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Reviews
| Priest, Parish, and People: Saving the Faith in Philadelphia's "Little Italy." By Richard N. Juliani. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. x + 395 pp. Map, photos, notes, and index. $35.00 (paper.)
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Richard N. Juliani made an inspired choice in placing Father Antonio Isoleri—who served as pastor from 1870 to 1926 of the nation's first dedicated Italian parish—at the center of an historical monograph. Established in South Philadelphia in 1852, the Italian Mission of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi served a small population—numbering at most several hundred people—when Isoleri arrived. By the time of his retirement, South Philadelphia housed more than forty-three thousand Italian-born residents and thousands more of their descendants (pp. 4–5). Presiding over a seminal institution during the great wave of Italian immigration to the United States, Isoleri also ministered through a period of tremendous controversy and excitement within the Catholic Church and the birth of the Italian nation. Isoleri publicly grappled with the social, religious, and political controversies of his day, not only from the pulpit but also in a prodigious body of both prose and poetry. Thus, Juliani chose a protagonist well positioned to substantiate his argument that the history of Italian immigrants demands appreciation of the entanglement of religion with the rest of social experience. Unfortunately, the author stumbles in his attempts to connect Isoleri and his parish to larger historical themes; the book largely falls short of Juliani's ambition to have "transcended local history" (p. 165). |
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Scholars of immigration and ethnicity will find that the book touches on many significant topics. Embattled for the first decades of its existence, the parish exemplifies the difficulties that faced "national" parishes in nineteenth-century America. On this subject, Juliani unearths intriguing material. For example, when the parish was under attack from the bishop of Philadelphia and suffering through a fiscal crisis in the early 1870s, it was sustained by contributions from the "buon Irlandesi" (good Irish) members of the Italian parish (p. 80). After detailing the resolution of this crisis, Juliani broaches other themes of broad resonance. In one of its best chapters, "Columbus and Other Heroes," the book explores Isoleri's role in the movement to venerate the Italian discoverer. Isoleri's blend of religious, racial, and nationalist concepts provides the opportunity to examine the place of religion within early Italian-American nationalist discourse (pp. 95–108; see also pp. 140–48). Juliani also describes the resistance mounted by South Philadelphians in 1933 when the Archdiocese resolved to close Our Lady of Good Council, another Italian parish in the area. Imprisoning priests within the rectory that they had been instructed to abandon and confronting police on city streets, South Philadelphians powerfully demonstrated their religious convictions and publicly proclaimed the preeminence of the local parish over other civil and religious authorities (pp. 290–308). These and other instances suggest the potential of this story to interest a wide audience of historians. |
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This potential, however, is largely untapped. Juliani overburdens some chapters with the details of Isoleri's personal disputes. Rather than focusing on larger themes—for example, the relationship between the Irish and Italian members of an embattled Italian national parish—the author concentrates on the minutiae of Isoleri's institutional maneuvering. Elsewhere, adequate explanation and analysis is lacking. In the chapter on Our Lady of Good Council, when Juliani might have been coming to the culmination of a story about faith in Italian urban experience, he instead explains the actions of parishioners by remarking that their "ancestors had defended their villages before the terrifying attacks of the Saracens, Turks, and other invaders" (p. 300). Elsewhere, the importance of Isoleri and his particular parish fade from view as Juliani pulls back to examine national and citywide themes (pp. 165–208 and 229–58). In all, the book fails to integrate the local parish into a larger history. As a result, Isoleri's story remains unlikely to reverberate widely within the study of ethnicity in North America.
Jordan Stanger-Ross
University of Victoria
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