Abstract
The role which Catholicism played in the formation of the working class in Italy was profoundly different from that which it played in the US, whereas it presents many similarities with situations elswhere in Europe. Despite those similarities, however, the role which it played in Italy was predominantly determined by a number of factors peculiar to that country. The first was the nature of the working class itself: given the pattern of economic development in post-Unification Italy, the working class was essentially heterogeneous, consisting not only of an urban, industrial proletariat, not to mention a large residual artisan class, but a rural, agrarian proletariat of landless labourers, as well as various strata of peasant farmers. Indeed, it might make more sense to talk about the formation of the Italian working classes.
In the workshops, in the parched fields,
we labour happily and contentedly,
not like the turbulent plebeians,
who drown out the wind with their insane accents:
faithful labourers of the Gospel,
as we work, we think of Paradise.
(From the song of the Catholic Societies of Bergamo and Vicenza)1
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Notes
As quoted in G.B Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la chiesa: Da San Pietro a Mussolini (Milan, 1992), 320 (unless otherwise stated, all translations are by the author).
For a summary of the historiographical debate around the processes and timing of industrialisation, and the related issue of working-class formation, see J. A. Davis, ‘Socialism and the Working Classes in Italy before 1914’, in D. Geary, ed., Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before1914 (London, 1989), 203–7.
V. Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy: Recovery after Decline (Oxford, 1993), 66–74.
P. Corti and A. Lonni, ‘Da Contadini a Operai’, in A. De Clementi, ed., La Società inafferabile: Protoindustria, città e classi sociali nell’ Italia liberale (Milan, 1986), 196, 243.
Ibid., 243.
See, for example, F. Agostini, ed., Le visite pastorali di Giuseppe Callegari nella Diocesi di Padova (1884–88/1893–1905) (Rome, 1981);
A. Lazzarretto, ‘Parrocci ed emigranti nel Vicentino del primo Novecento’, in Various authors, Studi di storia sociale e religiosa: Scritti in onore di Gabriele De Rosa (Naples, 1980), 1091–112; and
A. Monticone, ‘L’Episcopato italiano dall’Unità al Concilio vaticano II’, in M. Rosa, ed., Clero e società nell’Italia contemporanea (Rome-Bari, 1992).
D. Menozzi, ‘Le Nuove parrocchie nella Prima Industrializzazione Torinese (1900–1915)’, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 9 (1973), 70.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 85.
L. Bedeschi, I Capellani del Lavoro: Aspetti religiosi e culturali della società lombarda negli anni della crisi modernista (Milan, 1977), 211.
X. Toscani, Secolarizzazione e frontiere sacerdotali (Bologna, 1982), 55.
H. McLeod, ‘The Dechristianisation of the Working Class in Western Europe (1850–1900)’, Social Compass, XXVII, 2/3 (1980), 191–214.
U. Lovato and A. Castellani, ‘Il beato Leonardo Murialdo e il movimento operaio cristiano’, in Italia Sacra: Spiritualità e azione del laicato Cattolico (Padova, 1969), 608; see also,
F. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in Southern Italy; Apulia, 1900–1922 (Cambridge, 1986), 27.
A. Kelikian, ‘Convitti operai cattolici e forza lavoro femminile’, in A. Gigli Marchetti, ed., Donna Lombarda (Milan, 1992).
Ibid., 80: the picture painted by Snowden is curiously similar to that described by Antonio Gramsci in La questione meridionale, eds F. De Felice and V. Parlato (Rome, 1966), 151.
G. De Rosa, Vescovi, popolo e magia nel Sud (Naples, 1971), 262–7. The chiese ricettizie was a system of ecclesiastical patronage whereby churches were served by colleges of priests, often from the same family.
See Borzomati, I giovani cattolici nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia dall’Unità al 1948 (Rome, 1970), 47–52 and
C. Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Harmondsworth, 1982), 191–6.
G. De Rosa, ‘La parrocchia in Italia nell’età contemporanea’, in Various authors, La parrocchia in Italia nell’età contemporanea (Naples, 1982), 19.
Ibid., 25.
Faenza, Communismo e Cattolicesimo (Milan, 1959), 9 (this is a pioneering work, one of the first studies of the coexistence between Communism and Catholicism, in this instance in the Romagna) and F. Della Peruta, Braccianti e contadini nella Valle Padana (Rome, 1975), 29.
A. De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Socialist and Communist Parties (Bloomington, 1989), 6–7.
G. Camaiani, ‘Valori religiosi e polemica anticlericale nella sinistra democratica e del primo socialismo’, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura, XX:2 (1984), 228.
C. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism (London, 1967), 67.
D. Howard Bell, Sesto San Giovanni: Workers, Culture and Politics in an Italian Town, 1880–1922 (New Brunswick, 1986), 43–4, where he stresses the ‘importance of pre-factory cultural traditions and their importance in the formation of the modern working class’, and ‘an attitude of anticlericalism which resulted in resistance to church influences in secular life’. Bell’s work is of particular value to the present discussion because of his use of the diary of the parish priest of Sesto and its observations on the rise of the workingclass movement there.
As quoted in S. Merli, ed., Proletariato di fabbrica e capitalismo industriale:. il caso italiano: 1880–1900, vol. 2 (Florence, 1973), doc. CCLXXX, 645.
Enrico Berlinguer, Communist Party Secretary 1972–86, and author of the ‘historic compromise’: his wife was a devout Catholic. See D. Kertzer, Comrades and Christians; Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy (Cambridge, 1980), 200–4, for an account of religious practice among Communists in the post-war period.
As quoted in V. Romani Genzini, ‘Il movimento contadino nel Cremonese all’inizio del’900’, in Della Peruta, ed., Braccianti e contadini nella Valle Padana (Rome, 1975), 119.
S. Pivato, Movimento operaio e istruzione popolare nell’Italia liberale: Discussioni e ricerche (Milan, 1986), 24.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 24.
G. Bonetta, ‘Scuola e socializzazione fra ’800 e ‘900’, in G. Chittolini and G. Miccoli, eds, Storia D’Italia, Annali 9, La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età Moderna (Turin, 1986), 509; where local authorities, Liberal or Socialist, succeeded in banishing religious education from schools, enormous efforts were made to replace it with evening catechism classes in churches and young people’s ricreatori. See, for example, L. Barletta, ‘Chiesa, Stato e città’, in G. Galasso, ed., Storia delle citta italiane: Napoli (Bari, 1987), 288.
For an analysis of Garibaldi’s influence, see S. Pivato, Clericalismo e laicismo nella cultura popolare italiana (Milan, 1991), 77.
S. Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain’, History Workshop, 4 (Autumn 1977), 27.
G. Zunino, La questione cattolica nella sinistra italiana (1919–1939) (Bologna, 1975), 12.
The most complete study of Prampolini’s ideas is to be found in S. Pivato, Clericalismo e laicismo; see also E. Decleva, ‘Anticlericalismo e religiosità laica nel socialismo italiano’, in Various authors, Prampolini e il socialismo riformista; atti del convegno di Reggio Emilia (27–29 Ottobre, 1978) (Rome, 1979), 259–79. In English, see R. Hostetter, ‘The Evangelical Socialism of Camillo Prampolini’, Italian Quarterly, XVIII (1975).
As quoted in A. Azzaroni, Socialisti anticlericali (Florence, 1961), 105.
Camaiani, 235 and G. Giarrizzo, ‘Il Socialismo e la modernizzazione del Mezzogiorno’, in C. Cingari and S. Fedele, eds, Il socialismo nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Bari, 1992), 6, where he says: ‘The image of “Jesus the Socialist”, both God and prophet, who rejected the church of the rich and the pharisees, appeared in the Southern countryside and spread widely.’
As quoted in, A. Gambasin, Gerarchia e laicato in Italia nel secondo ottocento (Padua, 1986), 151.
As quoted in F. Renda, Socialisti e cattolici in Sicilia (Palermo, 1972).
As quoted in C. Snider, L’Episcopato di Cardinale Andrea Ferrari, vol. 1 (Neri Pozza, 1981), 365.
For an account of the development of the Catholic movement in Italy see Richard A. Webster, The Cross and the Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford, 1960), 3–26 and
J.F. Pollard, ‘Italy’, in T. Buchanan and M. Conway, eds, Political Catholicism in Europe (Oxford, 1996), 69–77.
For an analysis of the crisis see John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (Basingstoke and London, 1988), 345–52.
Zamagni, 104–5 and L. Giuotto, La fabbrica totale: Paternalismo industriale e Città sociali in Italia (Milan, 1979), 81–2.
See Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialisation to the First World War (London, 1991), 285–7.
Ibid., 254, and U. Lovato and A. Castellani, 571.
Translation in C. Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 5 vols (Wilmington NC, 1981).
See Snider, 245, and A. Caneva, L’Azione sindacale in Italia dall’estraneità alla partecipazione, vol. 1 (Brescia, 1979), 41.
Daniel D. Horowitz, Storia del Movimento Sindacale in Italia (Bologna, 1966), 186–7.
Ibid., 187.
I. Lizzola and E. Manzoni, ‘Proletariato Bergamasco e Organizzazioni Cattoliche: Lo Sciopero di Ranica (1909)’, Studi e Richerche di Storia Contemporanea, 15 (May), 1981, 15–18.
Ibid.
For a study of the origins of this ‘plutocracy’ see M.G. Rossi, Le origini del partito cattolicio in Italia: Movimento cattolico e lotta di classe nell’Italia liberale (Rome, 1977), 281–310.
A. Fappani, Il Movimento Contadino Italiano, (Rome, 1964), 156–62.
J.F. Pollard, ‘Conservative Catholics and Italian Fascism: The Clerico-Fascists’, in M. Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (London, 1990), 40.
As quoted in John N. Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy: Partito Popolare 1919–1926 (London, 1977), 47.
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Pollard, J. (1997). Religion and the Formation of the Italian Working Class. In: Halpern, R., Morris, J. (eds) American Exceptionalism?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25584-9_8
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