The discovery of the New World and the European settlements in the Americas offered the Catholic Church both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, the Vatican had a chance to reclaim its universal mission by Christianizing the native peoples. On the other, it had to curb the expan­sionism of Protestantism and to take care of Catholic immigrants, in order to prevent them from yielding to the lure of other cults. Giovanni Pizzorusso and Matteo Sanfilippo, who are among the most knowledgeable scholars in the field, outline the policies that the Catho­lic Church elaborated to address these issues and show how the Papacy changed its strategies and goals over the centuries.

The Vatican was a latecomer to sy­stematic proselytism across the Atlantic. The institute that oversaw the spread of Catholicism in the lands controlled by the pagans and the so-called heretics, the congregation De Propaganda Fide, was established only in 1622, namely one hundred and thirty years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. In addition, the Papacy granted the king of Spain large autonomy in dealing with religious matters in the territories under his sovereignty. Therefore, the Vatican concentrated its endeavors on North America and especially on the Antilles, where the colonial rivalries between a Catholic power with a pugnacious Calvinist-oriented minority – France – and Protestant empires such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, along with a significant presence of Jews and Irish Catholics, made the archipelago a fron­tier for the competing religious commu­nities.

The Vatican initially made equal efforts to fortify the faith of the Catholic immigrants and to convert the native pagans; however, by the time Arch­bishop Gaetano Bedini visited the Unit­ed States and Canada between 1853 and 1854 to report about the conditions and problems of Catholicism there, the Pa­pacy had focused primarily on the po­pulation of European descent. The in­crease in mass immigration from Catho­lic nations to the United States in the following decades, adding to the previ­ous influx of the Irish in the wake of the 1845-47 potato famine, strengthened such an approach and let the Vatican hope that the Church would make fur­ther inroads into this country. In 1908, the congregation De Propaganda Fide discontinued its activities in the Ameri­cas, a move that marked the awareness that this continent was no longer a land of infidels.

The Holy See realized, however, that North American Catholics needed speci­fic religious assistance, especially if they had recently moved to what continued to be a prevailing Protestant society. Ita­lians were considered an immigrant group whose faith required particular attention. To this purpose, Bishop Gio­vanni Battista Scalabrini of Piacenza founded the Pious Society of Mission­aries of St. Charles Borromeo in 1887.

Pizzorusso and Sanfilippo highlight massive unpublished records in the Vatican and other ecclesiastic archives that document the major issues con­cerning Italian-American Catholicism between the late nineteenth century and the death of Pope Benedict XV in 1922. These matters include the immigrants’ conflicts with the Irish-dominated hier­archy, the call for the establishment of national parishes, the controversies over civil marriages, the frequent cases of bigamy, the misbehavior of several Ital­ian priests, and the struggle against the anti-clerical campaigns of the anarchists and socialists in the Little Italies.

Dagli indiani agli emigranti draws upon essays that the authors have published in the last two decades. Yet Pizzorusso and Sanfilippo have exten­sively revised and updated their pre­vious works, merging them into an arti­culate and consistent narrative. The re­sult is a new and full-fledged study from which anyone interested in immi­gration and Catholicism in North Ame­rica will benefit.