One out of three men ordained to the priesthood in the United States this past year was not born here. Does it surprise you to learn this–or that 16 percent of the priests working in the United States since 1985 are foreign born? Catholics of the nineteenth century would not have blinked at these numbers. Accustomed to ethnic variety, they knew from daily experience that the Church relied on imported clergy. According to one study, only between 1940 and 1960 did American Catholicism produce enough native-born priests to meet its needs.
Most Jesuit institutions were launched by a Noah's ark of refugees. In the nineteenth century, exiled French Jesuits erected colleges and churches in New Orleans, Kentucky, and New York. Belgian missionaries planted parishes across the checkerboard flatness of the Midwest. German Jesuits, deported by Bismarck's Kulturkampf, founded schools, parishes, and Indian missions from the Great Lakes to the Badlands of the Dakotas. In the Far West, Italian Jesuit refugees served multiethnic congregations in eleven frontier states. As a result, diversity typified the order's religious communities. The Jesuits of Denver were a jumble of nationalities; a priest wrote in 1885, "two Frenchmen, an Italian, two American scholastics, one Irish brother, two Mexican brothers, one German novice ... One never knows what language to speak!"
Revolution propelled Italian Jesuits to America. Nearly 400 priests, brothers, scholastics, and novices were banished from one kingdom after another during the anticlerical upheaval that accompanied Italian national unification. Expatriates from Piedmont left in 1848. After the fall of the Papal States to the armies of united Italy in 1870, most Jesuits yet remaining emigrated. Sicilian and Neapolitan religious now joined the exodus to the United States.
The first wave of refugees took up work on the East Coast, strengthening the Church at a crucial time when priests were in short supply. In addition to filling the void in pulpits and classrooms, the Italians reformed the training of American Jesuits. In 1869, Neapolitan expatriates founded Maryland's Woodstock College, the nation's most influential seminary. Modeled after the Society's Collegio Romano, Woodstock bore Italy's imprint in every detail—from its architectural design to curriculum to daily operation. "Maryland owes its life to Naples," a grateful Maryland provincial said. "Without Naples we would still be doing our ABC's."
Most of the Italian exiles eventually immigrated to the frontier. From Montana to Texas, from the Pacific Coast to the high plains of Wyoming—they left vivid footprints in the West. Landing in Gold Rush California, Turin Province Jesuits founded colleges and parishes. The state's first institution of higher learning, Santa Clara College, opened in 1851. Four years later, St. Ignatius College (today's University of San Francisco) arose amid sand dunes along the city's main thoroughfare.
In the Pacific Northwest, other Turinese Jesuits and their co-workers planted missions and schools that extended from the Yakimas and Nez Percés eastward to the Cheyennes and Crows. By 1896, the Rocky Mountain Mission schools enrolled over 1,000 Native Americans. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the immigrants extended their educational mission to white settlers by founding Gonzaga and Seattle universities.
In the Southwest, Neapolitans of the New Mexico–Colorado Mission embraced an itinerant ministry. "Almost all week, I am out galloping from village to village in order to preach, say Mass, administer the sacraments," a circuit-riding priest wrote. "In Europe, it would seem strange to maintain a stall of four horses, but here four are not enough." In 1877, the Neapolitani established a school for Latinos in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that was later relocated to Denver as Regis College. The promotion of literacy drew the Italians into the publishing business. For nearly nine decades, their influential Spanish-language newspaper, La Revista Católica, molded public opinion on a host of controversial issues of concern to the region's Hispanic population.
 This Corpus Christi procession by members of the Coeur d'Alene tribe took place sometime after 1909. Italian Jesuits promoted devotions that centralized—"Romanized"—Catholicism for their different congregations. |
The uprooted Jesuits also functioned as intermediaries for some of the nearly 36 million immigrants who poured into the country between 1821 and 1924. Then, as today, churches preserved ethnic and cultural identity for immigrant newcomers while easing their integration to a new life in a new environment. The typical Catholic church of the era echoed with the chatter of mutually incomprehensible tongues. "The population here is made of up every nationality," an Italian Jesuit wrote from Colorado. "Since we have studied ... languages for over thirty years," a priest in California added, "there's a lot we can do." In New York's Lower East Side, Fr. Nicola Russo's work among Italian immigrants provided a model of successful ministry for parishes across the country. The Italian Jesuits were unstinting in praise of their Irish parishioners. "A great deal of the good" the Jesuits accomplished in California, a priest reported, "is due to the Irish who are the main supporters of our work." The Jesuits also interacted with older, established ethnic communities, particularly Latinos and Native Americans, two groups with whom the émigré religious were closely tied for decades. One of the reasons why the Italians attained leverage among Indian tribes was the priests' foreign origin. Their ambiguous national status as immigrants coupled with facility in mastering native tongues eased their reception by native peoples, who did not hold them accountable for repressive United States policies.
In the uneducated portions of the West, colleges rather than Indian missions paved the way to Jesuit influence. The Italians' foreign birth did not deter settlers from enrolling in their schools. Indeed, the clergy's status as outsiders proved an asset in recruiting students from among the West's cosmopolitan population. Like other Catholic religious orders, the Jesuits provided the only schooling to many children of ethnic minorities. About a fourth of the 1,650 students who enrolled at Santa Clara College during its first 25 years were of Hispanic origin. To accommodate these learners, the Italian Jesuits offered some bilingual instruction. To Hispanic populations sapped by dislocation and loss, these hybridizing schools smoothed the transition from an old to a new society while serving as schools of citizenship in the young republic; these enrollees discovered among the European faculty mentors who themselves wrestled with the challenge of acculturation.
Italian Jesuits in the States ministered to Native Americans, Hispanics, Irish, and Italians themselves. Fr. Salvatore Giglio, SJ, sits with members of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Pueblo, Colorado. |
The transplanted school masters discovered that patterns of education acceptable in the Old World had to be refashioned to fit the cosmopolitan West. Because the Italians' frontier colleges had been founded in the aftermath of mineral strikes, students in California or Colorado were more inclined to study bookkeeping or mineralogy than Latin poetry. The missionary teachers offered extensive instruction in the sciences—more, in fact, than was available in Jesuit institutions in the East. So essential was mineral analysis that a course on the subject became obligatory at Gonzaga College in Spokane. The Italians' penchant for accommodation resulted in melting-pot institutions that were neither fully American nor fully European, but a casserole of both.
In the Southwest, Neapolitan missionaries blended the traditions of their homeland with local Hispanic American notions. For a half-century, the missionaries crisscrossed the countryside, scattering the seeds of Italian influence. They were not inclined, however, to entirely sweep aside indigenous customs. That temptation was tempered by the Mediterranean cultural matrix that the foreign clergy shared with the native population as well as by the sympathetic grasp of Hispanic culture that many of them had gained during early exile in Spain. By sometimes integrating Italian and Mexican traditions, the Neapolitans legitimized themselves in the eyes of New Mexican Catholics. In turn, the Italians' adaptive give-and-take approach helped make their Romanizing ecclesiastical reforms more acceptable.
Wherever posted, the Italians aimed at reconciling religious differences among multicultural congregations. Their objective was to bind America's Catholics more closely to Rome, to advance a European-style institutional Church in the United States, and to forge a community where, as Bishop Martin Spalding of Kentucky once said, all races and cultures would find themselves "completely at home." This they accomplished by importing old-world religious devotions, enhancing the role of the priest in Church affairs, and promoting the centralization of Catholicism under papal authority. The standardized practices they championed far and wide—May devotions, Corpus Christi processions, the papal cult of personality, devotion to St. Joseph, homage to the Sacred Heart—had a centralizing purpose. Thus the Italians promoted the integration of diversified Americans—Italians and Indians, Anglos and Latinos—into a single transnational Catholic culture that surpassed local boundaries. Wherever the Italians went, the Church was more Roman when they left.
A burial on an Indian reservation in Washington. In the nineteenth century, especially in the West, priests were circuit riders who relied on horses and buggies, and later automobiles, to tend to their country parishes. |
When the immigrant clergy introduced European religious notions to congregations in the United States, they usually met acceptance rather than rejection because heterogenous American congregations interpreted the centralized practices offered by the European priests as a means of transcending the restrictive confines of ethnicity. Of a German Jesuit who toiled among fractured immigrant populations in the nineteenth-century Midwest, a historian wrote: "He gave them a Catholic sense and determination where before they were separate and dissonant." An early Santa Clara graduate voiced the same conviction about students at his alma mater in the 1850s: "Whether native or Eastern, Mexican or South American, English, French or Italians, Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, they were Santa Clara boys."
By the late nineteenth century, Italian hegemony over Jesuit operations in the West began to wane. Colleges that had sprung into existence by mid century as crossroad cultures were increasingly dominated by students and faculty who were American and Irish American. As native-born vocations to the Society increased, Italian influence diminished. Piedmontese jurisdiction on the West Coast finally ended in 1909 when the California and Rocky Mountain missions were united in the newly created California Province. Ten years later, the Neapolitan mission in the Southwest was absorbed by the Missouri and New Orleans provinces of the Society.
|
|
Saturino Ayon, bedecked with medals, stands next to the diploma he earned in 1866 from Santa Clara College. The schools founded by Italian Jesuits in the West drew many Latinos into an educational and cultural environment similar to their own. |
What does the story of the Italian Jesuits tell us? It reminds us that immigration and multiculturalism are not solely contemporary phenomena. These have, in fact, been hallmarks of American society since its beginning. The Jesuit order is what it is today, in part, because of its European forerunners who sustained it at a crucial time. Parishes founded by the Italians and their co-workers prosper still in the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Missoula, Denver, El Paso, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Clara. Missions and schools founded by the European Jesuits remain in operation on Indian reservations throughout the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps their most lasting legacy lies in the several preparatory schools and the five universities they founded.
The coming of the Italians transformed the Jesuits' isolated American branch from an organization dominated by local concerns to a more diverse and global body integrated into the wider life of the Church. To Blandina Segale, a Sister of Charity who worked with the clergy of New Mexico for nearly twenty years, the Neapolitans were without equals. "Out here," she wrote, "we call the Jesuits 'the vanguard of the church.'" Fr. John Frieden, a Jesuit from Luxemburg who worked with the Piedmontese on the West Coast, acknowledged their success as pastors, educators, and community builders. What he said of the émigrés in California was also expressed by other contemporaries about Italian Jesuits in the West: "They were remarkable men."
