Chiesa e immigrati italiani in Nord America: il caso dell’Ontario

Abstract

In recent decades there have been many studies on Italians in Canada, or essays on the role of the Catholic Church in the immigrant Italian communities there. But they aim to build a single model, working in parallel on what happened in Quebec and in English Canada, thus ignoring differences in the historical development of these two sets. Secondly, they did not give sufficient attention to the specificity of Ontario in Canada and to the comparis among the Ontarian case and what happened in other English-speaking provinces of East or West Canada. Finally, they did not stress that the intervention in favor of Italians in Ontario followed the lines of previous actions and earlier debates in the United States. Recover these three elements in a small number of pages is not a walk, but this essay will try to do it analyzing Holy See’s archives and the historical literature on Italian in Ontario.