Religious Sentiment, Religion and Migrations

The knowledge of the trials of uprooted people, of the risks and traumas of the transatlantic voyage and of the first settlement in a foreign country, dictated to Bishop Scalabrini and occasionally also to the politicians of his time, some pages brimming over with compassion and indignation. But the Bishop of Piacenza, besides undertaking an effective action of information, prevention and protection, raised the issue of the future of the migrant communities: their integration, their link with the country of origin, the preservation of their religious identity, the latter a concern that inspires and guides, without limiting them, all his forms of intervention. Thus he provides the framework for an innovative cultural debate that, within the limitations imposed by the cultural circumstances of his time, opens some original perspectives in understanding the expectations of the migrants and in providing adequate answers. The starting point of Bishop Scalabrini’s analysis is the type of emigrant that was leaving Italy immediately after its political unification in 1870, “ignorant and uncouth people” in whom primordial feelings were playing a key role. “In the child of the gleba the concept of religion is inseparably united with that of the temple and of the priest. Where any tangible religious structure is absent, little by little he forgets his duties toward God and the Christian life of his spirit weakens and dies.”²⁶ The peasant and rural areas from where almost all emigrants were coming from were anchored to centuries-old traditions where family, religion and community harmonized and created a way of sociocultural belonging and an affective world that defined the sense of identity of the person. The frequent reference of Bishop Scalabrini to the interdependence of religious sentiments and national identity, understood as the convergence of historical and family traditions, a common race, love for the native place, common glories and sorrows, love of God, seems nothing else but the inculturation of the faith and its linkage with ethnicity. The break provoked by emigration

disturbs ancient equilibria and the normal process of socialization. Bishop Scalabrini writes: “The populace, that does not reflect, and is therefore subject to a lesser variety of feelings, is more tenacious in its traditions than an educated person. On the other hand, when traditional sentiments fade, this enduring memory of the native place, which is summed up in the ancestral home, the Church, the sacred ceremonies, the pastor, these persons assimilate to the new environment, or they lose every principle and become isolated, every man for himself, all given to materialism, without ideals and without supernatural principles.”²⁷ The integration process into the new environment cannot avoid taking into account ethnic identity and its religious dimension. In the social and cultural condition of the migrants, the passage from one ethnic identity to another will not take place without supporting the first through forms of assistance that take into consideration “the migrants’ customs, their dialect, their temperament.”²⁸ From such an experience comes the necessity of specific religious services and structures suited to the cultural stage of adaptation the immigrants have reached, and to their demand for community since community is required to express their own identity which, in turn, preserves their religious faith. For this reason Bishop Scalabrini insists on the value of homogeneous settlements, of “colonies” of migrants in Brazil and on ethnic or national parishes in the United States, and on a clergy “possibly of the same nationality as the immigrants, or at least speaking their language.”²⁹

However, it did not escape Bishop Scalabrini that the demographic and cultural change in the countries of settlement would have brought about the formation of a new people through a lengthy and slow process of assimilation.³⁰ While he admitted such a result for the great “migrations of the strength and character of those of the Barbarians and of the Muslims,” he would have liked that in modern countries built by immigration, while respecting their political and religious unity, the language and the national identity of the immigrants were preserved. The motivation

is always religious. “There is no doubt that the idea of national identity is one of those sentiments called to exercise a large and at times decisive influence on the conservation or loss of the faith of a people.”³¹ During his pastoral visitations Bishop Scalabrini saw for himself the definitive choice of the immigrants to establish themselves in the Americas and in part modified his thinking. He recommends to the immigrants: “Follow the customs of the country that welcomes you; conform to them as far as you can. Learn to speak English, but do not forget your sweet mother tongue.”³² But Bishop Scalabrini does not speak of the evolution of an Italian identity toward a new American one without the faith of origin being lost because of this process. Perhaps the immediacy of the immigration problem did not allow him to foresee such a development. It is probable that the explanation rests in his understanding of religiosity as the expressive synthesis of culture, so much so that he recommended to the immigrants in the United States: “Be religious and you will be truly Italian.”³³

An essential component of ethnic identity, religion is a support and spiritual comfort, gives continuity to the experience of the migrant and provides him with that charitable assistance that the State may even promise but does not fulfill. Bishop Scalabrini also sees religion as a guarantee for living together “by smoothing the rough edges of every nationality, by tempering the competing interests of the various motherlands, in a word, by harmonizing the variety of origin in the pacifying unity of the faith.”³⁴ Finally, looking into the distant future, he not only sees migrations as a form of missionary expansion, but also as a prelude to the communion of saints in history, the fulfillment of the “great promise of the Gospel: One flock, one Shepherd.”³⁵