Jesuit Missionaries and the Multifaceted North America: Past and Present in the Italian Magazine Le Missioni della Compagnia di Gesù (1915-19)

The article aims to define the image of North America that Jesuits missionaries conveyed through the fortnightly Le Missioni della Compagnia di Gesù, that of a sui generis missionary field (compared to Asia and Africa), whose ethnic and socio-cultural heterogeneity required an equally multifaceted effort. The magazine presented two coexisting models of missionary commitment in North America, as a result of different adaptation strategies: the pioneering model, carried out among the native populations, and a ‘modern’ one, that of an apostolate in a highly ‘civilized’ society aimed mainly at protecting the Catholic emigrants’ religiosity.