Vincenzo Federico

Vincenzo Federico was born in Riesi, Sicily, on 26 May 1911, the first son from his father's second marriage. He had three older half-sisters from his father's first marriage, whom his mother cared for: Gaetanina, Francesca (who married and moved to America), and Sarina. He also had two younger brothers, Gaetano (who was four and a half years old when his father died) and Pino. Gaetano later emigrated to Argentina with his wife Iolanda while Pino remained in Riesi. Their father, Giuseppe Federico, was a capomastro (foreman) or capo-partita of specialized miners in Riesi, which was then an important sulphur mining centre. Like many in this trade, Giuseppe died young at around 42 years old, due to pneumonia. His mother, Rosaria Di Martino, was 29 years old when her husband died and struggled to make ends meet running a grocery shop. While she turned to taking in clothing piece work, Vincenzo started as an apprentice shoemaker. He would remember many decades later that:

In my early childhood I had become the "godson" of a neighbor of mine, a well-known mafioso of those years, and I believe that his "protection" could have had a great influence on my life; but, unfortunately for him, "an old ball made a new hole in him". So my life took, thanks to God, a very different direction. (Federico 2006: 161)

After six years of apprenticeship he was considered skilled in the shoemaking trade, the five lire a week enabling him to help support the family. Acquiring his own clientele, he built a business around privately commissioned custom-made shoes. In later life, his good business sense, though punctuated by some failures, would provide a stable basis for his ministerial work. 

The sulphur mining areas around Riesi were, fuelled by the Liberal nationalism of the Garibaldian revolution, particularly anti-clerical and radical. 

Among the painful events, I remember the devastation and poverty in the family after my father's death; the departures of my dearest uncles for America; the tears of the people for the dead of the Great War, the Spanish flu that invaded the country; the year of drought and hunger (...) the revolution in the streets, the machine gun fire in the square, from which I narrowly escaped.  (Federico 2006: 161)

The mayor of the town was a mangiapreti Liberal (Spini 2002: 152), who invited the Waldensians to preach in the town as early as 1870. By the census of 1912, half the population of Riesi (which totalled 18,000 people) declared themselves as evangelicals, a growth which extended through education and social welfare provision to Grotte. Spini notes: 

The Riesi "zolfare" miners were at odds with the clergy, because they were politically oriented to the left; vice versa, the Waldensians had opened schools in Riesi and in the nearby Grotte which were much appreciated by the local population. Evidently, at the time of the census, a number of Riesi residents had wanted siding with the Waldensians, from whom he had received the alphabet, rather than with the clergy, considered the allies of the masters. (Spini 1994: 119)

Spini suggests that there were some 15 centres around this core which were evangelized. (Spini 1994: 145) The collapse of the sulphur industry, then the outbreak of World War I, caused many evangelicals to emigrate, a decline followed by directed and aggressive work by Catholic orders. The pattern of Protestant conversion as the mechanism for personal liberation, however, was already established, and articulated by the communities the emigrants established or entered overseas. 

It was a returnee from the migration who influenced Federico towards the Gospel. Antonino Baglio had lived in the United States and converted to the Gospel from a "corrupt life". While this caused distress among his family members, the improvement in Baglio's life impressed Federico's grandparents, who encouraged Vincenzo to attend a home meeting on 15 April 1922. Federico remembered:

I continued to attend meetings when I could, and as I received the message of the Gospel of Grace, I began to feel that I should exert myself in serving the Lord. The leading brethren of the church took me to their hearts. In the meantime, I profited greatly by reading a Four Gospels and Acts that I had received as a gift and which I read avidly every night, to the annoyance of my mother because I burned out her candle. I began early to witness and pray at services. (Federico 2006)

In 1923, Baglio needed to return to the USA. He was replaced by Giovanni Sola from Ravanusa. Following exhortations from the "anziani" (elders) to seek baptism in the Holy Spirit, prayer meetings were held at Federico's house with many attendees. During one of these evenings, two girls, including Federico's sister Sarina, began speaking in unknown languages. After this initial experience, many baptisms in the Holy Spirit followed, with constant prayer meetings every evening. The spread of this experience was supported by visits from other 'americani', such as Donato Lippolis (originating in Puglia, but returning to Italy from Philadelphia) and Felice Lisanti (from Canada).  In 1926, due to Sola's responsibilities in Raffadali, Federico began helping with pastoral duties in Riesi. By 1928, he was working in Termini Imerese with Antonino Satariano: Federico visited the community in Palermo, which was being taken care of by Donato Lippolis. When Michele Palma travelled from Chicago to deal with the division over the 'blood issue' and the status of the Council of Jerusalem, a national convention was held in Rome, which Federico attended. The Convention agreed on a common statement of faith, which Caterina Gardella-Palma drew together into a definitive statement. This, in the historiography of the Assemblee di Dio, was later seen as a significant step towards common action. 

When, in 1929, Giovanni Sola moved to Palermo, Federico took over his work in Raffadali. There, Federico met and became engaged to Gerlandina, the daughter of the founder of the Raffadali community, Francesco Galvano.  The next year, Galvano having died on February 6, Federico and Gerlandina were married (July 30). They were to have six children: Giuseppe (1931, died in infancy; and another Giuseppe, died in 1934); Sara Loide (Sarina, 1932, married Matteo Mortelliti and was active in ministry; three sons: Antonino Elia, Vincenzo Timoteo and Davide Giovanni); Giovanna (married Carmelo Laurino; two daughters, Debora Angelica and Silvia Gerlandina); Maria Ester (1944, married L. Miccichè; two children: Sonia Maria Grazia and Filippo); Franca Lea (1949, married Giuseppe Garofalo; two sons: Cesare Elia and Davide). In 1932, he substituted for Salvatore Ferro, and remained there until the beginning of 1933, when the Riesi church was ordered closed by the local police. With the issuing of the Circolare Buffarini-Guidi, all pentecostal places of worship were closed. Federico and his family continued to support the work by running house meetings and hidden gospel meetings under trees and in barns in the countryside. 

In 1931, Federico and a group of elders then purchased a small (70 square metre locale) space for worship on Via Cordova. This was impounded under the Fascist regime, but returned to the Church under the American Occupation once Raffadali was liberated in July 1943:

In the Agrigento area, there was heavy fighting on our part (...). After a few days, endless columns of American trucks and vehicles advanced into our towns, throwing sweets, cans of meat, cigarettes, etc. to the population, which the people accepted because they were tired of the war and hungry, ready to welcome the new arrivals as liberators. (Federico 2006)

The Church returned to evangelism with renewed vigour, with Federico reporting in 1946 that he had baptised 237 new converts in Raffadali alone. An open-air worship service in Piazza Progresso, with a procession through the town, attracted around 4,000 people. This influx, however, led to overcrowding in their existing space, membership reaching some 500 people.  In 1949, the community constructed a new facility on Via Maggiore Crapanzano to a design (due to want of funds) drawn by Federico himself. By January 1950, the building, though still under construction, was already in use. 

By this stage, Federico had overseen the growth of one Italy's largest pentecostal churches. It was a natural focus for the formation of a national network of churches, which enjoyed a brief season of religious freedom under allied occupation.  In 1944, with the help of  Antonino Emmolo, Calogero Di Rosa, and Giovanni Criscione, Federico hosted a group of 70 or so Sicilian 'fratelli conduttori' in Raffadali, who arrived 'on foot, on horseback, on mule-drawn carts or by other makeshift means' due to the continued disruption of the War.  'We had to be content, however, with a regional convention, having to submit to the needs of the time (...) postponing the solution of the most important problems to a possible National Convention' like that pre-visioned at the 1929 Rome meeting. As the campaign on the mainland wound down, they began organizing what became the Fifth National Convention in Naples (1947).  In the interim, inspired by the teaching of Henry Ness, Federico hosted 'a one-week gathering in Raffadali in December 1947, then we continued with gatherings of three days each and we divided the topics to be discussed.' (Federico 2006) By the end of the War the needs of the bombed out peninsula were great, and this convention made moves towards organizing a central administration for the national movement so as to attract and mediate international aid. Federico was elected as one of the five members of the Comitato Esecutivo (Executive Committee), which later became the 'Consiglio Generale delle Chiese' (General Council of Churches) in 1949, and was later Secretary of the national movement (the ADI). In this role he became connected to the international pentecostal movement, in 1952 attending the third World Pentecostal Conference in London. He was sanguine about the future, and that the central power would not extinguish the treasured congregationalism of the movement. He did not live to see the outcome of that hope. 

The role of the national movement was always to provide coverage and assistance for the growth of the local movement. The Raffadali assembly continued to grow under Federico's leadership, the movement of its people (as with Milena) providing opportunities for the planting of new centres. In 1954, Federico worked with the growing American Assemblies of God and CCNA presence in Sicily, in the person of people such as Leah Palma Remoli, to help spread the Sunday School movement. In 1955, he laid down the leadership of the Raffadali church and moved for business reasons to Caltanisetta, purchasing a dying works. This did not work out as expected, but he continued in ministry, and in 1956 celebrated (in Resuttano) his first religious marriage as a registered minister of a non-Catholic denomination. National registration did not necessarily obviate local antagonisms, however, and the Caltanisetta legal establishment pursued him for years, testing the boundaries all the way up to the Corte di Cassazione (the Italian equivalent of the Supreme Court), with Federico and his lawyer, Giacomo Rosapepe, winning at each stage. This was one of many 'lawfare' campaigns waged against Italian Protestants in the post-War era, as the Catholic-influenced local policing structures attempted to establish precedent which would legally restrain the liberties enshrined in the new Italian Constitution, often by appeal to Fascist-era administrative proclamations. With the abolition of the Circolare Buffarini Guidi in 1956, much of the basis for these campaigns fell away, though local obstructionism did not. 

In 1964, inspired by the tent evangelism (and the gift of the tent after their campaign) of Enrico Dapozzo and Fredy Gilgen, Federico and Rosario di Palermo (1905-1988) set about resurrecting the older practice of holding youth camps. The Sicilian ADI churches established a camping committee, and--with 'two beautiful tents with one hundred and fifty chairs, sixty-four collapsible beds with relative blankets and other things'--the first camps were held in Milena. These circulated, year on year, around different centres in Sicily (Piano dell'Acqua (RG), Macchia di Giarre (CT),  Sant'Agata di Militello (ME); Campobello di Mazara (TP) and S. Biagio Platani (AG)). In 1970, this led to the establishment of a permanent camp site on 7500 m2 of land in the Coffa district of Chiaramonte Gulfi (Ragusa). It acted as a model for the establishment of other ADI camps around Italy, denominated as Centri Comunitari Evangelici ('Evangelical Community Centres'). Federico and the regional committee also played a key role in organizing welfare assistance (through a Pro Zona Terremotata Committee) after the destructive earthquakes in January 1968, which shook and destroyed several municipalities in the provinces of Trapani, Palermo and Agrigento. In May - June 1979 he spent two months in North America, travelling in the United States and Canada and attending the Pentecostal Missionary Convention held in Rochester, N.Y.

During this entire period, while pursuing his business activities, Federico worked as an itinerant pastor-evangelist, both in Sicily, in visits to communities of Sicilian out-migrants in the Italian north, and abroad in countries such as Argentina (where, apart from preaching in churches, he reconnected with his brother Gaetano). He died on 25 March 1995, about two months before his eighty-fourth birthday.  

Sources:

• Federico, Vincenzo with Francesco Toppi (ed.), Vincenzo Federico: Propugnatare della collaborazione tra le chiese evangeliche pentecostali (Roma: ADI-Media, 2006)

• Spini, Giorgio, Italia Liberale e Protestanti: gli invisibili (Torino: Claudiana, 2002)

• Spini, Giorgio, Studi sull'evangelismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Torino: Claudiana, 1994)