“The joy of honest work:” Pedagogical imperialism and the missionary work of the Roman Catholic church in Italy to the Romani People 1950–1965

After the Second World War in Italy, a growing movement within the Roman Catholic church spearheaded outreach to Romani communities, particularly in light of perceived threats from evangelical Christianity and communism. I focus on how the Italian Women’s Union of Catholic Action (UDACI) and the early clerical leaders of the outreach movement encountered the contradictions and tensions of Catholic “modernity” in their work with Romani populations. The women working within the Catholic hierarchy found themselves doing what they considered to be social work on the ground converting nomadic communities, while butting heads with the paternalistic power structures within the Catholic church. The evangelizing project traces the limits of what Willie James Jennings terms “pedagogical imperialism.” The outreach by the women of UDACI reified a paternalistic approach, since it encouraged the dominant groups to assume they could understand the needs of those they served without really engaging them in deep, meaningful ways that acknowledged their fundamental equality. The long-term repercussions of this approach have been clear in the Catholic church’s continuing struggles to meaningfully engage with Italian Romani communities This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .