The Emergence of Italian Pentecostalism: Affectivity and Aesthetic Worship Practices
Italian Pentecostals forged unity through the common experience of Spirit baptism. Aesthetic worship practices helped sustain a new affective religiosity, preventing sectarian relapse and promoting a new attitude of gender equality. Italian Pentecostals fostered egalitarian forms of worship commensurate with an expanded view of the Godhead and an awareness for the caring, compassionate, and maternal character of God. The affectivity of Italians transformed by the Pentecostal message was expressed tangibly through hymns, gestures, and literature, practices conveying a renewed awareness for the loveliness and beauty of the gospel.
Italian Americans found in Pentecostalism a middle ground between the excesses of formalism and sectarianism. They found in the primitivism of Pentecostalism greater continuity with their ancestral faith and in the dynamic spirituality of Pentecostalism a new vitality and uniformity. Pentecostalism allowed Italians to maintain their ethnic sensibilities while promoting an egalitarian understanding of God and congregational life. The emergence of Italian Pentecostalism consisted in the preservation of Italian identity and the revisioning of Italian spirituality.
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Notes
[1] Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York, NY; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979), 110.
[2] Joseph Colletti, “Luigi Francescon,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (NIDPCM), ed. Stanley M. Burgess, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 646; Pietro Ottolini, Life and Mission (Printed by author: 1962): 3-6.
[3] Francesco Toppi, Luigi Francescon (Roma: ADI-Media, 2007), 59; Ottolini, Life and Mission, 5-6.
[4] Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited,110.
[5] Louis De Caro, Our Heritage: The Christian Church of North America (Sharon, PA: General Council of the Christian Church of North America, 1977), 23-29; See Joseph Colletti, Ethnic Pentecostalism in Chicago: 1890-1950 (England: University of Birmingham, 1990). Their zeal was matched only by their commitment to biblical standards. Disagreement arose over the literal interpretation of the Sabbath (137).
[6] Ottolini, Life and Mission,9.
[7] Colletti, Ethnic Pentecostalism in Chicago, 140-43.
[8] Belmont Assembly of God, Anniversary Celebration: Great is thy Faithfulness: 100 Year Anniversary, 1907-2007 (Chicago, IL: Belmont Assembly of God, 2007), “100 Years: A Rich History of God’s Grace.”
[9] Giovanni Traettino, “Italy,” in the New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, edited by Stanley M. Burgess, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan), 134; Joseph Fiorentino, “A Summary of the Italian Pentecostal Movement in the USA and Abroad,” in the Lighthouse , vol. 3 no. 7 (July, 1961): 7.
[10] Wilma Wells Davies, The Embattled but Empowered Community: Comparing Understandings of Spiritual Power in Argentine Popular and Pentecostal Cosmologies, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 91-92;Roberto Bracco, Il Risveglio Pentecostale in Italia (Roma: ADI-Media, 1955), sec. “Nascita del Movimento.”
[11] Carmini Napolitano, “The Development of Pentecostalism in Italy,” in European Pentecostalism, ed. William K. Kay and Anne E. Dyer, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies 7 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 192.
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