The Story of an Italian Protestant

This is the story of my father told almost in his own words, with just a little elaboration and interpolation from me, but quite a fair amount of paraphrasing. It is a story that needs to be told because, as Charles J. Scalise wrote in his essay, “Retrieving ‘WIPS’: Exploring the Assimilation of White Italian Protestants in America,” “This study explores the assimilation of the WIPS [an acronym taken by Prof. Scalise from his title phrase] into American culture and seeks to offer some possible explanations for their general invisibility in historical studies of Italian Americans.” (1}

This is not the first time I have tampered with my father’s work which I edited after his death in 1968 as The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco and donated in 1969 to the Center for Immigration Studies of the University of Minnesota at the request of its Director, Rudolph J. Vecoli. (2) The manuscript consists of three parts, “A Brief Story of My Life,” “The Wisdom of the Bible,” and “A Letter to My Son” [which may be found elsewhere on this blog] — that is to say, yours truly. After he had done his “Autobiography” and his “Letter,” at the very end of his time, my father worked largely on translating some of my poems into Italian — not out of any literary consideration, but out of a desire to understand his older son. This is clear from some of his letters. He thought in Italian, and in order to communicate, he had first to translate his thoughts into English. The reverse was true as well — in order to understand English, he had to translate into Italian.

On several occasions, particularly in an earlier letter he had written me on September 16, 1957, he had asked me to help him out: “I am sending this copy to you of the story of my life for correction of my English. My greatest trouble is my English language. I am determined to master it as best as [sic] I can. So, please teach me as much English as you can. Correct this paper for me and … show me all my mistakes of grammar, punctuation, construction, ect. [sic].” (3)

Luigi Turco was born in Riesi, a rural community in south central Sicily, on the 28th of May 1890. His surname means “Arab,” and it dates from the period when, during the ninth and tenth centuries, Sicily was ruled by people who had derived from the Middle East (confirmed by a haplogroup G [M321] DNA analysis made by the National Geographic Society’s Human Genome Project in 2006) and who entered Sicily from North Africa. No doubt that means his ancestors were Muslims [see "Deep Ancestry" elsewhere on this blog]. (4) However, “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that, being an Italian, my faith was that of the Roman Catholic Church.” (5)

“It goes without saying.” The assumption, even on the part of Prof. Scalise, is that all Italians, including Sicilians, are born members of the Roman church. The same assumption is without doubt made of all native Spanish, Portugese, French, and so on. Once, many years ago, my wife Jean — whose maiden surname was Houdlette, obviously French — met a young woman who was visiting from Brittany where she had had a parochial education. Somehow the subject of religion came up, and Jean said that her family had been Huguenots. The young woman had never heard the word, and when Jean told her that they were French Protestants, the woman was scandalized. “There are no Protestants in France!” she informed Jean, and no amount of assertion or argument could change her mind on the subject.

Just so in the case of Italians; however, my father continued, “Riesi is also the seat of a Waldensian Church. The Waldensians are the oldest Protestant group founded before the Reformation [before the word “Protestant” even existed], and the Waldensian Church in Italy may be considered as the National Protestant Church.” (6)

The founder of the ancient sect known as Waldenses, a movement that opposed the ecclesiastical establishment, was Peter Waldo of Lyon (c. 1140-1217), a wealthy French merchant and religious reformer who began to preach during the twelfth century using as his text vernacular translations of the Gospels. His followers were known as the "poor men of Lyon," itinerant preachers who took a vow of poverty and taught a simple, Bible-based type of religion, the sort that Prof. Scalise in his essay calls “evangelical.”

In 1179 Waldo went to Rome to attend the third Lateran Council where his vow of poverty was confirmed by Pope Alexander III who, however, forbade him to preach. Nevertheless, he continued to do so, and subsequently, in 1184, he was excommunicated and banished from Lyon together with his followers. At the fourth Lateran Council of 1215 one of its seventy decrees condemned the Waldenses, and a second did the same to another group of sects, the Cathari, who followed the proscribed Manichaean doctrines.

Although by the late 14th century the Cathari had almost completely disappeared, the suppression of the Waldenses did not work, for they spread from France throughout Europe, including Italy, especially the Cottian Alps which now mark the border between Italy and France and are known still as the Waldensian Valleys. The Waldenses have over a hundred organized churches throughout Italy, one of these being that mentioned by Luigi Turco, located in Riesi, Sicily, seat of my father’s family.

Thus, contrary to religious stereotyping, it is possible, if unlikely, for people in Italy to be born Protestant, just as they may be born Muslim or Jewish. (6) And there is a third possibility. My father wrote, “My idea of Christianity, represented by both the Protestant and the Catholic people, was very vague. Until the age of twelve I never went to church; neither did any member of my family.” This was unusual, because the stereotype for Sicily is that the men are indifferent to religion, as my father was, but at least the women attend church. (7)

Luigi Turco was conscripted for the Italian army when he was twenty years of age, and he served, ironically, for thirty months during the Turco-Italian war which was fought from 28 September 1911 to 18 October 1912. It was the first time he had left his village. He spent most of his enlistment in Rome, but even in the seat of the Catholic Church he was not enlightened, though he was troubled and beginning to seek enlightenment.

After his discharge he and his eldest sister, Vita Sardella, immigrated in April 1913 to the United States with her two boys, Joseph and Salvatore the younger. Her husband, Salvatore Sardella the elder, had preceded her by several years, and the family was reunited in Boston, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, Luigi’s brother-in-law lived in a slum. Although in Sicily he had been a shoemaker, in America he was anything but a success. He drank, he gambled, and he was laden with debts. Vita had to find a job just to put bread on the table, and so did Luigi, who paid his sister room and board.

Within a few months the family moved to a better neighborhood in Wakefield, not far from Boston. “By this time,” Luigi wrote, “the hunger in me for a better moral and spiritual life was very deep. It had created in me a melancholic attitude, the spirit of despair! I tried to satisfy this hunger in me like the rest of the young people of my time, in drinking, eating, smoking, gambling, and other pleasures of the flesh, but to no avail. The activity of the Spirit upon me, then not clearly known to me, was leading me to find a better way, the real way, to satisfy the thirst of my soul for a better living.”

Luigi discovered that in Wakefield there was an Italian Baptist church. One Sunday in July of 1915, when he was twenty-five years of age, he attended the morning worship service where the minister, Rev. Gaetano Lisi, preached a sermon in Italian. Something happened to Luigi during the course of that sermon. “My old way of living had died.” When the service was over he spoke with Rev. Lisi, who sensed his earnestness, and shortly thereafter he found the force of will to stop smoking, drinking, and seeking illicit sexual experiences. (7) Although the incident does not appear in his manuscript, he told me once that he also went on a liquid diet so as to purge his body of the poisons to which he had subjected it.

“I became very enthusiastic in the work of the church,” my father wrote. “The first desire of my heart was, of course, to lead my unreligious family in America and in Italy” along the path he himself had found. He began his missionary work at home with his sister and his two nephews, but Vita and her husband Salvatore balked, and they began a “terrific persecution” against Luigi because he had left the Catholic Church. However, when Vita noticed that her brother had actually changed his life’s habits, as her husband had not, she began to be swayed. “Gradually she was converted, together with her family. They all became members of the Italian Baptist Church.

“Then,” my father wrote, “I began to work for the conversion of my family in Italy. I wrote to my father … telling him and the rest of the family to go to the Waldensian Church, but he answered me negatively. He thought that I was [going mad]. I wrote to the minister of the church, Rev. Pietro Mingardi, an ex-monk of the Roman Catholic Church, to go and see my family and work for their conversion, but his efforts were not successful.”

The First World War was in progress, but it wasn’t until the last three months of the conflict that, for the second time in his young life, Luigi was drafted, this time into the American army. After the Armistice in November of 1918 he was discharged and returned to Wakefield and his sister’s family. He found a job in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he soon suffered an accident that cost him his right eye. Because his left eye was weak, he was nearly blind, and he was confronted with the dilemma of what to do for a living. The new minister of his church, the Rev. Theodore De Luca, suggested that Luigi study for the ministry himself. “I [had] wanted to work for God … but as a layman. Now I saw the light to … study for the ministry,” not because of the accident, but because in the accident he saw that Providence had a plan for him. (8)

“At that time,” my father wrote, “we had in Brooklyn, N[ew] Y[ork], the so-called Italian Department of Colgate Theological Seminary, of which Dr. Antonio Mangano was the head. (9) The course was five years long. The school took Italian immigrants who had been converted here from Catholicism to Protestantism. Practically all the students were men over twenty years of age with little education, so in the school the Italian and English languages were studied; an elementary American history, an elementary church history and theology; now and then some prominent man gave us a lecture on various subjects. I had gone to grammar school in Italy, and I was considered one of the best … students, so one may see that at the end of the course the men were not well prepared for the work of the ministry.”

In the fall of 1919, after he had been attending the school for only a month, Luigi Turco was given the Italian Baptist Mission of Passaic, New Jersey. During the week he attended school, and he spent his weekends doing the work of the church in Passaic. Clearly, this was an early example, with a vengeance, of the system of internships that would later become popular in American higher education.

From the fall of 1924 to May of the following year Luigi and his seven fellow students spent the last year of the school with Dr. Mangano in Rome, Italy, studying at the Waldensian Seminary there. Luigi took advantage of the situation to visit his hometown, Riesi, several times. His first visit took place during the second week of October.

“Naturally,” he wrote, “the minister of the church came to my home to see me and invite me to preach on the following Sunday. I accepted the invitation, of course! I had to preach for the evening service at 5 p. m. I went to the morning service together with my father and one of my brothers [certainly his older brother, also named Salvatore, not his younger brother Joseph]. There was a small group of people; about fourteen of them. I will never forget the words the minister uttered to me at the end of the service. He said, ‘Brother Turco, you have no idea of the agony I am going through.’ He was very discouraged. After years of hard work, the congregation of his church consisted of about 14 people.

“I preached in the evening service. Naturally, all the members of my family, and some of my relatives and friends, came to hear me. Even people of the neighborhood who knew me as a common young man going to America to make a fortune, and now back in Riesi, after twelve years, as a minister, came to see me preaching, just for the curiosity. The church was filled to its capacity. Over 150 people were present, which was a miracle for the minister and his small group. I preached as best I could, and I was delighted to see tears coming from the eyes of my father, [Salvatore] and mother [Rosaria Fasulo] and one of my brothers [Salvatore the younger]. It was a great joy for me to see such a crowd, but much more joy for the minister and the small group of people of his congregation, because in my coming they saw a revival in their church; they saw the rehabilitation of their missionary work.”

Luigi Turco spent his Christmas vacation, the following Easter vacation, and the summer of 1925 as well, doing missionary work in Riesi. He went so far as to deliver a sermon at the jail where there was a young man he knew who was serving time. Luigi returned to the United States having converted his immediate family to Waldensianism as well as others of his relatives and a few friends. It amounted to a local revival of evangelical Protestantism and was the salvation of the Waldensian church in Riesi.

Returning to America, Luigi was assigned to be the pastor of the Second Italian Baptist Church of Buffalo, New York, but he continued to feel that his education was inadequate, and at the age of thirty-seven he entered high school while still attending to the duties of his ministry. He took his diploma in June of 1929; “then the idea came to me to go to college and to the regular seminary of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. I finished my seminary work, but I did not finish my college work. I needed one more year to have my B. A. and my B. D. degrees,” he wrote. (10)

While he was in Buffalo he talked his sister, Vita, into coming there to live with her family, minus the husband who continued in his unrepentant life style. Apparently Luigi managed this feat, which was huge in the family, while he was spending vacation time during the summers working among immigrant Italians in Wakefield. There he met and began to woo a not-so-young woman, May Putnam, ten years his junior, a Methodist missionary from Wisconsin and a member of an old New England family that had first come to unhappy prominence during the Salem witchcraft craze of 1692. She had overcome a family background of rural Midwestern poverty to return east to her family’s origins to attend and graduate from the Boston University School of Religious Education. Elsewhere, I have written about her, and my father, as well. (11)

May and Luigi were married in 1933. I was born in 1934, and on February first of 1938, my father was appointed minister of the First Italian Baptist Church of Meriden, Connecticut, where I grew up and where my brother, Gene, was born in 1939. Luigi was pastor for seventeen years, until the age of sixty-two, the same year in which I graduated from Meriden High School in 1952 and thereupon enlisted in the Navy. (12)

This was not the end of my father’s overall career, but I will leave it to those who are interested to pursue it in his manuscript The Spiritual Autobiography or in my books, Shaking the Family Tree, and Fantaseers (see note 11). I do, however, wish to return to Prof. Scalise’s idea that WIPs are “invisible.” My own career as a writer has not been invisible, yet it is true that the fact that I was born a Protestant is ignored for the most part, as is the possibility that there are French Protestants called Huguenots, or Italian Protestants called Waldensians. Discussing my poem “An Immigrant Ballad,” (13) about my father, Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale wrote in La Storia, “The humor here is strikingly reminiscent of Robert Canzoneri’s novel A Highly Ramified Tree (1976). Canzoneri’s father was also a Sicilian immigrant who married, in his case not a Yankee but a southern woman, and he too became a minister in the Baptist Church.”14

A few pages earlier Mangione and Morreale had been discussing the late poet John Ciardi, whom I knew very well and counted a close friend. (15) Even he, who certainly knew better, forgot that I was the offspring of a mixed heritage marriage, because he wrote me in a letter dated February 28, 1979, in which he was fulminating against the idea of “Italian-American poets,” not just American poets of whatever heritage, “I haven’t heard from [Vince] Clemente. I have had a couple of over-breezy notes from Brian Swann [both of these poets have Italian backgrounds]. I really don’t know what to make of so much Italo-Am. I’ve never thought in terms of I-Am poetry. I don’t know any I-Am poets, as such. Lew Turco is an Am[erican] poet who happened to have It[alian]. parents.” (16) No, like Swann, only one. And that’s one reason why Italian-American Protestants are “invisible”: because they may be only partly Italian, and the part that’s not Italian can be anything. I remember that one of my former students, Markesan Naso, was half Italian and half Indonesian. If it’s the father or the husband who is not Italian, the surname, too, can be anything.

I recall standing in front of the English Department mailboxes in Sheldon Hall at S.U.N.Y. Oswego one day back in the 1970s when my colleague, Dorothy Park, came to stand beside me in order to retrieve her messages and memos. I happened to glance at a magazine she pulled out of her box and noticed that it was a copy of The New Aurora (l’Aurora), the official publication of the Italian Baptist Association of America, in which my father had published many articles and his Italian translation of my poem on the death of President John F. Kennedy. (17)

I was amazed. I asked if she were an Italian Baptist, and she replied in the affirmative. I would never have known if I’d not happened to be standing there at that moment. We began exchanging information, and we remembered all sorts of people and events that we had in common throughout our childhoods. We had even attended some of the same conventions with our parents. As an adult, she had married into the prominent Park family of Buffalo, and her husband was a factory owner in western New York State. When she and I were growing up, the word among our generation was, “Assimilate!” And that’s what we had done, though the idea of the Melting Pot is not a popular one nowadays (see my essay "Diversity and the Melting Pot" on this blog site).

Perhaps to take all these things into account requires too much ratiocination and critics find it easier to revert to stereotypes, as Dana Gioia did in an essay titled "What Is Italian-American Poetry?" where he assumed that all American poets of Italian ancestry have in their background the Roman Catholic experience. (18) Gioia — who is also a friend and, like Ciardi, certainly must know better in my case — is himself of mixed heritage: Italian and Portugese. No doubt he thinks that all Portugese-Americans, too, were born Roman Catholics.

Scalise quotes Mangione and Morreale (q.v.) to the effect that “For all of the Protestant efforts, fewer than 21,000 Italians converted.” (19) It may be so, but how, at this date in the twenty-first century, would anybody be able to come up with an estimate of how many people of at least partial Italian background are currently converts to, or members of, another religion? My father’s church eventually became the Grace Baptist Church because the members wanted to assimilate; later on, after one of those divisive squabbles that congregations are prone to, it split and the members of both sides began to attend other local churches. The Grace Baptist is no more.

In 1993, on one of my visits to Meriden, I went down to the corner of Windsor and Springdale Avenues to indulge nostalgia and take a look at my father’s former church, both the original rectangular white clapboard wooden box sans steeple, and the newer, fancier structure built next to it after he retired (though he had raised most of the money for it during his pastorate). (20) Both were empty.

The old neighborhood is no longer predominately Italian but Hispanic. No doubt people believe that there is no such thing as a Spanish Protestant, either, but as I continued down Springdale I noticed across the street from the church and down a few storefronts, one of them had a sign in the window that read, “Spanish Baptist Mission.” Perhaps in a few more years, if the congregation becomes prosperous enough, its members will purchase the property of both the First Italian Baptist Church and the later, Americanized, Grace Baptist Church on the corner. Perhaps they will name it “The First Spanish Baptist Church of Meriden, Connecticut.” Like my father and his fellow apostates, they will be on their way to being invisible. Maybe “invisible” is good.

NOTA BENE: For other essays and memoirs on this subject, please see elsewhere on this blog “Deep Ancestry,” “A Letter to My Son,” “An Immigrant Ballad,” and “The Obsession” (under “Sestinas”).

Endnotes

(1) Scalise, Charles J., “Retrieving ‘WIPS’: Exploring the Assimilation of White Italian Protestants in America,” Italian Americana, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 133-146. [One does not understand why Prof. Scalise uses the “W” in his acronym, which is no more necessary than it is in “WASP” for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” How many varicolored Anglo-Saxons are there? “IP” would be enough, just as “ASP” is. And why does Scalise capitalize the “S”? It is a plural, not part of the acronym.]

(2) Turco, Luigi, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, ed. Lewis Turco. Available in photographic reproduction from University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1969.

(3) Ibid., pp. xx-xxi.

(4) See the chapter titled “Muslims,” p. 132 ff, in Benjamin, Sandra, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.

(5) Turco, Luigi, op. cit., p. 2. See also the essay "Deep Ancestry" on this blog site.

(6) Benjamin, op. cit., p. 132.

(7) Turco, Luigi, op. cit., p. 2.

(8) Ibid., pp. 3-4.

(9) Scalise, op. cit., p. 141. See also Mangano, Antonio, Sons of Italy: A Social and Religious Study of the Italians in America, New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1917 (reprinted by Kessinger Publishing Legacy Reprints).

(10) Turco, Luigi, op. cit., pp. 4-6.

(11) Turco, Lewis, “Mom May,” pp. 10-21, & “Father and Son,” pp. 32-48, in Shaking the Family Tree, A Remembrance, West Lafayette: VIA Folios / Bordighera, 1998; shorter versions, without poems, are included in Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2005, pp. 11-21 & 31-45, respectively. See also "A Letter to My Son" on this blog site.

(12) Turco, Luigi, op. cit., pp. 7-8.

(13) Collected in my volume The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004, pp. 8-9 together with a poem about my mother, “Requiem for a Name,” pp. 10-11, and one for my brother, Gene, “The Hustle,” pp. 173-4. See also "A Paternal Curse" on this blog site where the reader may also find "An Immigrant Ballad" and "Requiem for a Name.".

(14) Mangione, Jerry, and Morreale, Ben, La Storia, Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, New York: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 433.

(15) Turco, Lewis, "A Friend in Need, a Friend Indeed: A Memoir / Review," Voices in Italian Americana, Vol. ix, No. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 189-195; reprinted in A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004, pp. 237-242.

(16) Cifelli, Edward M., ed., The Selected Letters of John Ciardi, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991, p. 314.

(17) “November 22, 1963,” Poetry, Vol. cv, No. 2, Nov. 1964; Italian translation by Luigi Turco, "22 Novembre 1963,” The New Aurora, Vol. 63, No. 3, Nov. 1964.

(18) Gioia, Dana, "What Is Italian-American Poetry?" Poetry Pilot, newsletter of the Academy of American Poets, November-December 1991, pp. 3-10.

(19) Scalise, op. cit., p. 134.

(20) Alfonsi, Ferdinando, ed. & tr., Poeti Italo-Americani / Italo-American Poets, a bi-lingual anthology, Catanzaro, Italy: Antonio Carello Editore, 1985, ”The Church,” pp. 394-5. Also reprints and translates “November 22, 1963,” pp. 392-3 (see note 17, above. Both poems in English only may be found in Fearful Pleasures, The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007).

Originally published in Italian Americana, xxv:2, Summer 2007, pp. 197-206, copyright © 2007, all rights reserved. It will be collected in La Famiglia / The Family to be published by Bordighera in 2009:

 

From La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York:Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp.,$12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON

REMARKS

Lew, I read "The Story of an Italian Protestant" last week and have been thinking about it ever since. What a tenacious man your father was in pursuit of education and in his religious vocation. I've read things in the past that mentioned both the Waldensian and Manichaean heresies, but they always seemed to be talked about as if they were extinct, wiped out by the Catholic church. I'm always amazed when I find that times in the past have live and vital branches in the present. I like when my ignorance is opened up into more knowledge and I see connections flowing. I had a similar experience reading Don Quixote last year. I've added The Spiritual Autobiography [of Luigi Turco] and your two books, [Shaking the Family Tree and Fantaseers: A Book of Memories] to my reading list. Thanks for pointing me toward it. 

Alice