Report on Italian Immigration

Most Eminent and Reverend Lords,

The sorrowful increase of Italian emigration in recent years justly worries those concerned with the well-being of so many unfortunate people, who are forced to leave their native country in order to survive or improve their living conditions. Indeed, recent statistics show that just in the year 1886, 167,377 Italians emigrated abroad. Of this number 83,053 migrated temporarily and 84,352 migrated permanently. The number includes 23,320 women and over 15,000 children under fourteen years of age. Thus, tens of thousands of families migrate in just one year in search of better luck.

It is easy to imagine how many disappointments, how many moral and material harms they are exposed to on such long voyages, in all sorts of conditions, and in such great poverty of spiritual comforts. As a result, the good migrants, who make up the greater part, run serious risks to their morality and their very faith. Many well-publicized facts, as well as those that have become known through private correspondence, have strongly impressed public opinion, calling attention to this exodus that often presents itself with all the characteristics of a white slave trade.

If the preoccupation for those who can be responsible for the fate of so many wretched people must be great, much greater is the pity that the Church feels for them. For that reason, faced by the harms that threaten so many poor Italians, her sons, the Church was the first to be moved by them. Driven by the twofold motive of religion and charity, she began to seriously seek a remedy. To ensure the values of eternal life and, insofar as it is within her power, to alleviate the sorrows of this life.

The extensive correspondence which exists on this matter between the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and the bishops of Italy and America proves once more the vigilance, the zeal, and the prudent activity by which the Holy See fulfills through its own agency its civilizing mission. Since it is impossible to prevent emigration, the Holy See aims to impede the most serious drawbacks that it carries in the religious and moral order.

This report is a simple presentation of the facts, from which emerge:

1.     The first attempts accomplished through the initiative of the Sacred Congregation in order to lend the aid of religion and charity to the Italians who are in the process of emigration.

2.     The continuous investigations undertaken so as to fully know the various conditions in which the Italians find themselves in the place of greater emigration.

3.     The various projects that have been discussed to provide efficiently for the religious and material needs of the immigrants.

4.     The resolutions which the Congregation has felt appropriate to submit for the approval of the Supreme Pontiff, so as to carry through his prudent plans.