Archbishop Corrigan and the Italian Immigrants by Stephen Michael DiGiovanni (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 313 as "factories of infidels." He saw as useful but not essential, acquisition ofAmerican citizenship on the part of Italian missionaries. Notwithstanding a minor demurrer over the brevity of some chapters consisting of no more than a paragraph, this volume sheds valuable light on the interrelationship between the American Catholic Church and the Italian immigrant population. It does so by dealing with the nitty-gritty interaction of the daily life of immigrants and enabling readers to comprehend better the social, religious, and cultural world of Italian immigrants of the turn-of-the-century. Anyone interested in these topics cannot help but profit from a reading of this volume. Salvatore J. La Gumina Nassau Community College Garden City, New York Archbishop Corrigan and the Italian Immigrants. By Stephen Michael DiGiovanni . (Huntington, Indiana: Our SundayVisitor Publishing Division. 1994. Pp. ix, 272. Paperback.) In this study of Italian newcomers to New York during the episcopate of Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan (1885-1902), Stephen DiGiovanni contributes to a balanced understanding of the encounter between Italians and the American Church. Mining the archives of Propaganda Fide, the Apostolic Delegate, male and female religious congregations, and the Archdiocese of NewYork, DiGiovanni reveals the international dynamics of pastoral care for Italians. The result is not a social history of Italians, a diocesan history, nor a biography, but the story of "the formulation of a general project in favor of the Catholic Italian immigrants by the Church authorities in Rome, to the administrative and practical applications of that project in the Archdiocese of NewYork" (p. 13). Three themes dominate DiGiovanni's narrative. First, DiGiovanni is persuasive in his argument that the Holy See intended to promote neither European nationalisms nor a coercive program of Americanization within the American Church. DiGiovanni interprets this ethnic neutrality to indicate that the Vatican was inspired solely by the "desire to preserve [the immigrants'] Catholic faith and to work for the salvation of souls" (p. 63). Nevertheless, if neutral with regard to ethnicity in America, the Vatican's pastoral program was developed within the context of an uncompromising struggle against the modern Italy. DiGiovanni maps out this ecclesiopolitical context but backs away from its full implications: "the fact that Leo XIII singled out the Italians for special assistance may have had ties to the entire Roman Question. The fact that the Italians were in the worst condition of all other immigrant groups,however, must be seen as the basic motivating force for the Church's efforts on their behalf " (p. 66). 314 BOOK REVIEWS Second, DiGiovanni claims that "only the padroni [Italian labor bosses] and the priest had any lasting effect on the lives of the Italians in America" (p. 58) and concludes that "no other institution" (p. 206) besides the Church cared about Italians' welfare. DiGiovanni gives no evidence to support this assertion. He has not investigated the role oflabor bosses,labor organizers, newspaper editors , ethnic politicians, settlement house workers, Protestant missionaries, the Italian state, or the American state. Third, DiGiovanni concludes that "the traditional parochial structures affected only a small portion ofthe Italian community, . . . [and that] means other than those traditionally employed by the church in America at that time were necessary to assist the Italian immigrants" (p. 171). Archbishop Corrigan also came to this conclusion as he confronted intractable problems in his effort to establish national parishes for Italians. Thus, DiGiovanni provides a counterpoint to the consensus that national parishes best met the social and religious needs of immigrants. Indeed, in the NewYork Italian case the local parish was not sponsored by Italian resources, was rarely self-sustaining, was not free of provincial rivalries and dialects that undermined the very idea of a "national" parish, and was not the most common means Italians sought to educate their children. Unfortunately, DiGiovanni does not place his work within any scholarly contexts that would help the reader understand its relative significance. What does this study imply for our understanding ofthe Immigrant Church analyzed byJay P. Dolan and Dolores Liptak, or the divergent portraits of Italians and American Catholicism painted by RudolphVecoli and Silvano Tomasi? Furthermore, references to Gerald Fogarty's work on the American hierarchy and the Vatican, Henry Browne's...