Protestants, Italian Americans and

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.

Routledge eBooks, 2017

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.

The Catholic bishop Giovanni Scalabrini (1839-1905) and the Methodist bishop William Burt (1852-1936) were protagonists of the evangelization missions for Italian immigrants organized in the United States at the time of the Italian Great Emigration. They were the leaders of the ecclesiastical strategies to conquer and retain the loyalty of the migrants to their churches and the promoters of social assistance in the urban neighborhoods of immigrants. My speech will focus on the diversity of approaches, ideology and the setting of the two bishops, in order to show how they addressed the evangelization of Italian immigrants in the United States, giving in some cases alternative solutions to the same problem, and in others circumstances converging in the analysis and missionary strategy. The sources of the Archivio Generale Scalabriniano in Rome and the William Burt Collection of the United Methodist Church in Madison, New Jersey, will be the basis on which I will reconstruct an important piece of the American Catholic history in a comparative perspective.

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).

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.

1987

work on the continuing significance of ethnicity and race in American social and political life. (1) We felt it was important to ascertain how much Italian Americans had changed or progressed since their early settlement in the American colonies and their mass migration to the United States at the turn of the century. We also wised to consider how the character of subsequent migration has changed and in what direction Italian Americans were going. A sub-theme of the meetings was the Italians of Rhode Island, recognizing that this state has the greatest concentration of citizens who trace their roots back to Italy of any state in the union. In recognition of the outstanding achievements of Rhode Island's Italians, the first two chapters of this volume chronicle the political careers of John Pastore and Luigi De Pasquale. The stories of these two men parallel the social and political development of the states Italian American population.

2012