Classe di Lettere

Obiettivo del seminario è quello di ricostruire e definire il ruolo del movimento del Social Gospel all'interno del dibattito sulla “questione sociale” negli Stati Uniti tra la fine della guerra civile (1865) e l’approvazione del Quota Act (1921), con maggiore attenzione agli anni tra il 1880 (primo corso di Etica delle riforme sociali ad Harvard) e il 1917 (pubblicazione di A theology for the Social Gospel di Rauschenbusch). Intendo inoltre concentrarmi da una parte sull’apporto del Social Gospel all’interno del processo di affermazione del modello di società americana contemporanea e dall’altra sulle conseguenze che tale movimento produsse all’interno del protestantesimo americano.

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.

L’obiettivo del mio intervento è quello di riunire, in un quadro storiografico estremamente aggiornato, le poche conoscenze e le grandi lacune degli studi sul protestantesimo italiano negli Stati Uniti (1885-1921). Oltre a fare una breve analisi dello stato dell’arte, intendo proporre uno schema di questioni storiografiche significative e una descrizione delle fonti primarie di origine statunitense. Prenderò in esame, come caso di studio, gli appunti dell’arcivescovo cattolico di New York Michael A. Corrigan (1839-1902), conservati presso gli Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, i quali certificano la rilevanza storica (extra-confessionale) delle vicende del protestantesimo italiano negli USA durante gli anni della Grande Emigrazione italiana.

The goal of my speech is to give an original perspective on the otherwise well-known political relations between the Holy See and the American Church at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on the two linking institutions between the Roman center and the American periphery: the North American College, American institution in Rome, and the Apostolic Delegation, Roman institution in the United States.

The "Italian religious question" in the United States. Religious canon and ecclesial practices in the Italian Catholic communities of the Northeast United States (1876-1921)
by Massimo Di Gioacchino

The Italian religious question refers to the set of problems, prejudices and accusations of a religious nature experienced by Italian Catholic immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The objective of this research was to document the phenomena of deviance from the Catholic religious canon of the ecclesial practices of the Italian immigrants. The aim was, on the one hand, to document the religious history of Italian immigrants in the United States in a precise way, highlighting the gaps and errors of previous historiography and, on the other hand, to document a wide and significant historical cross-section through the use of an original method of historiographical deconstruction and construction based on the examination of the ecclesial practices of the communities and their contextualization in the internal political relations of the Church.