“A popular explanation is one that was offered by Rudolph Vecoli, a left-leaning historian, in 1968. In an article published in the Journal of Social History, Vecoli claimed that southern Italians were deeply anticlerical and thus had little interest in attending Masses and other priest-run services. Instead, the peasantry expressed its spirituality on its own terms.
“Vecoli blamed the clergy for the anticlericalism that allegedly pervaded the South. He claimed that the priests allied themselves with the landowning class and showed little sympathy for poor tenant farmers. Other writers have made a related claim: the clergy shared the views of the reactionary landlords and did all that it could to thwart the nationalist aspirations of the Italian people. As the Risorgimento—the campaign for Italian unification—gained momentum in the 1840s and 1850s, Church leaders from Pope Pius IX on down condemned the movement.
“With the bishops and priests holding such benighted views, it was no wonder that the people of Naples and Sicily would become alienated from the institutional Church. These claims seem reasonable and have been accepted by many scholars. They are in fact largely inaccurate, however. If anything, southern Italians were clericalists not anticlericals. When King Ferdinand IV of the Two Sicilies was deposed in 1799 by radical republicans sympathetic to the French Revolution, the people of Naples rushed to join Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo’s Army of the Holy Faith which ousted the revolutionaries and restored the king.
“In the nineteenth century, three men from northern Italy—Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Cavour—played key roles in the Risorgimento. Mazzini was the political visionary, Garibaldi was the soldier and Cavour was the shrewd diplomat. By 1870, the nationalists had completed their quest: the King of Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel II, had become King of Italy. In that year, the King entered Rome and took possession of the Pope’s residence, while Pius IX retreated across the Tiber and declared himself a ‘prisoner of the Vatican.’
“Often overlooked in all the pious accounts of the Risorgimento is that Italian unification was essentially a bid by northern Italians for control over the rest of Italy. In general, southern Italians were indifferent at best to the campaigns launched by Cavour and Garibaldi. Indeed, in the 1860s when Victor Emmanuel had wrested control of southern Italy from the Bourbon king, the people rose up again in defense of the Bourbons. Thus to suggest that southern Italians were angry at the Pope and other Church leaders for not backing unification is simply untrue.”
* Quoted from “Saints Over Sacraments?: Italian and Italian–American Spiritual Traditions” by John F. Quinn in The Saints in the Lives of Italian–Americans: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, Forum Italicum Publishing, 2003, Pages 103–104
