Priests, Politics, and Power: The Bandini Priests in America

Abstract In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three Italian-born priests—two brothers and their nephew—served in the United States. The Bandinis were engaged in Jesuit missions with Native Americans in Montana, the early work of the Scalabrinians and the opening of Ellis Island in New York, experiments in rural Italian immigration in partnership with American interests and Italian authorities in the rural South, and their own projects as lay priests. Their sprawling journeys especially affected Pietro Bandini's conduct of his signature project, a rural colony of Italian immigrants in the Ozark Mountains he named Tontitown. The actions of the Bandini priests in their small communities shaped Italian immigrant understandings of citizenship and political power in rural communities on issues from assimilation to Prohibition. Their experiences broaden our understanding of the role of priests among Italian immigrant populations as well as how religious leadership interacted with various established power structures in the United States.