Sprazzi di luce: pennelate di propaganda anticlericale. New York: [n.p.], 1940.

While the publisher is not listed, as such, the recto of the final leaf displays an advertisement for Il Proletario, published by the Federazione Socialista Italiana in New York. So it is possible, i fnot likely, that the federation also published this pamphlet, with its preface by Arturo Giovannitti.

Pulvio Zocchi (b. San Giovanni Valdarno 1878) and Filippo Corridoni were leaders of major worker struggles in 1912–13 in Italy led by the Unione Italiana Sindacale (1912–1925). Vividly anti-clerical, this polemic contains almost ghoulish portraits of predatory priests, whose mellifluous and caressing voices hide their slipperiness and evil designs.

The unscrupulousness of priests is apparent from that most sacred of first rites, baptism, which Zocchi calls “the first act of the comedy” that is religion (23). “The mother feels the joy of a new life entering the earth, full of joy, hopes, worries and aspirations. But the priest doesn’t think this way; he keeps watch. He has no scruples. He’s the friend of the parents and the spiritual confessor of the mother, sometimes also the physical one. [The father is proud, he thinks he knows the score]. . . . But the priest is cunning. He works in the shadows. Just like the Jesuits” (23).

In providing a preface for this polemic, Giovannitti might have felt some ambivalence in implicitly blessing this scathing attack on the clergy, of which he was one (albeit a Protestant minister, not a Catholic priest).

Unlike the case with Tresca and most of the other radicals, Giovannitti’s political beliefs did not include overt anti-clericalism or a rejection of Christian principles; indeed, some of his poetry reflects religious overtones.