Mutignano is a small village close to Atri, in Teramo Province in Abruzzo Italy. Due to its territorial contiguity with Atri and the defense of the port of Cerrano, in 1326, ir was one of the thirteen villages subject to the Acquaviva family. It shared some medieval history being chosen as a meeting place between some powerful players of the late Middle Ages, thanks to the Bishop of Monopoli, Nicolò Acciapacci, under Queen Giovanna II, the Queen of Naples. Later, some aristocratic families from Atri moved there, such as the Filiani, whose villa stands near the Pineto train station. Train building moved the focus of the government administration from the interior hill country to the coast and in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mutignano lost its importance and became a frazione of the new commine of Pineto.
Mutignano is also very important to me personally being the ancestral home of my father and almost all paternal ancestors. One of the unknown historical points of interest in the town is the former Methodist Church at 78 Corso Umberto. A Methodist Church?? Yes, a Protestant church in Italy and in some out of the way backwater. Who woulda thunk it??
Protestants in Italy
According to Italian Wikipedia, Protestants in Italy today are estimated at 750,000 (435,000 Italian citizens) who are divided into numerous denominations, which can be divided into 1) "historical" Protestant Churches, i.e. “storiche” (Waldensians, Lutherans, Calvinists/Reformed, Anglican, Baptists, Methodists), and 2) “restorationist” i.e. “restaurazioniste” denominations like the Churches of Christ, the Free, Pentecostals, "Holiness Movement" i.e. “Movimento di Santità” and many minor churches.
The most numerous Protestant congregations in Italy are Pentecostals, with approximately 300,000 adherents in numerous churches, and the Assemblies of God with about 250,000 members. In contrast the largest "historical" Protestant denomination populations are the Waldensians with about 21,000 members, the Evangelical Christian Brethren Church (with its ties to the Risorgimento) with 15,000, the Baptists with 6,000, the Lutherans with 4,500, the Methodist (including a union with the Waldensians) with 3,000, the Anglican Church, also with about 3,000, and the United Protestant Church (Italian-speaking Lutherans) with several hundred members.
The brief history of the reformation and protestants in Italy
Church reform in Italy began BEFORE Martin Luther. During the 11th through the 15th centuries a variety of religious dissidents appeared in Northwestern Italy and in Rome (like the patarini, the dulcinians, Arnaldo da Brescia, fraticelli, Albigensians or Cathars); however, all were unsuccessful (executed or murdered) except for the Waldensians, who settled in the inaccessible valleys of the western Alps in Piemonte. The Waldensians could be seen as proto-Protestants, but they mostly did not raise the doctrinal objections characteristic of sixteenth-century Protestant leaders during the Reformation.
Arnaldo da Brescia, from Lombardy, who called on the Church to renounce property-ownership and participated in the failed Commune of Rome of 1144–1193 |
Later in the 15th century, an Italian priest, Girolamo Savonarola who is regarded as a predecessor of Martin Luther in Italy, stigmatized the abuses of the Catholic clergy, as well as demanding a "moral revival" and the destruction of statues and images at churches. However, unlike Luther, Savonarola did not gain the protection of influential patrons, and he was limited to Florence, and soon executed.
Naples was also an important center of the Reformation. At the end of the 15th century, a Spirituali circle (proto-evangelists) was formed, concentrated around Spanish immigrant Juan de Valdés. Then in the 16th century after Luther, Venice and its possession Padua were temporarily places of refuge for Italian Protestants. These cities, along with Lucca, were important centers of the Italian Reformation because they were easily reached by new religious ideas spreading from the North. However, Protestantism there was quickly quashed by the Inquisition (influenced by Spain-controlled southern Italy and Milan, and influencing much of the remainder of Italy). Italian Protestants then fled mainly to German duchies and to Switzerland.
In the 1520s, soon after publication of the first letters of Luther, the first few Italian Lutherans appeared. However, the effect of Lutheranism was minimal because Luther wrote in German and directed his mission mainly at Germans, and the Church censorship in Italy was very effective. Waldensianism was, however, revitalized with the Protestant Reformation, and aligned itself to Calvinism by becoming a part of it in 1532. Also by 1550, Pope Julius III affirmed that 1,000 Venetians might be counted as belonging to the Anabaptist sect.
The Italian Reformation then collapsed after only about 70 years of existence because of the quick and strong reaction of the Roman Church. In the summer of 1542 the Italian Inquisition had organized itself in order to fight Protestants in all Italian states more effectively.
As a result of this Roman threat, the majority of Italian reformers escaped to countries in Northern and Eastern Europe, including Poland, where an influential group of Italian Unitarians came into existence, supported unofficially by the Queen of Poland, the Italian-born Bona Sforza. By about 1600, almost all Protestantism ceased to exist in Italy, with Catholicism remaining the religion of the Italian states, except for the Waldensians, limited to their inaccessible mountain retreats.
Another cause of the Italian Reformation's collapse was the aggressive politics of the Holy Roman Empire (led by the Spanish Hapsburgs) toward Italian states. Italian princes soon identified the Reformation a threat to their rule and joined in the persecutions.
Freedom of Religion in the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of Italy
It was not until 1848 when Charles Albert, king of Sardinia (and Piemonte), granted religious freedom and civic emancipation to the Waldensians. Freedom of worship and equality of civic and political rights were later extended to Jews and into the other Italian states that were progressively annexed to Sardinia during the process of unification of Italy. Newer Waldensian congregations sprang up as well such as the Free Christian Church (which lasted from 1852 to 1904) and the Evangelical Christian Church of the Brethren. Meanwhile British and American missionaries began to preach and establish Anglican, Methodist and Baptist churches.
The second largest “storiche” church, the evangelical Christian Church of the Brothers (or Assembly of Brothers) is attributable to the Anglican Church and was organized in Tuscany by Count Piero Guicciardini, of an aristocratic Florentine family in 1806. Protestants became hopeful that the Risorgimento would be accompanied by religious reform but they constituted a very small minority in the peninsula (32,684, according to the 1861 census). The influence that Protestantism exercised over the Risorgimento culture was actually remarkable. Several protagonists of the Risorgimento (from Cavour to Lambruschini, from Terenzio Mamiani to Ricasoli, and from Carlo Cattaneo to Ferrari) had close contacts with the Protestant world and some were of Protestant faith. At the end of the Risorgimento with the capture of Rome in 1870, all the evangelical churches opened places of worship in various cities. Subsequently, an evangelical organization was structured and under Piero Guicciardini and Theodoric Pietrocola Rossetti, the assemblies of the Brothers took root.
In the early 20th century, missionaries spread the Pentecostal gospel throughout Italy which became the dominant Protestant sects (see numbers above).
The Methodists of Italy
Methodism appeared on the scene of Italian history in 1859 with the arrival of William Arthur, secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society of London. He toured Italy to better understand the social and political developments of the Risorgimento. In his report "Italy in transition" he affirmed the need to open a missionary field not to found a Methodist Church, but to support the evangelicals already present (Waldensians and Free Church) in the commitment to religious reform in an evangelical sense that would provide the necessary spiritual support to ferment political and cultural reform.
In 1860 the Wesleyan Society of England sent Richard Green, who initially stopped in Florence, where he came into contact with exponents of the "free" churches (Gavazzi and Guicciardini); then pushing on to Naples, recently liberated by Garibaldi. In 1861, Green repatriated for health reasons, and Henry J. Piggott was sent to Italy. The organization of the mission in the South, a territory who Piggott understood with great acuity, was entrusted to Thomas W. Jones. In 1870, Leroy M. Vernon, sent by the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States of America, also arrived in Italy (replaced after a few years by William Burt).
Henry J. Pigott |
Piggott and Vernon began to organize their respective denominational churches: first the Wesleyan Methodist Church and second the Methodist Episcopal Church, agreeing however to carry out a complementary, non-competitive enterprise. Churches were opened in large cities as well as in rural areas. These efforts were also popular with the lowest strata of the population: e.g. in the area of Mezzano in Emilia, for example, as in the industrial suburbs of Genoa; in the towns of Maiella, as among the laborers of Ragusa (in Sicily) or the workers for the construction of the Sempione tunnel. It was joined by day and evening schools, professional training and job placement institutes, mutual aid organizations, in Padua, Venice, La Spezia, Villa San Sebastiano, Intra, Scicli, Naples, Mezzani, Mutignano and Portici.
In the center of Bassignana, a town in the province of Alessandria, a large Methodist church was built, after the citizens found themselves in complete disagreement with the parish priest and therefore decided to embrace Methodism. The Evangelical Church of Gorizia, founded in the 19th century as a German-speaking Lutheran church after the First World War, and the city increasingly acquired the characteristics of an Italian community of Methodist identity, until, after the Second World War, it became a local Methodist church.
The two branches of Methodism, the English and the American, united in 1946 founding the Evangelical Methodist Church of Italy. In 1975 the Methodist Church integrated with the Waldensian Church, subscribing to a common doctrine. Currently in Italy the Methodist Church has 39 communities and churches, about 5,000 church members.
Methodist Mutignano
In the heart of the historic center there is the Methodist Church. It lies on the site of a Catholic church first built in the early 1800s. Initially this small chapel was dedicated to St. Ilario, patron saint of Mutignano since 1682 (he was replaced S. Silvestro to whom the parish church is still dedicated). The replacement of saints was due to relics which had arrived from Rome, (as in Atri, in 1605, those relics of S. Reparata had arrived, thanks to the interest of Claudio Acquaviva, uncle of Rodolfo). Following a building collapse due to a landslide the church was completely rebuilt in 1881 in neo-Gothic style for Methodist worship.
In 1932 the church was completed/renovated by some local families (Sfredda, De Stephanis, Leonzi). But it could only enter into operation in 1944 after the end of the fascist dictatorship. It functioned as a place of worship until 1996.
I share a name on the dedication plaque of the church in 1929. I don't know if I am related |
The Methodist church was erected, thanks to emigrants from Mutignano who had fled to the north and found hospitality in the transalpine countries. As a thank you for the hospitality, conversion to the new faith took place. A similar case occurred in the Valle Siciliana in Teramo. The money earned in the north allowed in addition to the return home, the construction of a sacred building.