The Humble and the Heroic: Wartime Italian Americans (Hardcover) ...

Sermons, confessions, and missions were frequently in Italian, while the parish highlight—the celebration of the Feast of St. Joseph, reflected an ethnic character and Italian-language Catholic media like Il Crociato and Italian language prayer cards were available in the church vestibule. Just as they did in Italy, congregants were likely to talk animatedly to friends and neighbors during services, a custom that provoked occasional rebukes by the pastor, but did not stop the practice. In addition to regular Mass and confession, one afternoon a week, I also studied religion by attending Confraternity classes in the classrooms of St. Joseph. To go to St. Joseph’s Church on Sunday meant to walk six blocks through a heavily Italian neighborhood dotted with thriving mom-and-pop grocery stores, fruit stores, tailor shops, barber shops, Italian bakeries, and pastry shops. On the way home, one could always stop for items that were not bought on Saturday, the main shopping day. That Monsignor Silvestri was in fact more than an ordinary cleric was acknowledged decades after his passing in an informative New York Times article on the exceptional number of Sicilian American judges and lawyers from the vicinity over whom he had sway. “It was there that Msgr. Ottavio Silvestri, an ambitious and politically well-connected Roman Catholic pastor, cast his influence over a group of bright, young Italian children, who in turn would inspire others.”²²

As a priest and public figure whose influence extended beyond our neighborhood, some controversy surrounded Silvestri. This was in part due to the insensitivity he sometimes displayed—on one occasion, he reprimanded my mother when she took one of the chairs from the altar, believing he had placed them there for parishioner use during an overcrowded Good Friday service.²³ While local rumor as I recall it stressed his private wealth, to others it was his political leanings that attracted attention. Dedicated anti-fascist Gaetano Salvemini maintained that because Silvestri spoke at a Fascist-organized function in 1936, that rendered him, in effect, a supporter of the foreign ideology.²⁴