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Bishop Scalabrini and Archbishop Corrigan

(1887–1902)

The Bishops of the United States became concerned with the pastoral care of Italian immigrants from the very beginning of their arrival. Parishes with Italian priests engaged in the pastoral care of their compatriots could be found in some cities like Philadelphia and New York already toward the end of the decade of the 1870s.¹ In 1883 the Archbishops of the United States were convened in Rome to prepare the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. Irish and Italian immigration was the argument of a special session of this meeting. At this time, Italian immigrants were arriving by the tens of thousands. From 1881 to 1890 American official statistics reported the arrival of 307,309 Italians, a figure that would double in the following decade.

            The Coadjutor Archbishop of New York Cardinal John McCloskey, and Michael Augustine Corrigan, spoke on the difficulty of providing Italians with their own churches because they were not frequenting them too much nor were they contributing to the support of the priests.² Armed with first hand information

gathered from the New York pastors, Archbishop Corrigan kept the same views during the conciliar debates and favored sending the Pope a very explicit letter expressing how miserable the religious condition of the Italian immigrants was. At the same time, on orders from Cardinal McCloskey, he wrote to Don Giovanni Bosco asking for some priests for the pastoral care of the Italians in New York.³ The Council of Baltimore did not indicate many practical measures regarding Italian immigration. It insisted that a welcoming committee be established in the ports and it encouraged the protection of emigrant girls. In the Bishops’ opinion the solution to the problem had to be found first of all in Italy through a better religious formation of the people and the assignment of well prepared and unselfish Italian priests among the migrants.

            The Congregation of Propaganda Fide, under whose jurisdiction were the Catholics in the United States until 1908, was thinking that the answer to the difficulties had to be found on the spot in the Americas. In this dialectic process, Archbishop Corrigan, who had succeeded as Ordinary in New York in 1885 and would have remained until his death in 1902, played a key role.

            While the direct contact with the Italians of the poor and notorious slums of New York, where most of the immigrants were settling, pushed Archbishop Corrigan to look for help in Italy, the encounter with departing emigrants, the awareness of their exploitation on the part of emigration agents and the lack of action of the Italian State, prompted Bishop Scalabrini to look for practical initiatives that could assist the immigrants from Italy in their new environment.⁴ The fruitful friendship between the two Bishops Corrigan and Scalabrini was born of a common pastoral concern, in particular for a catechesis of reevangelization of the Italian masses in America. First, this concern led them to know each other through correspondence and then to meet in person in Piacenza and in New York.

            The personalities and the cultural background of Archbishop Corrigan and Bishop Scalabrini were different, but linked together by a great pastoral zeal,

and a deep human and Christian sensitivity for the migrants struggling for survival in an unfamiliar country, faced with the transition from a peasant to a workers’ urban life, with the obvious need to give themselves new religious answers before the challenges emerging from their changing personal and ethnic identity .

            Archbishop Corrigan stresses integration and the formation of an American identity to favor the unity of the faithful and of the Church, a unity that must take precedence over any nationalism and ethnocentrism. Bishop Scalabrini emphasizes more the culture of origin of the migrants and its function in the preservation of the faith and he accepts separate pastoral practices and structures that, however, must find their unity in the person of the local Bishop. The exchange of letters on the Lucerne Memorial of 1891 sharpens the focus of the two distinct visions. Bishop Scalabrini’s visit to the United States in 1901 and the personal conversations between the two Bishops will shorten the distance, even though the dialectical aspect of the relationship would have remained since it was rooted in the nature of things and in the different expectations tied to the cultures of the countries of origin and settlement.

            In this Scalabrini-Corrigan correspondence one catches some important glimpses on the initial life of the Scalabrinian Congregation as well as the sacrifices and generous commitment of the missionaries, plunged into the daily difficulties of the life of the immigrants, their lack of preparation for American pastoral methods, and above all their administrative inexperience and the scarce coordination of their life as a group. Even though in agreement on the usefulness of specific parishes for the migrants, Bishop Scalabrini and Archbishop Corrigan will arrive at a moment of great tension right on the issue of deficient administration and of the debts incurred by the Italian missionaries. But, on the validity of specific pastoral and social structures for the various immigrant groups, the two Bishops were in basic agreement since their priority concern was the preservation of the immigrants’ faith intimately linked to their culture. In the course of this correspondence reference is made to all the most significant personalities involved with immigration to the United States at the time and with the action of the Church on their behalf: Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini, Peter Paul Cahensly, Archbishop John Ireland, the first Apostolic Delegate to Washington, Archbishop Francesco Satolli, the missionary men and women serving the immigrants.

            This correspondence sheds light on an important chapter of the history of the Church in America and on the action of the Church in Italy at the service of the modern phenomenon of mass migrations.5