Kościół pw. Świętego Tomasza Apostoła, Kraków

The Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle is an early Baroque convent church at the corner of Szpitalna and Saint Thomas streets in Kraków’s Old Town. Its Dębnik marble portal and statues crown a site reshaped from a Polish Brethren meeting house into a Carmelite chapel in the early seventeenth century.

At the corner of Szpitalna and Saint Thomas streets, the Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle is a historic Roman Catholic convent church of the Holy Spirit Sisters. Its early Baroque front—Baroque being a dramatic, richly decorative seventeenth-century manner—has two levels. Notice the dark Dębnik marble portal, made in the first half of the seventeenth century; the niches above it hold stone figures of Christ, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul.

This small church occupies a site with a turbulent past. A wooden meeting house of the Polish Brethren stood here first, until anti-Protestant unrest destroyed it on the twenty-third of May, fifteen ninety-one. In sixteen eighteen, Wespazjan Piotrowski gave the former meeting-house property to the Carmelites, who converted its townhouse into their city chapel.

Bishop Tomasz Oborski consecrated it to Saint Thomas the Apostle in sixteen twenty-one, a dedication deliberately used in the Counter-Reformation at former Protestant sites. The Holy Spirit Sisters became its custodians in eighteen hundred while caring for patients at the nearby Hospital of the Holy Spirit. Since twenty eighteen, the church has also held the earthly remains of Venerable Servant of God Sister Emanuela Kalb.