Catholicism, Italian Americans and

Tthe sources on immigration and the American Catholic dioceses found in the archives of the Holy See originate from two different processes: responses to a routine call for diocesan reports or for “lettere di stato”; or reactions to a local crisis (but, in more than one way, all the documentation about immigrants in these files is a reaction to a major crisis). Therefore, these documents privilege, on one hand, a diocesan perspective (the reports), or a personal one (the “lettere di stato”). While they present concrete cases (as in files on immigration), it is quite impossible to find out anything about the daily life of parishes and ecclesiastical institutions.

Pastoral Psychology, 2011

In spite of significant efforts by American Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to convert the huge influx of Italian immigrants, their results were disappointing for a variety of theological, psychological and sociological reasons. This confluence of immigration, religious conversion and mission has received scant attention, even though it offers an object lesson for contemporary immigration and conversion studies.

This article focuses on two ancient ecclesiastical institutions, the lay patronage (Ius Patronatus) and the council of the upkeep of the church (Consilium Fabricae Ecclesiae). It attests to how those two institutions, in decline in Italy and almost unknown in the United States in the late modern period, diffused and developed among Italian immigrants in the United States. The aim is to contribute to the historical understanding of the evolution of the ecclesiastical culture of the Catholic laity in the late modern period, in particular before the promulgation of the Codex Iuris Canonici (1917).

Horizons, 2002

The early decades of the Cinquecento witnessed a proliferation of religious publications in the Italian vernacular. In the second half of the century the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and the founding of the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office (1542) and of the Index (1572) would halt the consistent and substantially uncontrolled development of devotional and spiritual literature. But in the generation before this a huge number of pamphlets and books, "from the more traditional to the more innovative", flooded the markets of the Italian peninsula, with considerable impact on the religious thought and practice of both clergy and laypeople.1 As has been pointed out, spiritual books acted in those years, alongside with popular preaching, as effective vehicles for religious propaganda and for the dissemination of new ideas.2 They promoted not only the doctrines introduced by the German and Swiss Reformation, but also the anti-dogmatic spirituality and the reform proposals elaborated by Italian evangelical groups clustered around such leading figures as the Venetian cardinal Gaspare Contarini and the Spanish alumbrado Juan de Valdés, or by the representatives of the most dynamic religious gatherings of the age, from 1 For an overview on this topic, see Ugo Rozzo, Linee per una storia dell'editoria religiosa in

Routledge eBooks, 2017

The Catholic Historical Review, 2016

An enormous amount of documents on the Irish Catholic Diaspora is available in the archives of the Holy See—Vatican Secret Archives, Archives of Propaganda, Archives of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—in the general archives of the religious orders, and in the Archives of the Irish College of Rome.1 The quantity and the relevance of these documents increased during the period after 1815, when the end of the Napoleonic Wars reopened the communication between the Holy See and the missions and the dioceses in Ireland, in the British colonies, and in the United States, while the emigration from Ireland steadily increased. From an archival point of view this period ended in 1908, when the apostolic constitution Sapienti Consilio marked the coming of age of British and Irish, American and Canadian Catholic Churches, while from an historical perspective the historical hiatus is linked to the First World War and the Irish War of Independence.