CALIFORNIA PROVINCE CENTENNIAL PROFILES

During the California Province Centennial, 1909-2009, Father Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J., profiles the province’s rich history in a series of vignettes illustrated with rare images from the archives of Jesuit institutions. Click on the illustrations below to enlarge the images.

2. THE ITALIAN JESUITS

By Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J.

Launching a new ministry is one thing; keeping it afloat is quite another. The modest enterprise set in motion at Mission Santa Clara by Michele Accolti and Giovanni Nobili struggled to keep afloat. Enrolling students was easy; finding faculty was difficult. The fledgling school limped along with a handful of laymen and Jesuits from the Rocky Mountain Mission who were no longer suited for missionary labor. After numerous written appeals failed, Accolti lit on another stratagem to find teachers. In 1853 he returned to Europe to filibuster on behalf of his California college. “You can accomplish more in one conversation,” he concluded, "than with a hundred letters.”

Accolti’s timing was propitious. At mid-century, Italy was shaken by a series of regional revolutions created by the movement for political unification known as the Risorgimento (“Rebirth”). During that upheaval, which began in 1848 in the northern kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and climaxed in 1870 with the fall of papal Rome, anti-clerical governments banished many religious orders. In Piedmont-Sardinia alone, some 344 religious congregations, with about 5,500 members, were suppressed. All told, about two-thirds of all men and women in religious communities, including the Society's Turin Province, were expelled from the northern kingdom. With cries of “Death to the Priests” ringing in their ears, many Jesuits, often in disguise, sought asylum abroad.

It was to these exiles that Accolti directed his appeal. He conferred with Pieter Beckx, the order’s new superior general, and with Alessandro Giuseppe Ponza, head of the dispersed Turin Province. Moved by Accolti’s entreaty, the two leaders recognized that the American West offered fresh purpose to Jesuits ejected from Italy. In 1854, they agreed that members of the Turin Province in exile would adopt California and the Rocky Mountain Mission as their missionary realm. By 1879, half of the members of the Turin Province resided in the United States.

What Italy lost, California gained. In the wake of the decision made by the dispersed Italians, reinforcements from scattered posts of exile converged on the newly formed California Mission. The first to arrive were three young priests already in the United States: Carlo Messea, Luigi Masnata, and Antonio Maraschi. The trio landed in San Francisco in November 1854. Others followed the vanguard.

The refugees’ coming transformed the fledgling California enterprise. By 1855, Santa Clara boasted a faculty of eighteen Jesuits and laymen, prompting the San Francisco Alta newspaper to report that it had “sustained its reputation” as California’s “first educational establishment.” That same year, Antonio Maraschi purchased property in San Francisco intending to erect a church and a day school on a site that would, he predicted, soon blossom as “the heart of a great city.” The church, situated among sand dunes on an undeveloped Market Street, opened to the public on July 15, 1855. St. Ignatius College admitted its first students three months later.

By the time the West Coast achieved provincial status in 1909, nearly one hundred priests, brothers, and scholastics sailed for California to take up educational and pastoral ministries. Without these refugee Italians there would be no California Province.

Sources: Gerald McKevitt, Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 (Palo Alto, 2007), 1-35; Gerald McKevitt, The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 (Stanford University Press, 1979), 29-53; A. C. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 1850-1950, trans. David Moore (Oxford, 1960) 11-12,30; Alan Ziajka, Legacy and Promise: 150 Years of Jesuit Education at the University of San Francisco (San Francisco, 2005) 1-16.