Many missionaries worked among the emigrants who, as they said, had lost their faith in the ocean. Many Italians sailed towards the United States in search of a more worthy future, before the trajectories of journeys changed route, a thing that today challenges the women religious towards a new direction.

How did the Church and the Congregations of women religious, with their commitment to charity, pay attention to this phenomenon, which was a genuine social emergency?  It was not just the matter of lending a service of assistance. Did their intention of preserving, in a very different context, some human, cultural and religious values produce any results? At which conditions did they produce them?  How did the activities of the women religious affect the integration of the receivers into a new land? Did they facilitate the integration or did the recall to Italy play the part of an alienating factor? Did the characteristics of the new context provoke any change in the mentality of the Missionaries, in their decisional and active processes? Did they provoke changes in the entire Congregation, in the central government, which had sent them? We know that, in some cases, the local reality was so different as to provoke the separation of a Province from its own Congregation, favouring the growth of a new one. Which motives provoked this and which consequences did they cause?  

These are recurring questions for history as well as for yesterday’s and today’s women religious, who are  animated by the interest of working with open eyes, being they aware of their contribution to the needs of their own times. In fact, the institutional nature of Religious Life, which unites a meaningful group of persons around a common project of life, subtracts the work of the single persons from the private sphere and turns it into a socially relevant action. Though the creative enterprise or the submitted execution depend on the persons and on the received formation, yet it seems that some environmental conditions and needs develop qualities that remain latent in other situations.

A pioneering research

A text rich in stimuli was published last year, thanks to the tenacity of some scholar persons: “Overseas Sister, Italian women religious and emigration in the United States: a history that we must discover”, courtesy of  Maria Susanna Garroni (Carocci, Roma 2008, 262 p.). It is the fruit of a collaboration journey among persons dedicated to researches and to some Congregations of women religious, which have made their historical documentation available.

Thus, the sensitivity towards ample, cultural themes has luckily highlighted sources that, often, do not look meaningful for the natural depositaries, for which they risk to disappear carelessly.

Sensitivity and resources activated in synergy open themselves to a promising deepening.

In the introduction, we read, «The activities of the sisters in their Congregations and in missionary territories are becoming an indispensable subject of historiography for the re-composition of women and gender history” (page 9).Yet, sometimes, we find no trace in the archives about the missionaries who work in USA. Therefore, we need to ransom their work from oblivion in order to probe, in a particular way,  how much “of Europe was transferred to America” (page 9), and at the same time how much the women religious changed in their contact with the American society, which was going on in its formation and in its specific connotation. This perspective subtends various keys of interpretation at survey levels. 

A group of women scholars, who were interested in the American reality, began the research. Starting from their interests in trans-national and inter-cultual processes, they came across the contribution of the women religious and caught the matter that we can read their presence at different levels.

Suzanne Garroni has brought to evidence that the Church needed the women religious in USA to realise her presence among the people. This called to cause the interventions of the Holy See, the requests and mentalities of the Bishops, the initiatives of the Congregations as well as local collaboration.  

The American environment, where State and Church had a separate regime, different from the Italian one between the end of eight hundred and the beginning of nine hundred, induced the missionaries to develop a closer relation with the surrounding world, up to the development of their own business capacity. In the religious pluralism, where the Church had to support her initiatives with the contribution of the faithful, they had to discover “financial” possibilities and ability in production; they had to identify and collect economic resources to support schools, hospitals, parishes”. Thus, the women religious contributed to the entire social and institutional scaffold of the Catholic Church in the USA (page 12).

The asymmetry of gender, that is, the fact that men were the first to abandon the religious practices, while the women remained faithful for a longer time, was attributed to the capillary action of the sisters among women, children, patients and families.

The apostolate as a launching site

The characteristic of the women religious was the apostolate in most different areas, wherever they noticed any exigency, innervating themselves in the sores and plagues, which the government institutions neglected. While the nuns lived apparently a life “set apart”, the history of the sisters was inseparable from the social one.

The variety of charisma joined the complexity of the USA history, in the first decenniums of Nine Hundred. It brought to emergence, first, the curiosity on the quantity of sisters distributed in various areas, on the increment and vital curve, on the typology of collaboration with men religious, parish priests, bishops, lay-men and women, Catholics and non-Catholics.  

It is not easy to weave on different subjects and different sources, to the end of composing a unitary mosaic; we can rather start with a pioneering and modest spirit from an attempt of pertinent and practicable tracks, which encourage us to go on with the survey, and to involve more protagonists in it. We are going to add some more tiles to the emblematic experience of St. Francesca Cabrini and several studies on Gianfausto Rosoli.

In the volume, “Sisters of overseas” articulated into eight chapters and into an equal number of scholars, after an introduction on the Vatican and immigration by Matteo Sanfilippo, I present –with attention to the available history- the general transformation of the women religious life. I present its structure and some components of a choice that gives value to subjectivity as a response to a freeing and empowering call.    

Peter D’Agostino analyses the particular case of the dissolution of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart. Maria Susanna Garroni examines that of the Pallottine Sisters, entering some pieces of relational dynamism activated by the situation of a mission far from the original environment, where it was necessary to know how to defend one’s own position. Clashes of personalities were unavoidable for the continuation of the started activities as mission of charity. We read them in the light of the categories “gender and trans-nationalism”, understanding the mission as a “mass emigration” of Italian religious Congregations towards North America, marked by difficult phases of adaptations” (page 134). 

Elisabeth Vezzosi investigates the growing professionalism of the “immigrated sisters”, to the end of helping the immigrants to become loyal “American citizens” (page 151). Using the actual terminology of social work, not enough consistent for the identification categories of the then religious, she underlines the theme of the cultural preparation. On one side they were expected to adapt themselves to the exigencies of society, on the other side they had the duty to educate them according to values matured in some Italian experiences, for instance in favour of the disabled. Marie Saccomando Coppola collects testimonies of Italo-American sisters in West New York, mentioning quantitative data about ethnic conflicts of leading personalities.

Analysing a literary text, Leonardo Buonomo examines the diary of Sister Blandina Segale, while Catherine Ricciardi concentrates on the Irish sisters for the Italo-American youths.

Environment to be explored

The eight essays of the volume are contributions to the American history and to Church History from a particular optics: that of the Sisters who, living the apostolate in a universal dimension, opened themselves to the vast field of missions. Besides being a sign of generous detachment, the mission became an occasion of extraordinary experiences, which enriched persons, institutes and society. The international composition of the Sisters set to circulation models, regulations, institutions, customs, on which it was necessary to reflect during the General Chapters and the canonical visitations of the superiors.

The explored sources have brought to light, above all, the concrete aspects of the Sisters’ work in answer to the existential charity and the educative exigencies of marginalised migrants. Thus, we can clearly see the contribution given in the public space, towards the modernisation of the ecclesial presence in USA. However, since it is the matter of women religious and not of simple social workers, it is not only legitimate, but also necessary to interrogate ourselves about the motivations, the religious mentality, and the interior world that supported the sisters in their mission. Equally necessary is to know the impact and the influence, which their devotions exercised among the people and the girls, for instance those towards the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary.

What did they mean in the area of education, purity, feminine identity, family and social responsibilities? We have still a lot to explore.

A rich Italian and English bibliography leads us into a complex and fascinating subject. The lovers of women’s history and of American history have taken the women religious near the horizon of historiography with respect and delicate cultural interest. Now it would be desirable to become more active as religious in order to enrich this just sketched picture, which we should try to know better through concrete stories. Besides leaving behind traces of their resourcefulness, exceptional sisters acted in a communitarian tissue with other sisters, Italian and local sisters, with the fatigue and the joy of sharing a project of service to people, starting from very different family and cultural presuppositions. Persons who know the religious life from within could explore more deeply the life of these communities and the transformation of the sisters’ mentalities.  

The dialogue between women religious and lay-women is very necessary to re-compose, in a more articulated manner, this very beautiful history of creative love, which is very much actual in a multi-cultural society like the once North American society and also  like that of today’s Italy.

Grazia Loparco
Lecturer in the Pontifical
Faculty of Sciences of Education “Auxilium”
Via Cremolino, 141- 00166 Rome