A Sicilian Immigrant on Italian American Religion
Interview with Caterina Gambino, a Roman Catholic immigrant from Sicily
Interview Abstract
I sat down with Caterina Gambino, a Sicilian immigrant, to discuss all things religious. We talked about Sicilian feasts, Papa Francesco, the differences between Italian and Italian-American religious devotion, etc. Though Caterina is no expert on the OLMC Shrine, her experiences as a religious South Italian immigrant can help us better understand the feelings of the grotto’s founders.
Introduction
Though my pale white skin and freckles do not suggest it, I am of Sicilian heritage. I have been lucky enough to visit the beautiful island a few times in my young life and these stays have instilled me with a passion for all things Southern Italian. As such, when Professor Borja asked us to investigate New York City-based religious sites, I knew I wanted to find a place that centered around Southern Italian religious devotion. The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto is nestled in one of Staten Island’s most Italian neighborhoods and I saw it as a great opportunity to explore my roots. When I decided to investigate the story of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto, I had originally planned to talk with a priest who had been involved in repairing one of the grotto-church schisms. My dreams were quickly dashed, though, as it was the Easter season and the priest told me he was simply too busy. After some careful thought, I decided to interview Caterina Gambino, my Sicilian-American neighbor. Though she had never been to the grotto, I saw her as an invaluable source as she understands the Mezzogiorno and is an immigrant. Her experiences helped me flesh out the lives of the grotto’s founders, as their positions (with the exception of time period) bear striking resemblance to Caterina’s own.
The Interview
Caterina Gambino is a Sicilian immigrant who came to the United States in 1997 with the hopes of finding employment in America. Torretta, the sleepy Sicilian town from which Caterina came, proved to be the antithesis of American life, even in Italian-American enclaves like Staten Island. Given the variety of Caterina’s experiences in Sicily and the United States, she was able to inform my understanding of Italian-American and Southern Italian religious expression even without being able to speak about the Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC) Grotto specifically. My hope is that her interview, in conjunction with Chigozie Okoye’s interview of Mr. Mike De Cataldo, the grotto’s caretaker and the OLMC Society’s president, will give the reader a well-grounded understanding of Italian religious feste, Southern-Italian and Italian-American religious devotion, and their various layers.
Caterina’s Perceptions of The United States
Caterina’s perceptions of the United States are very complicated, as I imagine most immigrants are. She still views America as the land of opportunity but, through the course of the interview, it became clear to me that she feels America does not have una anima profonda (a profound soul) like Sicily. This lack seems to be most apparent when it comes to religious devotion. Given that she has never been to festa dedicated to the OLMC, I asked Caterina about a comparable celebration, the Santa Rosalia Society Festival in Brooklyn. Caterina’s nose twitched and she scoffed: Sono come i pagani. Tutto che lo fanno è mangiare! (They are like pagans. All they do is eat!) I know from my previous conversation with Mike De Cataldo that the OLMC grotto’s yearly festa falls into this mold. In Sicily, according to Caterina, the feste remain predominantly religious celebrations, not all-you-can-eat buffets. She described for me the heartbreaking Good Friday processions during which i suoi paesani (her fellow townspeople) reenact the Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis): Mary meets Christ and his cross in one of the piazze with the whole town following and a dramatic scene plays out between the holy mother and her beloved son. All in attendance break down into tears and this scene remains one of the most poignant of the procession, as it evokes the complicated relationship Italian males have with their mothers (in vignettes like these, it seems even Jesus Christ himself was a mammone [Mama’s boy]). Though there is some carousing during these feste, Caterina insists they remain religious celebrations in a way the Italian-American feste do not.
The Church in the Caterina’s Life
Despite the differences in the celebration of religious festivals, there seems to be some overlap in the way Sicilians and Italian-Americans regard the Church as an institution. Sicilians are religious but attend church regularly only during major Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter. Caterina explained that she thinks of the Roman Catholic Church as as a divine organization that is sullied by human presence. Though she is a (huge) fan of Papa Francesco, Caterina is not fond of regular priests. Referring to our neighborhood church, she told me that she felt the parish was more a business opportunity than a venue for genuine religious feeling. For example, she described for me two instances of Holy Thursday foot washing. In the Roman Catholic church, priests, evoking Jesus Christ, bring various parishioners up to the altar and bathe their feet. The ceremony is meant not only to reenact the events before Jesus’ crucifixion but to serve as a reminder that the religious leaders are equal to the laymen in God’s eyes and so humbles the priests that can become unapproachable in a tradition bound institution like the Catholic Church. Papa Francesco, in the accordance with his pious yet humane persona, took great care with the washing. There was a tenderness there, Caterina said, that was sadly absent from the face of the parish priest. He apparently made it clear the bathing was a task that he wanted to get over with as fast as possible. Then, sighed Caterina, the collection baskets were passed around and any feelings of holiness completely evaporated.
Discord Between Church and Caterina
Caterina’s exasperation with the Catholic church is echoed by many Italian-Americans, who are annoyed by the penny-pinching and the restrictive rules they feel the parishes place on them. Mike De Cataldo mentioned in our earlier conversation that there was a schism between the church and the OLMC Society due to the ecclesiastical administration refusing to bend the rules (apparently, one of the priests refused to allow the festa to take place on a Sunday, citing it as the Lord’s day of rest. The Society members were upset and soon abandoned their partnership with the parish for a church that was less restrictive.) It is interesting to note that even as Italian-American religious celebrations become less and less religious, there is still a friction between the church and the practitioners. Ties between the feste and neighborhood churches loosen every year but many of the participants are unwilling to abandon the church entirely. As many of Staten Island’s Italian-Americans are Southern Italians (this identification remains significant until this very day. Regionalism remains incredibly intense in the paese under Rome.) this inability to get along with the parish hierarchy speaks to the survival of original immigrant prejudices.
Changes in Caterina’s Religion
The most interesting part of our interview, though, was Caterina’s answer to the question, “How has the immigration experience changed your view of religion?”. Given the readings we have done for the Peopling of New York Honors Seminar, I expected Caterina to respond that her devotion has grown all the stronger and that she sought out religious institutions and/or societies to cultivate ties with the Sicilian immigrant community. Religion has indeed become a greater part of her life but she has not sought any wider community with which to celebrate her devotion. When she first arrived in America, she tried to go to the festivals but (as mentioned above) found them to be more celebrations of fried Oreos than a way to give thanks to Santa Rosalia for answering her prayers. Interestingly, it seems that because the frequency of Italian immigration has decreased, there are less resources for immigrants like Caterina in America. There remain thousands of churches dedicated to Italian saints and hundreds of aid societies and organizations in the name of OLMC, Santa Rosalia, Padre Pio, etc., but their Italian identity has morphed into Italian-American identity, an entirely different thing. Italian-American identity bears some resemblance to Italian (specifically Southern Italian) identity: there is an occupation with la bella presenza (a beautiful appearance and demeanor), a devotion to the saints represented through a surfeit of medals and crucifixes, intense familial bonds, etc. Yet Caterina has mentioned that America has sucked the anima from its Italian communities. Few members know Italian or the dialects of the various towns and the numbers of those who have a real understanding of modern Italy is even smaller. As such, Caterina’s religious devotion, and by extension her remembrance of Sicily, is largely restricted to her home. Statues of Padre Pio, a major southern Italian saint, and la Madonna are displayed reverentially throughout the house. They are situated above eye-level, Caterina explains, so that she feels as if they are always watching over her.
Written by:
Anastasia Hayes
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto
Interview with Mike DeCataldo, a member of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Society
Interview Abstract
In my analysis of the interview with the treasurer of the Society of Mount Carmel Mike DeCataldo, I respond to Mr. DeCataldo’s account of the history of the grotto, write of the efforts that continually go into the upkeep of the grotto, the ties that link the story of the grotto to other stories of community and religious devotion, the immense amount of assistance from the community shared towards the grotto, and the clash between the institutional religious practice of parishes and the lived religious practice of the grotto.
Interview Analysis
My interview with the Treasurer of the Society of Mount Carmel Mike DeCataldo provides a cultured account of the history and the current activities of the Our Lady of Grotto. Over the course of the interview, Mr. DeCataldo sheds light on the history of the grotto and the influence it had on the lives of Italian immigrants in Rosebank, the strong commitment to the grotto that is held by many (including himself) towards the shrine, the impact the community had on the growth of the grotto, and the relationship towards the religious worship within the grotto to that of the churches within the community.
The Grotto and the Lost Voices of the Past
The site of my interview with Mr. DeCataldo has as much significance as the interview itself. The basement where I was to interview Mike was the same place that the members of the Society of Mount Carmel of the early twentieth century worked on the construction of the grotto, making sand-forms to create the building blocks for the grotto and taking them outside to assemble them, socializing amongst each other as they did so. DeCataldo says, “There was no air-conditioning in houses, there were no televisions. So these old-timers and young guys at the time would come over here, they had a guy that would cook inside of here, in the basement. And there were guys outside there working and then coming in here and actually building some of the parts for the grotto in this premise you’re sitting at right now.” (2:57) According to Mr. DeCataldo, several hundred people worked on the grotto during that time, each person probably having something to say in regards to its development. But unfortunately, none of the members of the past were here to tell about it. Mr. DeCataldo speaks of the endeavors to build a bronze plaque as a monument to all the people, documented and undocumented, who worked on the grotto, with many people attending the meetings of the Society of Mount Carmel during that time, but only the people of authority having the tendency of being documented during those meetings. He says “were going to get as many names as we could of the past people who were involved with building it, to let people know, who was involved with this in the old days right up to the present.” (13:53) DeCataldo also acknowledges the difficulty of such a task, saying “we don’t have as much old records and a lot of the old records are all wrote in Italian, because most of the people who ran the organization spoke Italian, so everything that they did was in Italian. Some of it we can interpret and get what we have to get out of it, but they don’t name everybody in all these meetings, they just name the people that are of authority,” (14:33) adding “That’s hard to figure out, but it’s a challenge were accepting” (15:20). With the absence of the voices of the past, this was where the essence of Mike’s interview came to fruition.
The Religious Devotion
The interview opened with the history of the grotto, but also touched on the strong devotion held by the early Italian immigrants within the Rosebank community. The grotto was very well constructed by its forerunners, the slabs of stone that the grotto is structured with consisting of a conglomerate of cobblestone, sand, and cement that still hold the grotto strong until this very day. Mike says, “Its accredited to these people, and how they constructed it, because they did stuff very heavy. When they made a footing, it was extremely big footing. When they put walls together, they were big walls. It’s something like you go to a castle, almost or an old European fort somewhere where they have two or three [feet] walls, these people made their walls like they were building an armed camp. But actually it was something so that they would keep it going and they didn’t really…I don’t think they even realized at the time what they accomplished and that it’d still be here”(9:41). In a way, the strength of the grotto parallels the strength of the devotion of the grotto’s early constructors. The grotto is in a constant resistance against the forces of nature, subsisting against critters like squirrels or birds daily, that cause pieces of the grotto to fall out, and even against nature’s bigger curveballs, like Hurricane Sandy. But still the grotto stands tall and holds its annual feast on July 16th. However, the feast wasn’t celebrated for just one year only due to the occurrence of World War II. Mike says, “That feast has been run for 113 years. There has only been one time that they didn’t have it and it was during World War II when all the guys that were members here, were in the war and they had to cancel having it” (12:02) That the only hindrance to the celebration of the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto was the presence of a war says a lot about the strong devotion towards the grotto and its unwavering nature.
Community Influence on the Grotto
In reference to the devotion the grotto, I was further surprised at the extent the community participated in the upkeep of the grotto and what Mike admits towards the middle of the interview, saying: “We never really bought anything,” (20:43) qualifying that “some of it was bought because you can’t get away with not buying anything,” (20:49) but concluding “a lot of it wasn’t bought.” (20:54) Mr. DeCataldo, as treasurer of the Society of Mount Carmel, has gotten an enormous amount of help from people and companies outside of the Society of Mount Carmel. Though the Society of Mount Carmel makes an effort to create funding for the grotto and the organization by selling candles and having the feast for donations, the grotto provides the context for others to give what they can with what they have, and many are willing to do just that. There are many examples of the volunteerism that goes into the grotto. From the bag of cement that one person may not need anymore, to the three lion statues from one person’s stoop that was donated, and many other examples, the grotto has become an object of immense generosity from the communities of Staten Island. Mr. DeCataldo spoke of a married couple from Shore Acres who attended a meeting with the Society of Mount Carmel, and how they were so impressed with the grotto, that they donated a $2,000 dollar check for the grotto’s shrubbery. “The people of Staten Island are very generous in giving so that this place is built, but this is the way it’s been.” (20:42) Acts of generosity like these are commonplace in interaction with the grotto and also demonstrate the willingness of the community to help maintain it.
Religious Clash Between the Grotto and the Churches within the Community
Though the grotto has made its niche within the community, there was once a religious incongruity between the religious practices of the churches in the community and the religious practice of the grotto’s annual feast. Mike DeCataldo touches on that incongruity as the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto’s annual feast at one point had to cease having their mass at St. Joseph’s parish, which is the Italian parish of New York, and begin having it at St. Mary’s, which was the parish of the community. He says it was because of “one priest that decided that he didn’t want to have our mass on a Sunday. He said it wasn’t right to do it on a Sunday so he wouldn’t have it. He said he’ll give us Saturday or Monday,” and adds “ So we checked with the seminary where the people go to become priests and deacons . . . their advice was to go with Saint Mary’s and if that priest agrees to go along with it you’s can go to him.” (35:11) This caused the member of the Society of Mount Carmel to hold the annual feast’s mass at Saint Mary’s instead of St. Joseph’s. Mike says “So that was the first year in probably seventy-five years to eighty years that we ever changed to both churches.”(35:51) But the problem was later resolved as a new priest by the name of Father Michael came up with the idea of having the Society of Mount Carmel alternate between St. Joseph’s parish and St. Mary’s. DeCataldo explains the situation, saying “Now we got a new priest down here, a young priest Father Michael, who thought differently. He thought it should be a united thing and he said ‘it’d be nice if you’s could have it at Saint Joseph’s and have it at Saint Mary’s, switching them back and forth, so the whole community gets a bite of it.”(36:36) The alternating between churches further hinted to me the fusion between conventional institutionally practiced religion and the “lived religion” practiced within the grotto.
Interview Reflection
As the interview came to a close, Mike left the impression that he would proudly take upon himself the duty of continuing the legacy of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto for as long as he could. With a history of nearly 110 years, the grotto will continue to go down in history as an example of community assistance, mutual aid, and religious devotion. Like a relay race, the founders of the Society of Mount Carmel passed the baton of devotion to its descendants like Mr. DeCataldo to continue their legacy of commitment to the Madonna and to the grotto. It’s interesting to think of how the continuance of this legacy will manifest itself in the future, and how the community will think of new ways to contribute to the grotto’s future development as well.
Written by:
Chiogozie Okoye
