Coming to America
The [Hidden] History of the Comboni Missionaries
(This article first
appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Comboni Missions)

****
I had
turned twenty the day before, still at sea, while the Comboni presence in the
United States, which eventually developed into the North American Province
(NAP), was just shy of eighteen. The first Comboni Missionaries, then called
Sons of the Sacred Heart and known as Verona Fathers, had arrived in the USA in
November 1939.
I was
stepping into a world I knew nothing about, except for what I had seen in
movies while growing up in Italy. I did not know English, I did not know the
culture, the customs, the patchwork of Christian beliefs, differing church
buildings, and traditions. I soon realized that most of the Comboni
Missionaries I met at the time had started out just like me. Somehow, they
survived, thrived, and become movers and doers for God’s Kingdom in this new
world.
We were
not sent to the US just to study, but to establish a presence here. Tossed into
a community of American-born novices, I started the never-ending process of
integrating the old and the new. I want to tell you what I call the “hidden
story” of the Comboni Missionaries in North America. I hope that faithful old
friends across the country will appreciate the effort.
In
1939, as we were looking to gain English-speaking members for our African
missions, Archbishop John McNicholas of Cincinnati needed ministry in the black
communities of Cincinnati’s West End. We adapted to a totally new culture, a
new church, and even faced a new evil: segregation.
How
could we cope with these new challenges? Just as we always do. We listened. We
learned. We adapted.
Comboni
Fr. Dominic Ferrara, later bishop in Sudan, was pastor of Holy Trinity, located
roughly where the middle lane of eastbound Pete Rose Way is now. He took note
of a musically inclined altar boy by the name of Clarence River. Recognizing
River’s gift, Fr. Dominic fostered the kid’s talent and, eventually, his
priestly vocation. Liturgical music in the USA would never be the same. In
those days we also gave new life to the inner-city parishes of St. Henry and
St. Anthony. In time, cement and warehouses took over and people were flushed
out by business interests.
In the
1950s, Louisville, Kentucky, needed a presence in its West End. It was not what
“respectable people” of the time would call a desirable assignment. Comboni Fr.
Alfio Mondini went there, said Christmas Mass in a barn, and opened what would become
a very successful parish and school, Immaculate Heart of Mary. Fr. Giles
Conwill, a nationally known Afro-American priest and preacher, grew up in it
and so did notable lay Catholic professionals. As children and teenagers,
several of them belonged to a Christian theater group under the direction of
ever-cheerful, always smiling, and long-suffering Comboni Fr. Sam Baiani.
Were we
then typecast as ministers to the black community? Not so fast.
In
Monroe, Michigan, where I was a novice in 1957, people are still connected with
Comboni Missionaries down to this day. Why? Because they cannot forget our poor
beginnings, our untiring help in the parishes, the night calls at the hospital,
the countless missionaries they have met. We found a settled community of faith
and adapted to it, filling it with the missionary flame.
If you
were a Catholic in the 1950s, rural Georgia was not the place you wanted to be.
One missionary group labeled it “No Priest Land USA”—part of a vast stretch of
3,000 counties where only a thousand had a priest in residence—and founded a
congregation specifically to minister to places like that. Yet, when the
archbishop of Atlanta
looked for help to cover the most depleted areas in the farthest corner of the
state, four Comboni Missionaries settled in eight counties to minister to the
flock—which was just .01% of the population.
Crosses
were still being burned on Catholic lawns and Martin Luther King was still
marching in neighboring Alabama when Comboni Fr. Walter Mattiato, by being his
kind and adaptable (albeit unbendable) self, became the first Catholic priest
to be admitted to the Ministers Association in his county. Some of those small
communities, where a dozen Catholics met for Sunday Mass, are now thriving,
multi-ethnic parishes.
The
popular slogan “Go West, young man” did not escape the notice of early Comboni
Missionaries. Back then, poor migrant workers from Mexico ensured our
nationwide supply of fruit and juices, but who could speak to their unique
pastoral needs? The Comboni Missionaries adapted to a farming migrant routine
to turn places like Irwindale and Hermosa Beach into thriving, large, living
Christian communities. Plush upscale neighborhoods have since replaced those
luscious, rural orange groves of Southern California.
There
were also Native Americans out West. They lived in reservations and no one
seemed to be particularly interested in them. Brave Comboni Missionaries, once
again, adapted to the situation. People like Fr. Januarius Carillo and others
took over San Antonio de Pala, an adobe chapel of the old Camino del Rey that
had been reduced to a pile of mud. Carillo needed help and was not ashamed to
beg, encourage, and cajole. When it helped, he played on the guilt complex of
concerned Americans when faced with what we did to the indigenous population.
He concentrated on the Hollywood crowd—several stars had ranches in the
area—and enlisted the likes of Frank Capra, Raymond Burr, Ramon Novarro, and
Jack Haley (the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz) to build a school. Joseph
Kearns (aka “Mr. Wilson” from Dennis the Menace) even rode his horse to
San Antonio for Mass. Then Father had some cedars cut down on Mount Palomar,
talked the Marines of Camp Pendelton into moving them to Pala for use in
building a school. Brother Jerry Charbonneau launched a national campaign to collect
Green Stamps (remember the Green Stamps?). He got enough to buy a school bus.
At one
point we thought French Canada, a bedrock of Catholicism,
would fill our seminaries, so we opened a French-speaking presence. Ontario,
some old timers were saying, was “too Protestant” for us! But, when Church life
crumbled in Quebec, we relocated successfully in Ontario and we are still there
today to serve and share.
By the
1960s, the picture had changed in Cincinnati as well. People from Appalachia
were streaming north in search of a better life and Cincinnati was the first
stop for many of them. Several families settled in Lower Price Hill, an area
that had once been a thriving old German neighborhood, with St. Michael Church
at its core. Old anti-Catholic feelings ran deep among the new residents. Was
the parish going to die? The Comboni Missionaries—Fr. Val Saoncella and Fr.
Louie Gasparini among others—adapted to the challenge and turned St. Michael
into a model of a “missionary Church,” just like we do on other continents,
with evangelizing teams, neighborhood outreach, and empowered lay leadership.
And that is how we returned it to the local Church a generation later: small,
unique, alive. (Unfortunately, it did not fit the “maintenance Church” system
prevailing in the United States. But you cannot say we did not try.)
Now it
is the turn of the Hispanics. In the early 1980s, when high chancery officials
were stating openly that freshly arrived young Guatemalans were a big question
mark, it did not take long for the Comboni Missionaries to forge a new path in
the Church that once took us in as immigrants in 1939. Fr. Bill Jansen became
the leader of the new flock and pioneered what is today the Archdiocesan
Hispanic Ministry, still in the care of the Comboni Missionaries down to this
day.
We are
smaller now, and we are older: This year the North American Province turns 80
and I turn 82. It has been a long, exciting, life-giving ride through the life
and mores of the United States and Canada. Godspeed to the newcomers: listen,
learn, act, be adaptable, be creative.
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Joe! Happy 80th anniversary to all of you!.
ReplyDeletePhyllis Kemper