Scalabrini Before Sainthood

FROM THE ARCHIVE
Scalabrini Before Sainthood
Mary Brown, Ph.D.

June 1, 2023 marks the first feast day of Saint John Baptist Scalabrini, who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2022. The Scalabrinian General Archives and the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) have preserved the records of several people who knew him when he was still alive and have left a record of their encounters with him. St. Scalabrini’s own written record is in the care of the General Archives.

Born in the small town of Fino di Mornasco in the province of Como in 1839, he pursued an early vocation to the priesthood. In 1876, Pope Pius IX appointed him Bishop of Piacenza, a small city fifty-six miles to the south of his hometown. As bishop, Scalabrini produced sermons for his cathedral and letters to his diocese. In Italy, he also was a leader in the aggiornamento of catechesis. The greater Church knew him as an advocate for migrants, as he often wrote letters and other publications advocating on their behalf.

Saints are often described as “irenic,” as they attempt to bring differing theologies and philosophies together through their life and writings. Scalabrini’s irenicism is more nuanced than that, as he adeptly navigated the divisions of his day. Shortly before Scalabrini became a bishop, Italy had become a united nation under the leadership of the House of Savoy and established an elected parliament. Among the new government’s first actions was to withdraw state support for the Catholic Church. Some members of the Church reacted negatively to this development, but St. Scalabrini calmly extended the olive branch, pointing out to the government that Church and state had common interests in, for example, the care of migrants streaming out of Italy. The state-church collaboration advanced by him continues today. Rather than finding peace by withdrawing from the world, he was an active peacemaker in the world.

This is one of the few candid photographs of Saint Scalabrini. He is in the center of the photo, crossing a Brazlian river by barge in 1904. The photo originally appeared in Marco Caliaro and Mario Francesconi, John Baptist Scalabrini, Apostle to Emigrants (New York: CMS, 1977).

Among his private materials, the most revealing are the letters between Scalabrini and Father Francesco Zaboglio. In 1887, Scalabrini helped form the first members of a community of male religious dedicated to the service of Italian immigrants–the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, Scalabrini. As he continued his duties as Bishop of Piacenza, Father Zaboglio, his vicar, represented him in the places to which the immigrants, and thus the members of his new order, lived.

Their distinct roles suited their equally distinct personalities, which shone through in their correspondence. One example came in 1893 when, nearly six years after accepting the first members, Father Zaboglio suggested it might be time to find a patron saint after whom the organization could be named, and suggested a list of candidates to Scalabrini, detailing the pros and cons of each one. Practicing the humility he had made the motto of his new community, Scalabrini let his subordinate tell him what to do–but only to a point. Instead of studying the list of names, he prayed for guidance and then waited. Over the next few days, his thoughts returned repeatedly to Saint Charles Borromeo, Counter-Reformation era Archbishop of Milan. His community of priests became the Society of Saint Charles, now Society of Saint Charles-Scalabrinians.

The Center for Migration Studies itself has only one item from Scalabrini’s own hand. It is a photograph of Scalabrini taken at a studio in Piacenza. When Scalabrini was within living memory, the photograph was one of many kept in a file of photos from the congregation’s early days. Now, it is a relic.

This original studio photograph of Bishop Scalabrini is part of the Center for Migration Studies’ Collection #077.

CMS has more vivid portraits of Scalabrini from missionaries who knew him. The earliest history of Scalabrini’s migrant ministry was chronicled in a publication celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sacred Heart parish in Boston, which the parish’s then-pastor, Father Vittorio Gregori, produced in 1913. Father Gregori’s narrative first described the Italians of Boston, bereft of clergy who understood their language and culture. “Bishop Scalabrini,” he explained, “was not a man to sit with his arms crossed [the English equivalent might be “hands folded”] in the face of such misfortune, to be endured in impotent pain. He was a man of action, bringing help and comfort across the sea to many suffering families.” Those few words convey a precise image: Scalabrini’s action was not to drop everything and enter the mission field. His action was advocacy: support for the migrants expressed in the work of finding and training clergy for them.

Cover of the first book to describe Saint Scalabrini’s priests’ impression of him.

CMS also holds the papers of two clergy who met Scalabrini at different stages of their lives and left different descriptions of him. For Father Pio Parolin, Scalabrini was a hero. [1] Born into poverty, young Pio’s calling to the priesthood was in jeopardy due to his inability to pay for his seminary education. Scalabrini’s institute offered him a full scholarship, and the young man took his first train ride (badly underestimating how much food he would need for the journey) and arrived at the seminary to enjoy his first real bed in a room all to himself. A short time into his training, he undertook the care of two of his peers who were dying of tuberculosis, a traumatizing experience that caused Parolin to sleepwalk. Some of his superiors wanted to dismiss him from training, but Bishop Scalabrini sent the young seminarian to his own physician, and then followed that physician’s advice to be patient with Parolin. There were no mental health specialists in that day, but over time Parolin’s subconscious calmed his trauma and the sleepwalking ceased. Parolin was ordained in the United States, as Scalabrini wanted to demonstrate to the migrants his commitment to providing clergy for them. He also had the honor of preaching his first major sermon on the feast day of Saint Charles Borromeo in front of Scalabrini and his new confreres. The “honor” turned into a disaster when Parolin, intimidated by Scalabrini’s presence, realized about the middle of the sermon that he had no idea what he was saying. Scalabrini confirmed his heroic status in Parolin’s eyes by telling him he did well and, with more study and practice, would do even better.

Father Pio Parolin

Parolin recorded one other conversation that took place during the days after his ordination. Scalabrini gave him an oral examination designed to test him for his new role of hearing confessions. At the end of the exam, Scalabrini reminded Parolin to “act as a father and not as a judge,” and that “God has been exceedingly good to you. You be good to Him.” Parolin died in 1970, before Scalabrini’s 1997 beatification and 2022 canonization. However, he was the first to record that he prayed to Scalabrini “that he may give me a bit of the virtues that are certainly not abounding in me as they were in him.”

Father Giacomo Gambera, on the other hand, met Scalabrini as an experienced priest. He knew Scalabrini by his reputation in Italy as “a famous and learned pastor, broad minded and sharply intuitive, wise and outspoken, revered by the people for his generous nature, and admired by the authorities and the sovereigns for magnanimous good deeds.” [2] Intrigued by the challenge and assured that this was a five-year commitment that would soon have him back with his family, Gambera joined Scalabrini’s missionaries. It wasn’t what he expected. His first mission was to New Orleans, where he was working when a mob lynched eleven Italians who had been found innocent of the recent assassination of the city’s police chief. Then, when his five years were up, Scalabrini sent him to Pittsburgh.

Father Giacomo Gambera

While Gambera was able to visit home, he remained in the mission field all of his life. His commitment to Scalabrini can be measured by the time he challenged the bishop. In 1901, Scalabrini visited his clergy and their parishes in the United States. At Sacred Heart in Boston, where Gambera was pastor, Scalabrini announced he had chosen the parish to pioneer the next phase in the migrant mission. He was sending Italian sisters to staff an Italian-language parochial school. Gambera pushed back immediately, conceding that the parochial school was desirable but protesting that the Italian sisters didn’t know English. Scalabrini, still Bishop of Piacenza, thought faith was born in the home and nurtured through life by the home language and culture. Gambera, in the mission field, saw the importance of integrating the faith into the culture of the American-born and -raised generation.

Scalabrini, irenic as usual, worked out a solution. He replaced Gambera as pastor of Sacred Heart in favor of someone more interested in the Italian school project, assigning Gambera to another project dear to both himself and to Scalabrini, the Saint Raphael Society. The organization met immigrants on Ellis Island to assist them with problems. Gambera remained with the Saint Raphael Society until 1905. It was just after he was transferred to a new mission at Santa Maria Addolorata in Chicago that Scalabrini died, on June 1 of that year.

Dorothy Day, herself a candidate for sainthood, once observed the problem with the title of “saint”: “That’s the way people try to dismiss you. If you’re a saint, you must be impractical and utopian and no one has to pay any attention to you.” [3] Her observation has great relevance for Scalabrini. When he was alive, his ideas seemed new and exciting, but not so “utopian” and “impractical” that people didn’t sign up to help him carry them out. Now that he has the title of “saint,” it is important to acknowledge that the proper care of migrants and refugees is “challenging,” calling for the intelligence and dedication that Scalabrini exhibited.

Saint Scalabrini’s original memorial in his cathedral in Piacenza. As part of the canonization process, his remains were exhumed. When they were reinterred, a different memorial was used.

[1] Pio Parolin, c.s., Father Pio Parolin: The Son of Adrien Pedo (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2002. The Italian original of this memoir is in CMS Collection #073.

[2] Giacomo Gambera, A Migrant Missionary Story: The Autobiography of Giacomo Gambera (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1994), 61. The Italian original of this memoir is in CMS Collection #069.

[3] Ron Grossman, “Flashback: The Reluctant Saint: Dorothy Day lived a complicated earthly life with a sacred calling,” The Chicago Tribune, February 28, 2020, https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-flashback-dorothy-day-catholic-worker-20200228-7bh4cxgl2nd7ti3x6qursjdjxm-story.html.

June 1, 2023