Religion: Battle for Italy

Not all the battles for Italy are being fought in Italy. In the U.S., Roman Catholics are concerned about the U.S. occupation of a Catholic country. Italian and many U.S. Protestants are concerned about this Roman Catholic concern.

With the invasion of Sicily The Tablet, official weekly of the Diocese of Brooklyn, fired the opening shot: “In looking over the list of officials being sent to guide, if not to rule, an overwhelmingly Catholic country like Italy, we note the absence of practicing Catholics. . . . It would seem not only practical and fair, but intelligent and profitable, for the United States to send some representatives who understand the religion . . . of those whom they are to direct.”

Next the annual convention of the Knights of Columbus demanded that Catholic Italian-Americans be put in charge of occupied Italian territory: “. . . Care should be taken to avoid entrusting administrative functions to anyone who is professedly or generally known to be opposed to the general views of the Italian people on religion. . . .” In short, none but Catholics should administer occupied Italian territory.

Then the Italian Protestant Ministers Association of Greater New York jumped into the jihad, issued a statement: “Here in America, Church and State have complete separation. Candidates to public office are elected . . . not on the basis of their religious beliefs but on their ability to serve in that office. It is in this spirit that the American Government is sending to Italy men who are capable of handling its affairs regardless of their religious affiliations.” The Association’s 75 ministers dubbed the Knights’ demand “most inopportune and brimful of that intolerance so often demonstrated by various agencies acting under the name of the Catholic Church.”

Slaughtered Saints. The U.S. Italian Protestant ministers spoke not only for their own congregations (Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian), but for Italy’s Protestants who cannot speak for themselves. Most of these are Waldensians who originated in 12th-Century France, have lived chiefly in the Piedmontese Alps for 650 years.

Founder of the Waldensians was Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyon, France, who started preaching the Reformation more than three centuries before Luther or Calvin. The Church excommunicated them, persecuted them (150 were burned alive in one day).

Seed of the Martyrs. Periodically, the Roman Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Piedmont (the present Italian royal house) sent soldiers to exterminate them. The terrible Piedmont Easter massacre (1655) moved Oliver Cromwell to decree a public fast to show English sympathy for the Waldensians. Cromwell warned the Duke of Savoy that if such a thing happened again the British fleet would bombard Nice. The massacre also brought from John Milton his thunderous sonnet:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept thy faith so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones. . . .

Nearly seven centuries after their founding, King Charles Albert of Piedmont granted the Waldensians civil and religious liberty (1848). Said the King’s Minister of State, Vincenzo Gioberti: “The Waldensians have suffered cruel persecution, and it becomes us Catholics to confess this publicly, so that none may accuse us of conniving at the errors of past centuries. . . .”

After that the Waldensians spread southward to the rugged Abruzzi and to the great olive-and vine-growing sections of southern Italy and Sicily. They have also spread to Argentina and Uruguay, where they form the fifth district of the Waldensian Church. In the U.S. Waldensian Italians usually become Presbyterians.