Beyond Memory , livre ebook

Beyond Memory
SUNY series in Italian/American Culture

Fred L. Gardaphe, editor
Beyond Memory
Italian Protestants in Italy and America
Dennis Barone
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Production, Emily Keneston
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barone, Dennis, author.
Title: Beyond memory : Italian protestants in Italy and America / Dennis Barone.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series in Italian/American culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005976 | ISBN 9781438462158 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9781438462172 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Italian American Protestants—History. | Italian American Protestants—Social conditions. | Protestants—Italy—History.
Classification: LCC BR563.I8 B37 2016 | DDC 280/.408951073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005976
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Michelle Heinzinger and Darlene Lipp (le mie sorelle)
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Soul of a Stranger
Chapter 2. To Struggle for a Place at the Table
Chapter 3. Does Christ Linger at Eboli?
Chapter 4. Answers to the Roman Question
photo gallery
Chapter 5. By Twos and by Threes
Chapter 6. Christ for Hartford
Chapter 7. A Sermon for the Oppressed
Epilogue
Works Cited
Index
Introduction
Early Sunday morning my wife and I had attended services at the Chiesa Valdese on the Piazza Cavour. Unfortunately, the facade had been wrapped in scaffolding for a restoration project. But the Valdese take their motto from the start of the gospel of John: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
It’s not what people think about when they think about Rome. A pilgrimage to Rome usually centers on a blessing from the Pope in Saint Peter’s Square. We had come to Rome—my wife and I—so that I could speak about the evangelization efforts of Rev. Alfredo Barone, in and around the southern Italian town of Calitri during the 1890s. I spoke at the historical conference “150 Years of Baptist Witness in Italy” (150 anni di testimoninza battista in Italia, 1863–2013), held at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology just around the corner from the Waldensain Church and the Piazza Cavour, an appropriate location since Count Cavour, a leader of the reunification of modern Italy, famously proclaimed, “A free church in a free state.”
But there has been a conflicted relationship between church and state ever since the unification. Religious liberty has often been pledged, and yet even as recently as 2012 the Milan City Council closed evangelical churches and similar closures occurred throughout Lombardy. State schools must teach religion classes that are controlled by Catholic Church authorities, something that would be hard to imagine in the United States.
Pastor Adamo at the Valdese Church on the Piazza Cavour had impressed me with his preaching ex tempore, without notes and rich in gesture. The organ-backed hymns could have easily been mistaken for the Sunday singing of a Presbyterian congregation in New Jersey. When we arrived Pastor Adamo conducted a young couple in their wedding vows. The music, the throwing of rice—all felt very familiar and comfortable. Later during the service Pastor Adamo baptized the couple’s young child. The pastor’s appearance had a Puritan-like plainness, a simple ministerial robe. He preached on John 15: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” This seemed appropriate for a beautiful Sunday morning with a wedding and a baptism.
At the conference I spoke after Domenico Maselli, an esteemed elder spokesman for Protestants in Italy, a pastor, politician, professor, and scholar. Maselli spoke, or so it seemed when I glanced at the paper he held, from one page of handwritten notes and yet he delivered an animated lecture on the relation between the Catholic Church and other churches in Italy. I followed Maselli with my specific case study of one particular Southern evangelization. Massimo Rubboli, University of Genoa, arranged the proceedings so that presentations moved from the general to the particular and then back out to analyses of breadth such as the final paper, Anna Maffei’s discussion of the Baptist church in Italy today.
I traced the years of my great-grandfather’s pastorate in Calitri and his first years in the United States, especially at the Italian Baptist Church of Monson, Massachusetts. I then turned my talk back to Italy, but the Italy of 2013 and not that of 1913, and asked if Protestantism in a predominantly Catholic country might hinder Italianization, whereas Protestantism in the America of a century ago might have been an aid to Americanization? I noted that the mission churches of a century ago in the United States all offered many social programs for immigrants. Now that Italy has become a country of in-migration rather than out-migration how has this change impacted the small, but vibrant, Protestant communities of Italy? All the Italian American Protestant churches at the beginning of the prior century offered abundant social and educational services. Is this so for Protestant churches and the current situation in Italy? What, I asked, can the Protestant churches in Italy do for today’s immigrants?
Before the lunch break finished, I walked through the Theology School with Marta D’Auria, a journalist. We looked for a quiet place to talk. In the library she asked me questions, one of which concerned the lasting impact of my great-grandfather or the relevance that he might have for today. I thought of the Waldensian’s motto once more, the Waldensians who are the oldest reform Christian faith, having begun in the last half of the twelfth century—long before Martin Luther—and faced centuries of persecution stretching long after the time of the Protestant Reformation. I thought of the nine days Rev. Alfredo Barone spent in jail for preaching the gospel in the small hill town of Trevico.
Had I more time for my lecture, I might have read my adaptation of a poem by contemporary Neapolitan writer Erri De Luca which begins: “In the Straits of Otranto and Sicily, / Migrants without voice, / Workers from Africa and Asia” and ends “… for them: / The miracle of Italy is a curse. / For nothing, they’re left to drown.” Thank God I did not have more time. For besides the past, beside family history—what gives me the right to challenge the Protestants of Italy? What do I know of the hungry of Rome or of Hartford? What do I know of the drowned so close to the shores of Lampedusa? How can I understand the feelings of a young evangelist packing up his family, including a boy who would become my grandfather, and emigrating from Italy to Connecticut in 1899?
In this book I examine the complex history of the lived experience of people who engaged in an alternative religious practice in their homeland and then navigated traditional and dominant ways in their adopted land. My study uses literary sources, church records, manuscript sources, and secondary sources in various fields to recover many forgotten voices such as the Baptist Antonio Mangano and the Methodist Antonio Arrighi. Additionally, throughout this project that weaves together Italy and the United States is the story of Rev. Alfredo Barone, my great-grandfather, especially his leadership of Baptist churches in Calitri, Italy and Monson, Massachusetts. I seek to offend no faith tradition, to respect all, and to celebrate at the same time that I analyze and critique.
I title this book Beyond Memory because so many want to rob Italian Americans of any trace of Italian identity and push them into the ranks of the Yankee Doodle Dandies: Beyond Memory because “all Italians are Catholic,” because it is little known that this is not so, because Italian American Protestant churches are gone: and Beyond Memory because it is difficult to recall this somewhat forgotten past. For example, the Italian Branch of the Assemblies of God incorporated in New Jersey in 1951 and grew thereafter until first the use of the Italian language declined, and then in 1990 the specifically Italian Pentecostal organization dissolved (Saggio 40). Today in Italy, according to figures from Marco Giampetruzzi (archivist Unione Cristiana Evangelica Battista d’Italia, Rome), there are 112 churches in the Union of Baptists and 4,275 members. This does not take into account Baptists of other umbrella organizations such as Reformed Baptists and other free Baptists churches. More than a century ago (1909) Rev. D. G. (Dexter) Whittinghill counted 60 Baptist churches in Italy with 1,619 members (“The Italian Mission” 170), while in his 1918 study Enrico Sartorio reported, “There are in America about four hundred Italian Protestant churches and missions, having a membership of more than twenty-five thousand Italians” (110). Although these numbers are low, the Italian Protestants at the time of migration and after can tell us much about Italy, America, and religion. Even the fact that Catholics often referred to Protestant evangelization as a failure, whereas Protestants almost always called it promising, reveals something important about the attitudes of both groups regarding the evangelization efforts of the latter. The differing attitudes toward these numbers ar