A Brief History Of Italians In America, 4 The Cross And The Flag

The Cross And The Flag

It never was a walk in the park being a Catholic in Connecticut – or, for that matter, anywhere in New England. Italian and Catholic Irish “papists” in the post-Civil War period could routinely expect ill treatment, and sometimes outright persecution.

In Boston, during the American Revolution, voices raised in celebration of religious freedom were also turned, almost mechanically, against orthodox Catholics. In a frequent celebration reminiscent of Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, an effigy of the Pope seated on a chair was carried through the streets of colonial Boston and liberally pelted with rocks and rotten fruit by the anti-Catholic mob. Wealthy merchants, the River Kings of the Connecticut Valley, joined in the fun, as did Boston ministers who had conveniently put aside the central tenant of Christianity: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Following election to the presidency of John Kennedy – a Catholic in chains who had to assure voters he was not an agent of the pope -- it was thought that this many headed hydra had been disposed of, once and for all. But anti-Catholicism runs deep. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, whose father was a Prussian Jew and whose mother was an Austrian Catholic, wrote that anti-Catholicism was the oldest and most enduring of American prejudices, a live option in both Jamestown and Plymouth Colony. Like the underground river in the Yucatan Peninsula, considered the longest in the world, prejudices run hidden from view and occasionally splash up to the surface – which brings us to Saint Oronzo, the patron Saint of Lecce in Southern Italy, located on the heel of Italy’s boot on the Adriatic facing Albania.

What we know of Oronzo, the cultus of the Saint, comes to us by way of a twelfth century manuscript. It is doubtful anyone in Windsor Locks was familiar with this record, including the pastor of Saint Mary’s Church, Father Finance – his real name.

According to the legend, Justus, a disciple of Saint Paul, was on his way to Rome when he was shipwrecked on the beach of San Cataldo de Lecce. During his stopover, Justus converted two citizens of Lecce, Orontius (Oronzo) and his nephew Fortunatus. Fortune had smiled on Oronzo whose father, Publius, had been treasurer during the reign of Emperor Nero. Publius was on his way to Rome when he was shipwrecked. Oronzo had succeeded to his position when his father died. In affirming Christianity, Oronzo had much to lose and only a martyr’s crown  to win.

Denounced as Christians, Oronzo and Fortuatus fled to Corinth, where Oronzo met Saint Paul. He was confirmed as the first Bishop of Lecce but shortly after was imprisoned along with his nephew by Nero’s representative Antonius, who threatened to kill them both if they did not reject their new religion. Nero, and other Caesars as well, were sticklers on the point.  The two converted Christians refused and yet were released. After preaching at the Salento and at Bari, they were again arrested by Antonius and executed by axe a short distance from Lecce on August 26. Oronzo had earned his martyr’s crown. Justus was also martyred. Nero, caught in a power struggle, later lost the backing of important senators and was compelled to commit suicide following an all too frequent upsurge in republican virtue -- very inconvenient to tyrants -- that occurred regularly during the reigns of Suetonius’ twelve Caesars, nearly every one of whom was mad as a hatter.

Oronzo was a genuine martyr, a hero of the faith, and Italians in Windsor Locks had found a place for him in Saint Mary’s Church – on the left side of the transept, tucked away in a twilight corner adjacent to a statue of Jesus of the Sacred Heart. There the stalwart Oronzo stood, mute and powerful, until August 26^th, when he was dusted off, outfitted with a red cape and paraded through the town, a joyous occasion for all that ended with song, wine, rich Italian food and pastries, at what then was the only park in the town, adjacent to Saint Mary’s parochial school. By the time Oronzo arrived in the park, his red cape had turned green, this owing to monetary contribution made along the way by poor sinners who wished Oronzo to intercede on their behalf, sometimes to smooth quarrels with their neighbors who had failed to heed Christ’s command to love thy neighbor as thyself. The statue of Oronzo, it was rumored, was the property of an local Italian  whose name has not come down to us, but the bearded saint,  soon after he had been installed, quickly  won an honored place in the hearts of many Italians in the town and elsewhere. He had a strong following in New Britain and parts of Hartford among Italians who had emigrated from the province of Apulia.

Father Finance, however, was not a fan.

The good father had been assigned to Windsor Locks to increase contributions and so put the books of Saint Mary’s in balance. His homilies were peppered with admonitions to accomplish this end: “Now, don’t you bother putting coins in the basket this Sunday. The collectors are straining under all that weight. Paper currency would be kinder, and more charitable too.”

No one in Windsor Locks minded pocket book appeals. Businesses, the townsfolk knew, needed money to grind along, and the church was, among other things, a business. They were prepared to be generous. Father Finance’s calls to repent and empty your pockets for the greater glory of God and his church were kindly if not warmly received. His flock uncomplainingly acceded to Father Finances’ pleas for more generous contributions. But there was something off-putting about this priest. First of all: “Finance” – what sort of a name was that? What country did the man hail from, and what town? Clearly, he was not Italian.  Was his name a nom de guerre? Why was he so thin? Tapeworms? And those sharp elbows, what did they signify? And what was his beef with Saint Oronzo? It could not have been the statue; the church was full of them. The ceremony then? Could that be it? A priest who was averse to ceremonies would be positively irreligious: The mass was a ceremony, and a joyous one at that. To what private joy did Father Finance bend his knee? What WAS his problem?

The Italians in the town – and, most especially, the carpetbaggers who came from out of town – are not likely to remember the substance of Father Finance’s homilies.

Father Finance often grew warm citing Mathew 6: 1-3: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. 2 So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,…”

Most likely, the priest’s tender sensibilities were bruised by the Oronzo ceremony, part of which involved a greasy pole climbing contest at the park, where the festivities concluded with songs, some in Italian, wine drinking and … the food! Women brought with them their favorite dishes. The poor here were not fed crumbs from the table. Everyone feasted. Everyone noticed everyone. The kind of humility recommended by Mathew was nowhere in evidence on Saint Oronzo’s Day. The men played games. The women, veiled in the church, now cast off their veils and paraded their finery. Oronzo’s green money-covered cloak was returned to Father Finance – who, unfortunately, was indisposed.

The very moment the church doors had burst open -- Saint Oronzo hoisted on the shoulders of the celebrants in his red cloak -- the doors of the rectory were disgorging Father Finance, who appeared to be, to the crowd approaching the Saint with fistfuls of dollars, rejoicing with the saints in Heaven. Later, after the festivities had been concluded, word went round that Father Finance had breathed his last as his body was being carried towards the ambulance under the very hand of the Saint, outstretched as if in benediction.

The town was, for the most part, sorrowful at the passing of Father Finance. His obituary in the Windsor Locks Journal gave the priest his due, There was – Carlo the fox apart – little overt anti-clericalism among Italians in the post-war world. Many of the old Italians were rarely overt with anyone but Italians; and even here, one had to take care. Prudence was nearly always the better part of valor, and Italians, when I was a boy, did not want to stink in the nostrils of those prejudiced against them.

Carlo kept his own counsel. He had no confessor and rarely visited Saint Mary’s Church. Nuns, in particular, set his soul spinning. Saint Mary’s parochial school, to which he sent his children, was just off Center Street, a short three minute walk from the homestead. The school’s nuns, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, a teaching order, would pass his house in a clump on their peregrinations. Outside tending his roses or pruning his fruit trees, The Old Man, as we affectionately called him, could easily spot them flocking down the hill, their black habits fluttering in a breeze like the broken arms of crows, at which he would hustle into the house and, for all we knew, hide under his bed. Something about the nuns stirred some deep antipathy in his psyche.

My brother, sister and I have often speculated about all this. Had the nuns beat him when he was child in Costa Nescovato, Italy, a small town only two miles from Castellania, where his wife, Louise Imperiali, hailed from? His fear or repulsion was palpable, even a bit hysterical. There was, according to my mother, some difficulty in Costa Nescovato. Carlo returned to his hometown once and was badly beaten. My cousin Bill Mandrola (he spells the family name differently) has done yeoman’s work unearthing data from old ship manifests. Bill speculates that Louise, who came to Windsor Lock alone a year or two before Carlo, may have expanded her age a bit on the manifest sheet. A young woman traveling alone might have excited a good deal of curiosity and interest, both of which were sometimes fatal to immigration ambitions. She was, according to the ship’s manifest, unmarried; Carlo, however, reported himself as married. Could they have married in Italy? Bill concludes they likely married here.

In the absence of hard and reliable data, the imagination runs riot.

“What was the problem in Italy?” I asked my mother.

“Don’t know. He visited once and came back badly beaten.”

A modest discretion at such moments is understandable: A beating at the hands of your friends or enemies is not the sort of trophy one puts on the shelf to entice the admiration of family members.

There are various theories. A card game gone bad, brother Jim speculated; certainly a possibility. But a romance gone bad, a craftily arranged elopement, a sudden quarrel with toughs in the town, all might account for the beating.  Why did Carlo return to Italy in the first place? He had already escaped the “difficulty,” why return to it? Jim’s alternate theory was that Carlo fled Italy to America to escape the draft. Perhaps he bumped into an engorged and patriotic Sergeant Macaroni on his return to Costa Nescovato, which was not too far from Casalnoceto, where the Pescis hunkered down.

Carlo treated nuns in particular as if they had been witches who might put a spell on him. It has become fashionable in our time to denigrate nuns and priests, the whole lot of them, as – well, parochial, when in reality, they were focused on their vocations. Not all but some of the nuns were brilliant and accomplished. Catholics who have had in their childhood an intimate and warm relation with nuns denigrate them later on to satisfy the neo-pagans who surround them in a de-Christianized culture. Growing away from the church rather than into it, they have become stunted Catholics. Is there anyone more destructive than a Catholic who has turned his face against his church? It was a nun who taught me how to draw. She was herself an accomplished artist, and she tutored me because she saw in me some raw talent that, with a little nurturing, might blossom into something that would bring me joy. This nun, whose name I think was Sister Ursula, sang as she drew, lovely melodies that sweetened the dull air of the school. I will never forget her flashing, encouraging smile. She had no reason at all to favor me, a stupid and thoughtless boy, with her attentions.

“What would you like to draw?”

“I don’t know, sister.”

“Do you like birds?”

She deduced from my blank expression I had no great affection for birds.

“Red birds! Glorious red birds! Not Robin Red Breasts. Do you know the story of Robin Red Breast?”

I pleaded ignorance.

“I will tell you. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, beaten and bloody, crowned with thorns, forsaken of all, but for the few apostles who stood below him along with his dear weeping mother and other women, the Father in Heaven, who forsakes no one, not even thieves and murderers, sent to his Son a sparrow that sang to him a pretty song and pulled and pulled at the nails fastening him to the cross. And what do you think? Blood from the Savior of all men fell on the breast of the sparrow. And forever after and all, there were in the world Robin Red Breasts, among the first birds to appear in the spring, when winter has been frightened off by the great promise of new life. But today…today, for you my child, we will draw THIS bird…”

And she pulled from behind her black habit a picture of a scarlet cardinal sitting on a spring twig, its flaming red head turned in the direction of a boy stricken with wild anticipation. It was as if I had never seen the color red before.

Her eyes were wide, and her voice had in it the lilt of Irish I had heard before in the voice of Mr. Shaw, an old man who swept with a huge scythe the hill I climbed every day to reach Saint Mary’s, pausing every so often to sharpen his blade with a whetstone. I sat in the tall grass, invisible I thought, while he, swinging his great scythe, mowed down my cover. And there I was, caught hiding and seeking, his smile sweeping over me.

Together we painted the cardinal. Sister sang softly a quiet tune. Decades later, when I hear the piercing whistle of a cardinal or see a blast of red skittering through the trees, I almost remember the sister’s song.

I can’t remember whether it was Donna or I who first discovered that Santa Claus – not the real saint, but the chimney dropper whose familiar image was penned by Thomas Nast, the anti-Catholic bigot – was what Christian denialists have since come to call a “myth.”

It may have been Donna; she was my Christopher Columbus. I can’t recall the date of the awful discovery either. The reality of Santa was just one of those “white lies” you felt compelled to keep intact for the sake of younger children. For this reason, the nuns at St. Mary’s would resort to permissible subterfuge when they were asked by youngsters of a certain age whether Santa was real. A white lie was, in common parlance, what Catholic theologians might have called an evasion.

Catholic theologians will tell you that it is, on very rare occasions, permissible to depart from the governing rule: Tell the truth and shame the Devil. If a justa causa can be established, a difficult barrier to surmount, four actions are then permitted: a material but not a formal lie, an equivocation, an evasion, or silence. Example: St. Augustine says that if a murderer stops you on a road and asks which way his victim went, it’s permissible to mislead him. I do not know whether the existence of the Clement Moore-Thomas Nast Santa falls into this straight jacket of the permissible lie. I do know what a proper nun-like response to the question “Is Santa real?” might be, because I put just that question to Sister Immaculata. Her curt response was: “Ask your father.” I suppose some Catholic theologians might regard the Santa white lie as a hybrid equivocation-evasion. Boys when I was a boy were geniuses in evasive action; we hated bald faced lies, but loved the loops that led us round inconvenient truths to safe and pleasant harbors.

In my case, the arrival of Christmas was associated with things other than gift-giving, among them the arrival of the Pertusi brothers from New York, the good cheer that banged on the back door, both before and after the Great Day, in the form of my boisterous uncles and their more quiet and subdued wives, the plenteous feast laid out by my mother, Saint Mary’s Church, garlanded and wreathed by religious women, rising like a prayer above the snow, the story of the First Christmas, a mewling babe in a crib, pondered over by shepherds and wise men from the East, the great joy and sorrow that intersect like shining swords on this day when salvation opened its mothering arms to a wounded world.

“Sit there,” my busy mother would say – “there” was the bench that stretched the length of the kitchen window – while she puttered about the kitchen, readying things for the following day, when she must accommodate the crowd of family and visitors that would sit around the dining room table, brimming with good cheer, chattering all at once, exploding in laughter, my uncles provoking the sly joy poured out abundantly in the stories they told, in the good natured ribbing they administered equitably to all but themselves.

And there I would sit, turned slightly, looking out the window – waiting, waiting, waiting. So crisp was the snowfull day that everyone walking down Suffield Street towards Main Street was preceded by semitransparent balloons of breath that fogged white at the touch of air.

My line of sight was fixed on Pellegrini’s house across North Main Street. There was a small clump of Maple trees that abutted the Pelligrini house, until one merry Christmas, when Louie Peligrini had been given his heart’s desire, an axe that fitted nicely into a holster that hung from his scout’s belt, this lumberjack of the neighborhood rushed out, while his parents were not at home, to do battle with the half dozen Maple trees and, plying his axe to them, felled them all. His father, I believe, beat a good deal of sense into Louie following this misadventure.

To the right of the Pelligrini house stood two tall twin towers, a small house perched on top. Years later, Phil Lombardi and I would summon up enough courage to climb the corkscrew stairs that led from the ground to the house, wondering as we scaled them the purpose of the chute that followed the same twisted path. It was, we discovered after sliding down it several times, a coal chute no longer in use. The siloes on either side of the stairs and chute, now empty, once held coal. We returned home that night at about seven o’clock, the hour at which we did a good deal of our mischief, our backs scarred with black soot, two very apologetic boys. My mother knew instantly what had happened, sent me to the shower and burned my clothes. Lombardi’s mother was less accommodating.

The train, arriving at the station, had already hooted a warning to the cars crossing the metal framed bridge that connected Windsor Locks with Warehouse Point, the oldest section of East Windsor, so called because there, when Windsor itself was a colonial fort, strong men would ferry trade across the Connecticut River on barges pushed forward with long poles, carted up and down the river by horses. The metal bridge is now gone, replaced by a Soviet styled concrete affair, unbeautiful, cold and eminently practical. The one-sided Main Street that leant character to the town is gone, a victim of the redevelopment fervor that struck Connecticut in the mid-1960’s. Gone is the Realto Theatre, the Donut Kettle, Marconi’s and the many bars along Main Street that filled the air with the odor of hops and whisky. All gone.

But let me call it back for a farewell kiss.

I was fourteen in 1957, seated at the kitchen window bench, my eyes fixed on that point at which North Main Street disappeared at the foot of what we boys called Bunker Hill. Every rise of hill in the town was at that time a Bunker Hill for boys who cherished the honor and heroism of Connecticut revolutionary soldiers, farmers like Israel Putman who dropped his plow when told his countrymen had been fired upon in Boston and rushed with his comrades to fight the redcoats. The train whistle had cracked the cold air. Beneath me I could feel warm gusts arising from a hissing radiator that had to be bled every so often – or it would explode and carry us through a hole in the kitchen wall, dumping us, shocked but not seriously injured, into the piling snow. And I was waiting, waiting, waiting…

And then, miraculously, the hill disgorged the Pertusi brothers, John and Anthony.

I screamed, “They’re here.”  Now Christmas could begin.