SCULLEY SABBATICAL Tracking the Truth on

By Kate Lukaszewicz, 2022 Sculley Sabbatical recipient

A historian must concern herself with historiography, the writing of histories and especially of how those histories evolve and are interpreted. The current prevailing narrative of any historical event or biography can be fully comprehended in the present only if one has fully grasped how that narrative has been understood–and misunderstood–over time.

In fact, my favorite author on the subject, Sir Simon Schama, reflected in Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, that “Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation …. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”

My “someone gone around the corner” is Father Suitbert Mollinger, the founding pastor of my childhood parish and elementary school and a founding funder of my graduate school. I am confident that he died on June 15, 1892, but four different birth dates are identified on four different sources. As a young man, he studied as a surgeon, or in a seminary, or served in the Crimean War, but there is no surviving documentary evidence of any of these vocations. Even so, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest and practiced medicine. He diagnosed and prescribed compounds of his own invention, tending to more than 300,000 pilgrims by the end of his twenty-fouryear tenure in Pittsburgh’s Troy Hill. He healed not only with compounds, but also relics and the intercessions of the prayers and ephemera associated with Roman Catholicism. (As a historian, I must question that if the relics offer a placebo effect, is that “divine power” sufficient to be recounted as truth?)

These conflicting “facts” about Mollinger’s life have complicated my efforts of writing a book-length biography of this internationally famous priest. For 130 years, the historiography of Suitbert Mollinger had been thus: born to a wealthy and aristocratic family, his Protestant father died when Suitbert was just ten, and Suitbert, afforded all the luxuries of a European education, studied medicine before finding his vocation as a priest. He studied at seminary somewhere in the Netherlands or Belgium or near

Pennsylvania, was ordained in the Diocese of Erie in 1859, spending five years there before relocating to Wexford in 1864 and Allegheny City in 1868, where he would become famous for his efficacy as a healer and collector of Catholic relics, which numbers 5,000.

My research is at the mercy of historic documentation: sometimes too little to offer any cogent narrative, sometimes so much that the prospect of analysis and interpretation daunts.

But in January 2020, my skill and persistence were aided by luck: I found a document that turned the extant Mollinger biography on its head.”

At that time, I determined to write a full-length biography of the man, for, despite his fame, none existed. Sitting at my dining room table, I made my first visit to an online Belgian genealogy website. Within minutes, I was looking at gevangenisregister: a prison register. I was shocked, but my finding was confirmed by a professional translator. With this new information, I searched Dutchnewspaper archives and found dozens of newspaper articles that chronicled the 1851 fire in Mollinger’s apartment, his reported losses of fine art, precious metals and gems, and books. In January 1852, the papers were covering his trial and conviction. A deeper look into the genealogical records revealed a conviction of fraud, a prison sentence of five years, and an early release for good behavior. That Mollinger was acquitted of the arson charge spared his neck, for the Dutch penal code indicated that arson was punishable by beheading.

With this discovery, I knew that to tell the complete story would require research in his home countries. Under this premise, the leadership team at Sewickley Academy awarded to me the Sculley Sabbatical for Summer 2022, so that I could “reconstruct a dead world” in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Last July, I arrived in Amsterdam, rainy and cool, but I was hot on Suitbert’s trail. He had owned a tobacco shop in Amsterdam, but the Amsterdam City Archives shed no light on where the tobacco shop had been or how Suitbert had otherwise spent his time in this city. The addresses of his domicile and tobacco shop are lost to us, and we are left with history as hypothesis. However, I did lay my hands on a copy of a directory of the Dutch patrician families, learning more about the father who had died when Suitbert was just ten.

Without any more information about Suitbert’s life in Amsterdam, I explored the diversions that had been available to him. The Rijksmuseum offered much, with centuries of art, including pieces by a landscape artist whose work the mendacious Mollinger had claimed to have owned and lost in his apartment fire. He and I must, I thought, have gazed upon the same canvases and sculptures, pieces secular and sacred, and I wondered whether this panopticon of art inspired his myth of his own middling – and fictional – art collection having been reduced to ash.

With that unanswerable question, I turned my attention to the city’s Mozes en Aaronkerk, a church dedicated to the saint for whom Suitbert named his own chapel: St. Anthony of Padua. This Catholic church was among the Netherlands’ “hidden churches,” expected literally to hide behind a facade that did not reveal the building’s true purpose, as required by Dutch law at the time. My Civics-teacher-brain tuned in, thinking of the First Amendment’s promise to protect religious freedoms, which surely must have appealed to anyone who saw – and sees – their state persecute their sincerely-held religious beliefs. That this church dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua is tucked behind statues of Old Testament brothers in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter perfectly illustrates the spirit of the since-repealed Dutch religious laws: the state must be able to plausibly deny having awareness of your worship so as to not legally prosecute.

This contrived deceit speaks to Suitbert’s particular brand of fraud: to not only insure items that he did not actually own, but to insure them multiple times over, via different brokers, a deception he managed because he was dressed as a seminarian when he approached insurance agents. The paradox of Suitbert’s life is that he concurrently had aspirations towards a religious vocation and a life beyond his personal – but not familial – wealth. While I cannot find a single record of his seminary attendance, witnesses at his criminal trial admitted that he had been committed to a life of prayer and the study of Latin, suggesting that his sacred and profane urges were sincere. There is no record of Suitbert’s attendance in the Mozes en Aaronkerk, and I chose to visit it based only on its name.

While historical documents may disappear into the ether without a single trace of their existence, buildings provide sturdier stuff for research. Suitbert had been sentenced to the penitentiary at Hoorn in the northern tip of the Netherlands; the building, conveniently enough for the unpampered traveler, serves now as a hotel.

I reserved the least comfortable accommodations available, a decision which did not disappoint as the air refused to circulate and the room’s creature comforts remained spare.”

This is why historians must travel: most of us will never step inside a penitentiary cell, yet I slept in the same prison in which my subject slept for nearly five years, and believe my construction of what that experience was like was aided by actually being present in the spot.

This was also the case with Eck en Wiel, a small town that hosted the estates of the Mollingers and the van Hellenbergs, Suitbert’s maternal family. I was hosted by Jan, himself a historian and well connected within the region. Jan brought me into Little Joyful, the name bestowed upon the van Hellenberg home in which Suitbert spent part of his childhood. The manse rests in an idyllic setting, that, combined with its name, makes me certain that the sun always shines from a crystal blue sky and the verdant flora is always in full efflorescence. As I admired the corbel ceiling domes, I wondered how a person who had come from such earthly riches could turn to fraud, and I wondered the same when Jan took me to the Catholic church that the van Hellenberg family had funded. I am resigned to never knowing what motivated Suitbert’s crime, and I suspect that no one ever will, just as I suspect that I will never have a sense of how the years in the Hoorn prison brought Suitbert to what seems to have been a sincere repentance.

My travels brought me next to Maastricht, where Suitbert and his family had lived occasionally, and which also holds the archival collection of the region’s criminal trials. I stepped into the local archives and, with my limited Dutch, began opening the registration books of the local Catholic churches and the censuses. In Suitbert’s time and place, the Dutch census was a dynamic document, with people registering in their new towns every time they moved. That Suitbert is unfindable on these documents after the death of his father speaks to the slippery nature of historical research. One can find his siblings and mother, aunts, uncles and cousins, but no Suitbert, suggesting that he was evading yet another obligation or had, as long purported, left the country to continue his education. Another unknown. I turned my attention then to the court records housed in the archives, and the archivist, after hearing my query, helped me to locate the epic tome that held the appropriate records so that I could begin to turn the pages, one by one, in search of Suitbert. The archivist and I were both surprised that I found him within minutes, the benefit of his trial having begun in early January 1852. It was a long record, scores of pages, in a beautiful Dutch script, now awaiting for a translator to unlock its secrets for me.

Mechelen, the city of Suitbert’s infancy, brought me into Belgium, at a time when the country was celebrating its religious heritage with Open Churches, a multinational effort to bring people into houses of worship. Mechelen’s contribution was a walking map of its eight historic churches. Mission literally in hand, I began my work: Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk, Church of Our Lady across the river Dijl, Saints Peter and Paul. All eight visited, but nothing more accomplished than imagining the Mollinger family attending services and gazing upon statues upon which their eyes may have rested. Digital research in my hotel room located baby Suitbert on the local census, but at an address so very indeterminable that even the house historian at the local archives admitted that to navigate the housenumbers customs of the time in order to identify the home would be a fool’s errand, but I think that he enjoyed his herculean effort all the same.

My sabbatical took me to other towns and cities, but their Suitbert historiography was paltry. He had lived in Rotterdam, so I spent a day there, but Nazi bombings had nearly obliterated the city’s documentary history. Though I was unable to definitively answer all of my questions about Suitbert, I was sure to take full advantage of my time overseas. Long an educator of the Holocaust, I visited the Anne Frank House. And as a devotee of international politics, I happened upon the European Union’s Parlamentarium and House of European History, whose images and maps summoned forth the longdormant memories of my own AP European History course.

While these travels enriched me personally and professionally, I greatly appreciated the opportunity for our students at Sewickley Academy to see a teacher engaging the skills that she purports to value in service to her field of study.”

The Sculley Sabbatical supports “enriching, idiosyncratic travel,” which was of immeasurable value to my research, and, just as importantly, to modeling for students what it means to be a joyful, lifelong learner.