Mysore :
The annual fest of St. Anthony’s Shrine at Dornahalli in K.R. Nagar taluk will be held from June 4 to 13.
Addressing a press conference here recently, Rev. Fr. Gilbert D’Silva, Rector, St. Anthony’s Shrine said that the nine-day festival will be inaugurated at 6 am by hoisting the flag at the shrine on June 4. About the Shrine:The Miraculous Statue of St.Anthony has an authentic history now covering a period over two hundred years. A humble peasant, while ploughing his ragi field suddenly came across a small wooden statue; and thinking it for a ‘doll’, he gave it to his children to play with.
One night he had a dream in which a friar wearing the same dress as that of the statue appeared to him and told him that the object turned up by his plough was not a ‘doll’, as he thought; but a statue of a revered catholic saint, known all over the world as Wonder-Worker, that he would like to have a special Shrine in his honour in that place of discovery and that he and his family would be blessed. But the farmer, however, turned a deaf ear to this admonition and in the course of a week his bullocks died and two untimely deaths of his children occurred, which he attributed to his negligence to carry out the instructions received in the dream.
A catholic priest who used to come from Pondicherry to visit Bangalore and Mysore once a year recognised the statue as that of St.Anthony of Padua and urged the farmer to carry out the instructions received in his dream. The farmer erected a little shrine in the field where he had found the statue.
Thereafter the farmer began to prosper well and the news spread. The Shrine became the centre of devotion in spite of various obstacles and hardships. People began to flock to the shrine to seek the saint’s intercession in their distress and sorrows. The fame of the Shrine grew fast and soon a catholic village grew up in the environs of the shrine.
Rt. Rev. Msgr. I.H.Lobo, the former parish priest of Dornahalli, began the construction of a new church in 1964. On 13th June, the same year the foundation stone of this huge church was laid by the Bishop of Mysore. On 13th June, 1969 the new Church was consecrated by the Bishop of Mysore.
source: http: //www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore / Home> General News / June 02nd, 2014