The small, scuffed sandals, worn by a long-ago little girl, balance on top of an old travelling trunk. Next to them, a crochet hat and a lacy white dress. Nearby, a glass case displays a Bishop’s red socks and his gold-embroidered gloves.
The new museum at
the Italian church in Buffalo is exactly the sort of museum I love; no high-tech stuff, just a glorious cornucopia of objects, a
goldmine of memories. And it tells a tale
of hardship and homesickness, tears and laughter, that speaks
to anyone who’s left their home for somewhere else, including me.
The inner-city church,
St. Anthony of Padua has been a focus
for the Italian community in our nearest metropolis since 1891.
Then, Buffalo, on the eastern shore of
Lake Erie, was one of America’s richest cities, a rising commercial and industrial force and
immigrants, including thousands from impoverished southern Italy, poured in,
many lured by dodgy recruiting agents.
These days,some 80 people still attend the Sunday Italian Mass, more on special feast days. But most descendants of the Italian settlers have left the neighbourhood for more affluent areas No longer mostly dockers, labourers, organ-grinders, the butt of cruel jokes, but policemen, business leaders, doctors, lawyers and politicians - assimilated Americans. Italians have contributed rather more to America than macaroni and the Mafia.
Is it still worth
preserving their ethnic heritage? St
Anthony’s new parish priest thinks so. Monsignor Fred Voorhes
(the name’s Dutch; the Italian
bit comes from his mother), inherited a church which already oozed history,
resplendent with murals and statues: St
Martha, St Rosalia, St Anthony of
course, cradling Baby Jesus, St Lucy holding her eyes on a plate.
But rooting around in cellars and attics, he
found a lot more. “Why hide these
wonderful things that people would enjoy seeing?” If nothing else, the courageous efforts of the
migrants, travelling to the New World, was worth
commemorating.
Monsignor Voorhes found
room for the museum in the church basement. An appeal to Italian-Americans in,
as he put it, the “fashionable suburbs” raised 8,000 dollars. More interesting were the objects donated. A woman
had just called to offer her grandfather’s “railroad watch” (he’d worked on the railways)
and her grandmother’s christening robe, from her baptism in St Anthony’s in
1902.
The diocesan archives turned up probably the
most valuable exhibits, a rich set of
fiddleback vestments, the kind used in the days when the Latin Mass was still the norm.
There are
reliquaries and tabernacles, zampogna - Italian
bagpipes - and a mandolin, elaborate silk
banners, painstakingly worked and inscribed with the name of a women’s group, “Societa Femminile S.Raffaele Arcangelo”, a
faded Boy Scout flag.
Msgr
Voorhes’ predecessor, Father Secondo
Casarotto, himself born in an Italian village, was an avid historian and had
already collected piles of photographs.
Now they’re on the museum walls: tenement-dwellers,
vegetable vendors, children playing in a gutter near a dead horse. Some small
boys visiting the museum couldn’t get enough of that one.
There are
processions winding through streets of houses now mowed-down in the name of
urban renewal, faded sepia basketball
teams, brass bands, legions of altar boys and First Communicants, graduating classes from the now defunct church
school.
The red socks
belonged to Msgr Voorhes’ uncle, Bishop Pius Benincasa, Buffalo's only bishop of Italian
blood. He was also distantly related to Saint Catherine of Siena, as is the
Monsignor, “I’ve looked at a portrait of
her and we seem to have the same dimple. Now is that purely coincidence, or was it passed down through the
centuries?”
Buffalo has fallen on harder times, the old
industries disappearing, the population
declining, several of the city’s great
churches closed, including some built by other ethnic groups, Polish, Irish,
German. The museum has come at the right time, before people truly forget – or stop caring. It depicts not just a vanished Italian community
but a vanished Catholic one - and a vanished America.
“Tell your British readers we’re only 20 miles from Niagara Falls,” said Msgr Voorhes, “Come and see us!”
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