In the year 2011, we shall celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the unity of Italy. They have already been talking of it for months.

Is it legitimate for the religious institutes to celebrate this event? Are the religious institutes a world set apart, as we have sometimes believed? The religious, mainly the women religious devoted to the active life, increased in number during the time in which Church and State seemed to be opposed with regard to modernity and secularization, especially after 1879. The political choices marginalised the Church that, after the separation, went closer to the poor, the women and all those who could not draw any advantage from the promises of progress. At the beginning of nine hundred, the men and women inspectors who visited the religious schools and colleges mistrusted the education imparted in them, believing that it was anti-patriotic.

The boarding houses for women workers, decisive for the industrial development, accommodated thousands of girls subtracted from the family education and from the social control, preserving them from “falls”, source of fatal marginalisation. The inspections appreciated the unequivocal advantage under the hygienic, sanitary and moral aspects, though they feared that the nuns, salaried by the proprietors of establishments, could be a hindrance for the claims of union.    

When the law of formal instruction was compulsory, but women teachers and classrooms were missing in the poorer regions; when there were legions of illiterate boys and girls, who would never sit behind desks like children, the religious Congregations worked during informal interstices of old and new poverties. They did it without opposing progress, rather facilitating the integration of popular groups into the on going socio-economical evolution, according to contexts.  

Like an integration network

It is necessary to investigate at large scale how the institutes, with different tasks, contributed “to build up the Italians”, in the various periods of the national history. Between eight and nine hundred, they had to unite very distant areas and regions with values, languages and cultural models: it appeared like “the Patagonia of Italy”.

What did the religious who went from Piedmont and Lombardy to Sicily, as well as to south and central Italy, communicate?

Most of the families, with which they worked, never read the newspapers and lived in isolation. In the normal daily life, they created their relations through persons who functioned as cultural intermediaries, weaving networks of national unity. 

The gradual increment of local vocations and the exchange of personnel within the institutes; the assumption of government responsibilities and the formation of religious coming from different regions; the trajectories of diffusion of foundations in different regions, are, today, an object of meaningful investigation to know the real Italy. Equally interesting is the successive foundation of religious congregations in the south and in the islands, with ampler diffusion and local prevalence, as well as the international exchange due to the opening of missions.

The considerable emigration of the Italians, first from the North, then from the South and the islands, aroused the commitment of the Congregations to side the emigrants, in the harbours of departure as well as in those of arrival, for social, cultural and religious assistance. In very many places, they cultivated a “well understood” sense of “italianità”, trying to be aware of an identity beyond the dialects fragmentation, while helping people to seek a dignified and honest integration in the new context.

 Unluckily, nothing of all this appears in the National Museum of the Italian Emigration, prepared in the Rome Vittoriano (Piazza Venezia). The said Museum is very much documented with restricted state interventions, the printing press, some cultural associations, but it keeps very few references to Scalabrini and to Cabrini who, with many other institutes, gave a decisive help to the emigrants from the harbour of departure (Genova, Naples…), up to the harbour of arrival. To ignore them means an objectively distorted re-construction. We need documents to let the interested people know these things, coming out from the communication circuits within the Institutes, rather than lamenting prejudicial selections or scarce commitment to information.

First row in the emergencies

During the First World War, they requisitioned many religious houses and transformed them into military hospitals. The nursing sisters devoted to the assistance of the patients, as well as sisters dedicated to education, became nurses and gave an active contribution to the needs of the Country. The sisters were very active in laboratories, in collecting, sewing countless pieces of clothing and sending them to the front, welcoming orphans and children of the recruited persons. They carried on these activities with a convinced enthusiasm of participation in the national life, rather than as an inescapable necessity.

Would it be possible to denounce the anti-patriotism of the religious? The Second World War had other exigencies, with thousands of personal and communitarian activities involved in charity, risky hospitality offered to the Hebrews, draft dodgers, political persecuted persons, refugees and orphans. All this was a form of resistance that took advantage of those who saw a brother in every person, especially the persecuted one.  

For the emergencies of natural calamities, the religious were in the first row of assistance, from the Messina earthquake to that of Marsica, from the earthquake of the Basilicata to that of Friuli. They were in the first row also to answer the recent appeals of emigration in the opposite sense, from the Albanese and North Africa coasts towards the areas and cities in which the uneasiness of exclusions and integration issues keep on lurking.

However, the national life evolves, above all, in the daily life. The sisters look attentively at the network and diffusion of the religious houses and works of mercy in cities and in their periphery; in hospitals, in works of charity and assistance, in schools, in associative activities, free time, in times of democracy and times of dictatorship.  

The religious have withdrawn from many public institutions during the past decenniums, yet it would be demeaning to forget the patrimony of human, civil, cultural and religious values, which they cultivated and transmitted, in the perspective of a Christian humanism declined in the choices of daily life.  

They have also helped the development of economic values with their low-paid work, the formation for the work of the young generations, often subtracting them from the coils of delinquency and marginalisation, without forgetting the slowness, backwardness of opportunisms.   

Laboratories of cultural identity

If in our globalised world and plural Italy, where we live, it is necessary to recognise the identity value of society, the grammar of its culture, it is indispensable to investigate the specific contribution that the Institutes have given with faith translated into very concrete, capillary ndr diversified works, without fearing of sinking beyond Eboli. It is equally necessary to probe whether the institutes have given an efficacious contribution to oppose rooted Italian evils, such as mafia, illegality, exploitation of persons and environments.

We cannot write honestly a convincing history of education and of assistance in Italy, without keeping in view the contribution of numerous religious, through a documented historical re-construction. Shall we find persons willing to make researches on this theme, which concerns the past but looks at the present disquieting consciences and minds?

We hope that this question does not fall on deaf ears, as an expression of resigned renunciation to be present today in the national life with this form of participation. The Co-ordination Historical Religious (www.storicireligiosi.it) does not want to miss the appointment. Gripped by urgencies, it is difficult for the Congregations to invest in this sense, yet the farsightedness of gratuity is equally impellent. There is a non-rhetoric way of not setting  apart from the life of one’s own Country.   

Grazia Loparco fma
Pontifical Faculty of Sciences of Education «Auxilium»
Via Cremolino 141 - 00166 Roma