X. The Present and the Future

The poor peasants who emigrate, when they don’t die during the voyage or succumb to privations and heartbreak at having been duped, are left in those regions, it may be said, without a shadow of religious assistance. Their state is more easily imagined than described. There are not many

priests in America. The few who are available almost always do not know our language and could not be of any help, much as they might want to, for the simple reason that our emigrants would not understand them. Besides, the emigrants are so spread out over that vast territory that the priest could visit them only rarely and briefly.

Hence, Italians in America are almost forced, as a rule, to live a life that is worse than pagan, without Mass, without sacraments, without public devotions, without liturgy, without the word of God, so that it is saying a great deal if the children born there are baptized. It is clear that such a state of affairs must imperceptibly lead those poor wretches to a frightening indifference toward religion and a dehumanizing materialism.

Don’t tell me, that if a person is religious, he can hardly lose his sense of piety and cannot altogether forget his duties. The fact of the matter is that the deprivation of spiritual bread, the impossibility of reconciling oneself with God, the lack of motivation for good, all exercise a disastrous influence on the morale of the people. Even an educated person runs a risk, albeit to a lesser degree, because his philosophical training and his theoretical knowledge of religion can somehow protect him from indifference and because his mental abilities make him capable of making up for the lack of external cult, at least by way of reflexive desire, which permits him to be spiritually united, albeit from afar off, with the divine mysteries celebrated in Catholic churches elsewhere. How can we expect such a conscious act of reflection and such lofty thoughts from our simple and unlettered faithful?

For simple folk the concept of religion is inseparable from that of the church and the priest. Where there is no visible religious instrumentality, they gradually become unmindful of their duties to God, and Christian life in their soul withers and dies.

Neither must we forget that, if in America there may not be all that many Catholic churches and priests, yet, depending on the places, there is no lack of Protestant and Masonic proselytizing. When the voice of God’s minister is not heard, immoral novels, pamphlets, books and flyers from various sects do arrive. Hence, on the one hand, religious assistance is missing, but, on the other, the dangers to the faith of our poor emigrants abound. And, out of either expedience or ignorance, the emigrants let themselves get caught in the nets of the apostles of error.

The urgency to act then is quite clear and will appear even more from the following observations:

Those little settlements of cabins, spread now in a kind of desert, will become flourishing towns and cities, both through the natural increase in population and because of this tide of emigration that rises higher, so to speak, every day. Then what will happen? It is easy to foresee that in a few years we shall have in the vast plains of the Americas a new Italy, perhaps rich in material goods but poor in the riches of the spirit, or more precisely, we shall have a society conforming to the direction given it at the start.

The first impressions are always the most persistent and lasting, and the first traditions are the ones that give a family, a city, a settlement its special characteristics. Of this history furnishes us with countless examples.

Moreover, keep in mind that the disposition of our fellow countrymen is by its very nature eminently yielding, so that they easily adapt themselves to the places and to the people among whom Providence leads them.

The religious and moral future of our settlements in America, therefore, will depend on how much religion and morality is preserved by these first centers of population. Will they be inspired by civic and Christian sentiments? Then their descendants will be civil and Christian and those who later join them from Italy who will have to adapt more or less to the traditions of faith and piety they find there. Shall they be abandoned instead? They will grow up like savages and even those who arrive afterwards will soon become savages. The tendency of our emigrants to settle in colonies is a fact that should not be overlooked: it will make the task less difficult for those who are called upon to guide them. To neglect this tendency now, when it is a question of choosing well the site of future cities and giving them the religious and Italian character on which their prosperity and future importance must depend, would be an unpardonable error. That character must be impressed immediately. Any delay, I believe, will be fatal! That character will be like an indissoluble bond that will unite them to their distant motherland. In fact, the sharing in the same religious and patriotic values is much more important for creating the unbreakable unity of a nation than sharing in material interests.