Not long after my paternal grandmother—born in the Netherlands, but who lived most of her life in Paterson, New Jersey—died, a family member was telling some of us about kindnesses performed by a neighbor couple for my grandmother in her final months. “Are they Christian people?” another relative asked. The response: “No, they’re Italians.”
The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950
Yale University Press
287 pages
$22.78
To be sure, the label “Christian” in that conversation was for our family pretty much a synonym for “Dutch Reformed.” If pushed, we could expand the definition a bit. But Catholics were certainly off our spiritual map. And when the Catholics were also Italians, the situation was hopeless.
I got over all of that long ago. For example, I consider Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli—otherwise known as Pope John XXIII—as one of the great church leaders of the past century. And while I have never been tempted to pray directly to Saint Francis of Assisi, I do find him inspiring as a model for discipleship. Still, re-reading Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, now appearing in a third edition, reminded me of the kind of thing that worried the New Jersey Dutch Calvinists of my youth about grass roots Italian Catholicism.
What I know now, of course, is that many of my Catholic friends share those worries. A priest-theologian friend, a Polish American, had worked several years in Rome, heading up a Vatican office. I mentioned to him once that a cousin of mine had lived with his family in Rome, serving as dean of the Greater European Mission’s Italian Bible Institute. “What kind of school is that?” my friend asked. “They train people to evangelize Italian Catholics,” I answered. His immediate response was: “Thank God somebody is doing that! We certainly have not had any success! That school will be in my prayers.”
I did not ask my friend about the specifics of his critique of popular Italian Catholicism. But I’m fairly sure he would have described a pattern of religious devotion that shared some common elements with the beliefs and practices of the community of immigrants chronicled by Robert Orsi, in his study of the grass-roots Catholicism that emerged in Italian Harlem in the last decades of the 19th century.
The focus of Orsi’s book is the elaborate annual festa of devotion to the Madonna of Mount Carmel, held for many decades every July on 115th Street in East Harlem. The main religious event of the festa was a solemn mass followed by a jubilant procession through the streets on July 16, but the larger drama occurred over many days, before and after the parade. Friends and relatives would visit from others cities, with much eating, drinking, dancing, noise-making, and the buying and selling of religious articles. There was a heavy trade in candles and waxworks, locally produced: models of arms and legs to be offered to the Virgin in support of prayers for healings, and images of infants carried by women who were praying for fertility. This was a time for special acts of penitence and intercession; many miracles, originating during the festa, were attributed to the Madonna’s beneficence. In one case, the family of 69-year-old Giuseppe Caparo helped him carry a heavy wax model of himself in the annual procession. The Madonna, they were convinced, had preserved his life when Giuseppe had fallen without serious injury from the fifth floor of a building.
For the mass and procession themselves, families would dress up in their finest—although many walked barefoot on the scalding summer pavement. The crowds came streaming from all directions to the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Many would crawl up the stone steps to the church’s doors, some even licking the stone surfaces as they moved.
After the mass, the crowds would gather outside, and the large statue of the Madonna would be carried out and placed upon a float. Then the march would begin, with bands, Italian chanting, rows of dignitaries and parish groups, banners, incense, fireworks—and hundreds of penitents along the route, some of them forcing the procession to pause as they threw themselves in front of the float bearing the statue, begging for the Virgin’s favors.
Italian immigrants started moving into Harlem in the 1870s, with the flow increasing over the next several decades. As the neighborhood expanded, other groups—Jews, Germans, and Irish, mainly—were forced to move away. At the same time, blacks and Puerto Ricans also began moving into Harlem. Neither the exodus nor the influx of neighbors was altogether peaceful. But inter-ethnic tensions were only a part of the hardship faced by the Italians. Their physical living conditions were often squalid, and they were plagued by unemployment, rampant disease, organized crime, and intra-ethnic gang warfare.
The Madonna of Mount Carmel had accompanied the immigrants on their journey from their homeland, and she played an important role in their new life in America. With her statue serving as “a visible link between Italy and East Harlem,” the Madonna was a guarantor of continuities for the immigrants; in her name they preserved the family rituals and burial customs of the Old World. She also provided the hope—and even some miraculous interventions—that eased the way into the strange and difficult living conditions of the New World.
The Mount Carmel yearly celebration continues these days, but its scale has been drastically reduced. More important, it clearly no longer serves the purposes that were once so important to the folks living on and near 115th Street. The September-October 1954 issue of Italian Harlem’s Mount Carmel Parish Bulletin featured a cover photo of the Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman. This expression of honoring the grandson of Boston-area Irish immigrants was of a piece with the Bulletin‘s increasing attention to local parish and archdiocesan activities in the years immediately following World War II.
All of that might seem unremarkable for a Catholic parish newsletter. But as Robert Orsi tells us, it was not always so. Early on, the larger Catholic community in the New York area regarded the East Harlem Italians with disdain. Orsi cites the example of an Irish American priest who in 1888 blasted “the peculiar kind of spiritual condition” of the immigrant Italians as devoid of any grasp of “the great truths of religion.”
But by the middle years of the 20th century, the Mount Carmel folks had finally become “an Italian American Catholic parish eager to conform to the styles and values of American Catholicism.” What had for many decades been “a festa housed in a church,” Orsi observes, had now become “a church with an annual festa.”
The shift in the sense of identity among the Italian Americans in East Harlem brought about a parallel shift in the Madonna’s role in their community. She had—in an important sense—joined the church.
Many Protestants have been warming up in recent years to Marian devotion. For example, a recent book presenting us with a “Mary for Evangelicals” featured enthusiastic endorsements by well-known evangelical theologians.[1] To be sure, evangelicals and their mainline Protestant counterparts do not mean to espouse the official Marian dogmas of Catholicism, such as Mary’s Immaculate Conception and her bodily ascension to Heaven. But there is a new insistence, as one Protestant writer put it recently, that Mary be seen by all of us as “the Mother of Believers.”[2]
Seldom in all of these recent Protestant calls for a new spiritual affection for Mary, however, has any serious attention been paid to the ways she has often functioned, especially in the past two centuries, as a subverter of ecclesiastical authority. This inattention even characterizes recent historical studies that have sorted out the various “re-imaginings” of Mary throughout history. Miri Rubin, for one, offers a detailed historical account of the Virgin’s shifting roles over the centuries—for example, after serving as the maternal nurturer in medieval Christianity, Mary subsequently came to the aid of “poets and revolutionaries, apocalyptic visionaries and, later, feminists.”[3] But Rubin shows no real interest in the ways in which folks like the recent Italian immigrants in Harlem used Marian devotion as a challenge to the authority of church officials.
While the Italians of Harlem sustained their challenge mainly by configuring their Marian devotion in a way that constituted an alternative to much officially sanctioned Catholic life and thought, their largely passive challenge was of a piece with more aggressive ones that have arisen in recent years. In the complex scenario spelled out by Michael Cuneo in his excellent study of various conservative and traditionalist dissenting movements in contemporary Catholicism, the key Marian apparitions of the past century, the ones at Fatima in Portugal and Medjugorye in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have loomed large in what has often been an overt grass-roots hostility toward the Catholic hierarchy. Such hostile movements—which Cuneo describes as comprised of “complex shadowlands of steamy prophecy, exotic conspiracy, and sectarian intrigue”[4]—generally pit the specific Marian revelations of recent history against official church pronouncements, often depicting the Vatican, including several recent popes, as at best hiding some “revealed” secrets, and at worst as perpetrating a deceptive heretical conspiracy.
Of special importance in this regard is the message delivered by the Virgin to three shepherd children who lived near Fatima in 1917. Her revelations, which came on six separate occasions during that year, featured three messages. One depicted the horrors of hell; in the second, she promised a world peace to be facilitated by an official church commitment to the conversion of Russia as an expression of devotion to her “Immaculate Heart.” The third, which was kept secret until June of 2000, included what was understood by the faithful to be a prophecy of the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. But much controversy continues to surround this third “secret” among many Fatima devotees—including the conviction shared by many of them that to this day the Vatican is refusing to reveal the whole truth about the third Fatima revelation.[5]
Apart from those details, however, there is the reality of a grass roots devotion to a Mother who reveals her secrets directly to her peasant children. This devotion has led to what is, in effect, the emergence of an alternative “magisterium” in some Catholic circles: i.e., the teaching “office” of the heavenly Virgin who chooses on occasion to bypass the channels of official Catholicism to communicate directly to the “foolish” of this world. That same Virgin was clearly the primary spiritual authority for the immigrant people of the East Harlem parish.
Robert Orsi’s book first appeared in 1985. What makes this third edition especially interesting for those of us who first read the book in its original edition is the inclusion in this present volume of a new introduction, along with the two earlier introductory essays. Together these three pieces, totaling 67 pages, provide a fascinating ongoing commentary on the project. For one thing, Orsi reports on his continuing contacts with some present day offspring of the 115th Street community. Many of them still practice the community’s devotion to the Madonna, and their perspectives give us a rare picture of how practitioners of a folk religion respond to their actual reading of an academic book about their views and practices.
The three introductions chronicle an increasing methodological self-awareness on Orsi’s part. Twenty-five years ago he was—without fully realizing what he was doing—departing from what he now clearly sees as a defective pattern of scholarship, one that approaches a movement of this sort with the attempt “to translate the experiences of people we write about into the comfortable categories of modern scholarship,” instead of learning from the people studied about how “they disrupt our theories and methods.”
The result is a book that is rich in “thick description” of an immigrant community’s life, touching on politics, neighborhood activities, food, gender patterns, family dynamics, entertainment, the drama of living and dying—and insofar as it can be distinguished from all the rest, religious devotion. Through it all, one senses not merely a laudable effort on Orsi’s part to cultivate an empathy for his subject matter but even a genuine affection for the community whose complex life he narrates in such careful detail.
All of us who care about “lived religion” can learn from Orsi’s important efforts to understand—to use the title of his final chapter—”The Theology of the Streets.” There are many streets that still need to be studied in similar detail, and with the same kind of empathy, even affection. Indeed, as some of us struggle to find our own way of giving the Lord’s mother her spiritual and theological due, we can learn at least a few lessons from the residents of the East Harlem neighborhood themselves.
Orsi puts one of those lessons well in his concluding paragraph. On the streets in their neighborhood, he writes, those Italian-Americans created a communal occasion on which they carried their pains and hopes to a divine Mother—one who often “merged in their memories with their own mothers”—begging for another year of her nurturing mercies. And they did this with the knowledge “that the path to the divine was the same dense and trying and joyous and painful path that they trod every day.” That should preach well in neighborhoods far removed from 19th-century East Harlem!
1. Tim Perry, Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord (InterVarsity, 2006).
2. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ” ‘Nothing Will Be Impossible with God,’ Mary as the Mother of Believers,” in Mary: Mother of God, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 19.
3. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), p. 416.
4. Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 87.
5. An Italian journalist, who claims to have been—apparently until publishing this book—a friend of the present pope and other senior church officials, has now developed an elaborate case for the existence of yet another, and highly significant, “fourth secret of Fatima,” the content of which, he claims, is being withheld by the Vatican; cf. Antonio Socci, The Fourth Secret of Fatima (Loreto Publications, 2009).
Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Eerdmans).
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