||
The Saint Anthony of Padua Church is a Roman Catholic church in Wilmington , the largest city in the American state of Delaware .
The three-aisled basilica in neo-Romanesque style, built in 1926, is dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua and serves as the parish church of the parish of St. Anthony of Padua of the Wilmington diocese , which had been created two years earlier for the pastoral care of the rapidly growing number of Italian immigrants in particular . San Zeno Maggiore in Verona served as a model , especially for the design of the south facade with its portico and a large round window. The entrance doors are decorated with bronze reliefs and figures of saints by the Italian sculptor Egidio Giaroli . On May 3, 1984, the church was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Parish
Even today the church is the cultural center of " Little Italy " in west Wilmington. Since 1925, on the commemoration day of the patron saint Anthony of Padua, i.e. June 13th, or the next Sunday, a statue of the saint has been in procession through the Worn streets of Wilmington. Over the decades, an eight-day Italian cultural festival has developed around the procession, attracting around 100,000 visitors each year and one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
The parish priest is given the oblates of St. Francis de Sales , who have been represented in Wilmington since 1903, set up the headquarters of one of their two American religious provinces here and also run two high schools: the Salesianum boys' school and the Padua Academy for girls in the immediate vicinity of the church. The first pastor of the parish until 1949 was the Irish-born Salesian J. Francis Tucker (1889–1921), who was later delegated by the Vatican to Monaco and there was confessor of Rainier III. has been. In 1955 he arranged the wedding of the prince with the actress Grace Kelly , whom Rainier had met in the summer of 1955 at the Cannes Film Festival: After Tucker first made sure in Philadelphia , Kelly's hometown about 50 km from Wilmington, that the future Princess Grazia Patrizia came from a good, decent and Catholic family, he set a celebration in his old parish church of St. Anthony on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his ordination at Christmas of that year. The anniversary of his confessor provided an official pretext for the Prince's trip to America; Immediately after midnight mass, he got into a taxi, drove to Philadelphia and proposed to Kelly.
On June 5, 2015, the church was the site of the funeral service for the politician Beau Biden , at which Barack Obama gave the funeral speech.
Web links
- St. Anthony of Padua Parish - Parish website
- St. Anthony of Padua Feast Day Procession - Entry in the Local Legacies documentation project of the Library of Congress
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jim Parks: The Diocese of Wilmington . Arcadia, Charleston 2001, p. 45.
- ↑ Entry in the National Register Information System . National Park Service , accessed April 22, 2016
- ^ History of the Festival (Carnival) on the parish website.
- ↑ Jeffrey Robinson: Grace of Monaco: The True Story . New, revised edition. Da Capo Press, New York 2014, pp. 40ff.
- ↑ Julie Hirschfeld Davis: Obama Delivers Eulogy for Beau Biden . In: The New York Times (online edition), June 6, 2015.