Part Two

(Gravity and urgency of the problem)

From the very beginning of the Discovery, the Church carried out her mission in America by curbing the greed and brutality of the conquerors and civilizing the natives.  One example among many is the fight waged by the clergy to defend the natives and the Christian communities founded among the Guarany Indians in the Missions of Paraguay.  These communities formed a vast political and religious empire, admired even by writers not too kind to Catholicism, and appropriately called The Republic of the Saints.

But, later on, as times changed, the clergy got excessively involved in politics, and the colonial political power in Latin America was anything but good.  It was foolishly tyrannical and grasping not only with the natives but also with the Americanized descendants of Europe.  The saying that a European shoemaker had a greater right to govern a colony than the most brilliant Creole became an axiom of those colonial Governments, which seemed to have been purposely set up to alienate those rising generations from the motherland and to instill in them a deep-seated hostility to everything European.  The moral divorce got worse and worse until it burst into open rebellion.  This state of animosity and rebellion had repercussions on religion because most of the people believed that the clergy was in league with the Governments, as was often the case.  If we add to this the scarcity of churches and priests, we have to conclude that in those regions Catholicism existed in name more than in fact, to the great moral and religious detriment of both governments and people.

When the waves of emigration began, many priests also crossed the ocean; but unfortunately, with rare exceptions, they represented everything bad that the clergy could offer in terms of morals.  There, almost without restraint, with a scandalous life and illicit trade in holy

things, they brought shame and ignominy on religion and ruined entire populations.

Now, the problem is to restore all things in Christ in those regions as well.

To this end much has been done, but it is very little compared to what still has to be done.  Given the dangers to their faith, all the emigrants of the various nationalities need the vigilant and maternal care of the Church.  But Italian emigration deserves special attention because, of all those peoples, the Italians, if I may say so, are perfectly foreigners.  In the United States, the Spaniards and the Portuguese found vast areas where their language is spoken, while the English and the Irish have a second motherland there and in the British territories, at least as far as religious care is concerned.  Only the Italians live there abandoned to themselves.  There was a time, not long ago, when, because of intolerance, they were shabbily served even in Catholic churches!  The same is true of the Poles, the Ruthenians, and the Germans.

On my recent trips through those regions, I have witnessed demonstrations of faith that moved me to tears.  But I have also accumulated a catalog of anecdotes and stories that make me blush as a bishop when I think that the abandonment in which the emigrants were left for so many years could ever have happened and, in fact, is still continuing to happen to so many people even in our day!  There are hundreds of thousands of our expatriate brothers and sisters who are pleading in vain for a priest to speak to them of God in the language of their distant motherland.

This is also the fate of the Poles, who are torn by schism, of the Canadians, of the Germans ‑- who do not have the good Jesuit Fathers as they do in the State of Rio Grande do Sul ‑- of the Ruthenians with the burning question of celibacy for their priests, of the Italo-Greeks, and of other new waves of Catholic emigration, disseminated a bit all over (...).