| Chapter 1: | Italian Americana 1920s–1930s |
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The Church
The Catholic parish church was a fixture in effectively every New York Italian enclave. “The church, of course, was always a restraining and guiding force. From the earliest days in Brooklyn, it bound the Italian people together. It would be impossible to overestimate its importance as a social influence.”20 Frequently, the result of efforts by the Italian immigrants in the neighborhood parishes reflected the regions of Italy of the majority residents in the area. For instance, the Neapolitan background of immigrants in the Williamsburgh, Brooklyn neighborhood was reflected in the establishment of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and remarkably more than century later, it continues to manifest itself in the celebration of the Giglio, one of the foremost feasts in the northeast. There were at least three Catholic parishes within easy walking distance to where I lived—St. Barbara, originally of Germanic background, St. Brigid of Irish background and ours, St. Joseph Patron of the Universal Church that was conspicuously Italian. Newly-arrived Italian immigrants readily felt a distinctive ethnic ambiance in the Italian parish that put them at ease as Mario Macaluso’s autobiography affirms,
The church, built in 1921 largely with Italian American support, permeated with the sense of Italianitá that was readily evident in the persons of Abruzzi-born Monsignor Ottavio Silvestri, founding pastor and assistant pastors who were either Italian Americans or priests recruited directly from Italy.