In the late 19th century, countless home missions and missionary societies sprung up in the US in response to the incoming waves of immigrants. Their purposes included education, orientation, and “transform[ing] the raw immigrant into a white-souled citizen,” as the 1902 Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Societies of the Methodist Episcopal Church put it. One of these home missions was the L’Emmanuello Italian Episcopal Mission church, founded on Dec. 20, 1883 at 1024 Christian Street.
L’Emmanuello was founded by Episcopal Bishop Stevens as a misssion church to serve Italian immigrants in the South Philly neighborhood. It held services in Italian and English, and offered English classes to adults and children. The church was right up the street from where my great grandfather (and grandfather) lived, in the heart of Little Italy, and it became a neighborhood point of contact for the Oliva and Campanella families.
In 1896, my 2nd great grandfather Matteo Campanella, his wife Maria, and their daughter Maria Christina were confirmed at L’Emmanuello. It’s the oldest record (so far) that I have of their residence in the US.
Emmanuello’s first priest originally came from the Catholic Church:
The Rev. Michele Zara was born at Leece, Italy, May 13, 1844. He was ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church, April 7, 1867. After fifteen years of faithful service, he left the Church of Rome and joined the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. He then started one of the most successful missions among the Italians of Philadelphia. In 1903 he was commissioned by the Bishop White Prayer Book Society to make a new translation of the Prayer Book, a task Mr. Zara completed in about a year and a half. It was published in 1904, as stated above[5].
In 1909, Rev. Zara returned to Italy, and was replaced by Rev. Thomas F. Della Cioppa, who hired a deaconess to assist in the busy parish. By 1912, Emmanuello’s Little Italy neighborhood was an Italian city unto itself, with an estimated 80,000 Italian residents. Nevertheless, the mission’s management suffered a lack of resources, mostly due to the lack of resources of its impoverished immigrant parishioners, and had to beg the diocese for additional resources.
By the 1940s, service to the local Italian-American parishoners had moved to St. Mary’s at Broad and South Streets, and l’Emmanuello’s specifically Italian mission was discontinued. But during the waves of Italian immigration, it provided a key resource for many to get oriented in their new country and community.
Sources:
- Wohlers, Charles. The Book of Common Prayer, Chapter XII: Italian Translations. Online collection.
People:
- Campanella, Matteo
- (Venuti) Campanella, Maria Mattia
- Oliva (Campanella), Maria Christina
Lemon Hill Research 