In the United States, the history of Italian immigration has often been told through work, urban neighborhoods and family networks. More rarely was the institutional religious dimension analyzed, that is the relationship between migrants and the Catholic Church as a structure of power, organization and control. The Ruin of Souls is on this floor. AMar Religious History of Italian Catholic Immigrants in the United States (1853–1921), the volume of the historian Massimo Di Gioacchino, which will be presented on Tuesday 21st April 2026 at 18:00 in a public meeting at New York University, through the con Hasia Diner (professor, emerita of NYU), Stefano Villani (University of Maryland) and Joseph Sciorra (Calandra Institute, CUNY), with the introduction of Stefano Italiana.
The book examines a precise temporal arc: from the foundation in 1853 of the first Italian Catholic church in the United States until 1921, when the Emergency Quota Act imposed strict limits on the entry of immigrants, effectively marking the end of the great Italian migration wave. During this period, millions of Italians – especially from the South – settled in the American cities that still today are the symbol of Italian immigration: New York, Boston and Philadelphia all over. The American Catholic Church, already structured on an ethnic basis (with Irish, German or Polish parishes), was able to manage Italian communities often considered difficult to integrate, both for linguistic differences and for religious practices perceived as “not aligned” to the dominant ecclesiastical model.
The central thesis of Di Gioacchino’s work is that the religious history of Italians in the United States cannot be reduced to popular devotion – processions, patron saints, local cults – but must be read as a conflictual relationship with ecclesiastical authority. Through twelve years of research and the use of unexplored American and Vatican archives, the volume documents attempts, resistances and failures of the Church in maintaining doctrinal control over the Italian faithful. In many cases, American ecclesiastical hierarchy – dominated by Irish clergy – considered Italians as religiously “undisciplined”, while migrants tended to organize themselves in autonomous forms, even outside official structures.
Massimo Di Gioacchino, professor and director of the Research Initiative on Global Italian Religious Networks at New York University, has been working for years on the movement of people and ideas between Europe and the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
L’articolo The complicated relationship between Italian immigrants and the Church in the USA, told in a book comes from IlNewyorkese.
