63. French-language Address of Mr. P. Fuller to Bishop Scalabrini at the New York Catholic Club¹³⁵

          New York, October 15, 1901

Your Excellency:

I am both flattered and moved to have been chosen to address you in the name of the Archbishop and of this Catholic Club and to tell you to what extent you are welcomed here.

            On all titles you have a right to a warm and kind welcome: your personality would suffice; the priesthood and episcopate require it even more; the charitable and holy mission that takes you among us crowns your titles and highly claims every help and sympathy from this Club and this Diocese.

            Useless to list here all the glories the world owes to your dear country. In the arts and in the sciences its creativity has never dried. Even

today we owe to Italian authors what is more advanced in that science that aims to unite people more and more and to inspire all countries to respect the rights of others, I refer to the science of international jurisprudence.

            But it is of your people that I need . . . the calumny, that could deprive the Italian immigration of the glory to which I pay here publicly the tribute.

            But they are far from their country, in a foreign land, without finding any of the simple customs of their youth, without finding as well the melodious language in which they have learned to pray. They are in exile. You understood the sadness and the dangers of their condition. You understood, in the language of your great poet, that

                        Nessun maggior dolore

                        Che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria

(there is no greater sorrow than to remember happy times in one’s misery), and you concerned yourself with bringing them that maternal comfort that only the Church offers.

            This is a work, Your Excellency, not only of piety but of holy wisdom. Away from their native place, their friends, their language, all their memories, surrounded by strangers, without companions and persons to confide in, worn out by the hard necessities of incessant daily work to meet their needs and those of the people they left behind in their native country, surrounded by a vast population that doesn’t recognize the divine authority of our mother the Church, there is no surprise if they slowly forget this mother in their difficulties and if, like the Israelites deprived of their leader, they soon are satisfied with the attitude of this century, the pursuit of material comforts.¹³⁶

            You, therefore, are doing the work of a missionary and an apostle for which there is a pressing and imperative necessity. May God help you to accomplish it! Here you are not lacking some faithful collaborators. Your work will be facilitated, much more so because you will know how to inspire into your sheep love for their new pastures, gratitude for the freedom they enjoy, confidence in the good brothers who surround them and

who, without being from their country, are interested in them and offer them the dedication that every good shepherd has for his flock.