Sunday,
April 29, 2007
Italian Jesuits in the
American West, 1848-1919 and their Disconnection with Italian Americans
The "Brokers of Culture "
tells us is while the Italian Jesuits received a warm reception from
Mexican-American parishioners in New Mexico and from the Nez Percis in Idaho, and so many others, they contributed
little to the furtherance of the Italian Community ,
which may have been as a result of Jesuits being at odds with Catholic
orthodoxy, and not welcomed by the strict Catholic Italians.
The
19th-century Jesuitsfervently ultramontane, devoted to
the Sacred Heart, fierce defenders of Pope Pius IX and the 1870 definition of
papal infallibility and suspicious of liberalism in all its varieties
and the public schools that seemed to inculcate itsurely seemed unlikely role
models for Jesuit and non-Jesuit scholars in the immediate postconciliar
era. Their zeal seemed triumphalist, their vision
narrowly institutional.
McKevitt, a professor of Jesuit
studies at Santa Clara
University, does not
disagree with this assessment, but he also opens our eyes to a different view.
He began thinking about his subjects, the 400 Italian Jesuits who left Italy
for the American West between 1848-1919, when he was a young Jesuit 40
years ago, bumping into old trunks and photos of his now long-forgotten
predecessors in a seminary attic. Most of these Italian Jesuits left
involuntarily, expelled by Italian nationalists in the successive waves of
Italian unification that dominated the peninsulas politics.
They ministered
to Indians in the Northwest, Irish-Americans in San
Francisco and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest; and they ran the
nations most influential Catholic seminary, in Woodstock, Md.
They founded numerous high schools and five collegesRegis
University, Santa
Clara University, the
University of San
Francisco, Gonzaga
University and Seattle University.
Off to a Distant Land
Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919
By Gerald McKevitt
Stanford Univ. Press. 448p $60
In a few months
we will reach the 70th anniversary of the publication of Gilbert Garraghans three-volume history of the Jesuits in the
19th-century Midwest.
Dont have a copy beside your night table? Join the club. I teach
American history for a living. I write about the history of Catholicism in the United States.
But I only recently became aware of Garraghans
achievement. In his way, Garraghan, himself a Jesuit,
has produced a masterpiece: tightly written, frank (for the time) about the
successes and failures of his predecessors, many of whom he must have known,
and brilliantly researched, using manuscript sources in French, Italian, Latin,
German and English with nonchalant ease. Garraghans
absorption in the details of each Jesuit parish, school and retreat house
deterred, perhaps numbed, many potential readers, but his study concluded with
a modest congratulatory note in honor of those Jesuits who established a
tradition of zealous and energetic effort for the extension of Christs
kingdom on earth.
Garraghan had few successors. Even as studies by distinguished
scholars on 16th- and 17th-century Jesuits in China,
New France and Brazil
poured off the presses, especially in the last 20 years, 19th-century Jesuits
languished in historical obscurity. Why? Gerald McKevitt,
the author of a new book about the 19th-century Jesuit immigrants, Brokers
of Culture, doesnt speculate.
But the 19th-century Jesuitsfervently ultramontane,
devoted to the Sacred Heart, fierce defenders of Pope Pius IX and the 1870
definition of papal infallibility and suspicious of liberalism in all
its varieties and the public schools that seemed to inculcate itsurely seemed
unlikely role models for Jesuit and non-Jesuit scholars in the immediate postconciliar era. Their zeal seemed triumphalist,
their vision narrowly institutional.
McKevitt, a professor of Jesuit studies at Santa Clara University,
does not disagree with this assessment, but he also opens our eyes to a different
view. He began thinking about his subjects, the 400 Italian Jesuits who left
Italy for the American West between 1848-1919, when he was a young Jesuit 40
years ago, bumping into old trunks and photos of his now long-forgotten
predecessors in a seminary attic. Most of these Italian Jesuits left
involuntarily, expelled by Italian nationalists in the successive waves of
Italian unification that dominated the peninsulas politics. They
ministered to Indians in the Northwest, Irish-Americans in San
Francisco and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest; and they ran the
nations most influential Catholic seminary, in Woodstock, Md.
They founded numerous high schools and five collegesRegis
University, Santa
Clara University, the
University of San
Francisco, Gonzaga
University and Seattle University.
Brokers of
Culture
is superb, a major study that will shape the next generation of scholarship in
Western and religious history. McKevitt deftly
sketches the drama and pain of exile, the tears shed as these Italian priestsalso Italian sons, Italian brothersleft for a
lifetime of labor in a distant land. He then analyzes how Italian Jesuits
received a warm reception from Mexican-American parishioners in New Mexico and from the Nez Percis
in Idaho, in
part because their linguistic abilities, honed by years of Greek and Latin,
facilitated quick communication. Their ultramontane pietybringing Corpus Christi processions and Lourdes
grottoes to such exotic locales as Kalispell, Mont., and Taos,
N.Mex.also melded with native traditions in both
regions more than the less demonstrative religious practices and more
restrictive dress codes favored by Protestant competitors. That these Italian
Jesuits and their New Mexican parishioners fought the introduction of the
public school system, began a Spanish language press and declared themselves as
American as descendants of the Mayflower reminds us how American nationalism
during this period, like all nationalisms, was less a fact than a hard-won,
contested achievement. That Italian Jesuits disdained the Americanist side in the turn-of-the-century battle
over Catholic modernism suggests how abstract theological disputes framed such
seemingly practical questions as whether students at Santa
Clara must remain on campus at all times or could occasionally
receive a day pass to sleepy San Jose.
In general, the
Italian Jesuits were less successful brokers of culture (to use McKevitts unwieldly title)
in their colleges, where they struggled to adapt to the competitive marketplace
(even then) of American higher education. Santa Clara,
for example, was founded in 1851, well before either Stanford or University of California
at Berkeley.
This early prominence guaranteed the Jesuits a steady and continuing stream of
distinguished alumni, but the refusal of one withdrawn Italian Jesuit president
to meet with college benefactors, let alone students and non-Jesuit faculty,
does not convey eagerness to advance in the U.S. News & World Report
rankings. When Catholic parents asked for business courses, Italian Jesuits
required Latin and Greek. When Catholic students requested recreational
facilities, Italian Jesuits forbade card playing, smoking and boxing. Over time
the more worldly of the Italian Jesuits, and then Jesuits from many
backgrounds, took the administrati ve reins and propelled the colleges to their current
excellence, with the vineyards and trellises on college grounds as mute
testimony to a different, genuinely foreign vision.
At times, McKevitt, like Garraghan, delves
deeper into the internal history and practice of the order than the casual
reader may wish to go. But he always resurfaces with something important to say
about Catholicism and religion more broadly in the American west. His signal
contribution may be to refocus our attention on the international currents undergirding 19th-century Catholicism. Entirely at home in
the Italian history of the order and its Italian language paper trail in Turin,
Naples and Rome, McKevitt charts a chapter in
religious globalization, as Catholic practices, devotional objects and ideas
circulate back and forth across the Atlantic. In this he is like Garraghan, and in this the lives of their 19th-century
subjects echo our own opportunities and dilemmas. John T. McGreevy
John T.
McGreevy
teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. He is
the author, most recently, of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton, 2003).
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