Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [892]
Community leadership fell to those who organized relations with “America”: the padroni and the banchiere. The latter group was composed of immigrants who, having acquired some capital as grocers, barbers, or saloonkeepers, now set up as bankers. In addition to lending and changing money and transmitting funds to the old country, the banchiere provided a wide array of services, acting as travel agents, scribes, marriage brokers, and legal advisers. Together with the small number of better-off professionals—doctors, dentists, pharmacists, merchants, and lawyers—the banchiere and padroni dominated colony life. These prominenti, who owned or financed the mutual aid societies, community organizations, and ethnic newspapers, were highly conservative, concerned about their status, and antagonistic to working-class efforts at self-help. The leading newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, was founded in 1879 by Carlo Barsotti, a wealthy contractor-padróne who styled himself “his excellency Chevalier Carlo Barsotti.” Under his leadership, the paper pugnaciously opposed unions, independent political parties, and any laws that would regulate banchiere or padroni. The leading mutual aid association, the Societa Italiana di Beneficenza (1882), was also under the thumb of wealthy prominenti like its banker-padróne president, Commendatore Louis V. Fugazy (“Papa Fugazy”). In the ecclesiastical arena, however, immigrant workers took matters into their own hands.
THE MADONNA OF 115TH STREET
To the Irish hierarchy and Irish parishioners, their new coreligionists seemed barely Catholic at all. They seldom came to church, apart from baptisms, weddings, and funerals. In 1884 Archbishop Corrigan noted that of fifty thousand Italians in the New York area, not more than twelve hundred attended mass. In addition, the newcomers refused to contribute to the building programs Corrigan promoted, and they rejected his parochial schools in favor of the free public school system. The Italians had no great respect for priests, even their own, and were given to ribald speculations about clerical sins and to denunciations of priests as lazy hangers-on. Socialists objected to the Church’s identification with wealthy landowners, nationalists to its opposition to Italian unification.
To the Irish, such “Catholics” seemed more than half pagan. Yet the Italians were capable of amazing devotion. The immigrant men filled their rooms with sacred images—pictures and statues of the Virgin and their hometown patron saints—which they either brought with them or sent home for. In their thousands of cramped rooms, laboring men set up little shrines at which they offered prayers for families left behind. Such intensely personal devotions were considered acceptable, if unorthodox. Far more shocking to Irish-American clerics was the way such practices spilled into the streets.
In the summer of 1881 immigrants from Polla formed a mutual aid society named after the Madonna del Carmine, the town’s protectress. The following year they began annual feste in her honor. From 1883 these were held behind a iiith Street boardinghouse, at a little chapel in the back yard where ragpickers sorted, washed, and packed their daily hauls. In 1884 the confraternity—a lay organization—obtained from Polla a statue of the Madonna and turned their festa into a popular celebration.
The growing cult alarmed Bishop Corrigan and the Irish hierarchy. Now fully alive to the “Italian problem,” the archdiocese invited to New York the Pallottine fathers who had been ministering to Italian immigrants in London. Their first priest, Father Emiliano Kirner, arrived in 1884 and was given care of the little 11 ith Street chapel. Father Kirner soon discovered the East Harlemites wanted to build a more