Anthony Foti

Anthony Foti (listed on his birth record as 'Antonino') was born on 15 January 1928, in Niagara Falls, New York, the youngest son of Italian immigrants, Domenico (or as he was known in the USA, 'Dominick') Foti (b. 31 October 1891, Roccavaldina, Messina, Sicilia; d. February 1986, Clinton, New York), a wheel man at the Carborundum Abrasive Company in Niagara Falls, and his wife Giuseppa 'Josephine' nee Bongiovanni (b. 13 February 1886- d. 2 November 1962, New York).  Domenico and Giuseppa migrated to the USA in 1924 aboard the SS Colombo in Naples, with their two oldest children Giuseppe 'Joseph Ronald' (b. 1920, Italy –1977, Arlington, TX), and Vittoria 'Vickie' (b. 1922, Italy - d. 4 March 2008, Las Vegas, NV; married name Mogavero).  Three later children were born, including Catherine (aka Petrina, after Domenico's mother, Petronilla, b. c. 1925 in Pennsylvania, married name Perry), and his older brother Francis (or Frank, b. 17 June 1926, Sagamore, PA - d. 3 November 2019, Camillus, NY)  who, like Anthony, would enter the Assemblies of God as a minister and missionary.  (At the time of the 1930 Census, the family included a boarder, Anthony Ciraolo, a labourer at the Power Company). 

Niagara Falls had rapidly gained an international flavour after the advent of the cheap hydro-electric power flowing from Niagara Falls came online in 1905. Immigrant workers suffered exploitation, high death and injury rates, and were often involved in labour disputes and discrimination. [Fast 2017] Anthony's family had become attached to the Walnut Avenue Christian Church founded by Massimiliano Tosetto, a church which had had significant impact as a missionary-sending church, as well as a source for both Italian Pentecostal hymnody, and it's influence on the foundation (along with Luigi Francescon and Giuseppe Petrelli) of the largest Italian Pentecostal denomination in the United States, the Christian Church of North America (CCNA). Foti would remember Tosetto as an irenic, aesthetically nuanced and passionate leader and model. 

Anthony was educated at Niagara Falls Senior High, before progessing to Maranatha Bible College in Montgomery, Pennsylvania (1950, where fellow students included his brother, Frank, his cousin Guy Bongiovanni (1930-2018, his maternal uncle's son), and his future wife, Jean Castellani), one of the forerunners of Eastern Bible Institute, Valley Forge.  Even at age 19, his High School yearbook photo shows him as a serious young man driven by a purpose - though the comment on the side panel references his geniality. When he registered for the draft in 1940, the family were living at 425 20th Street.  Maranatha Bible School had been founded in 1932 and was initially chartered in 1939 with a site in Green Lane, PA.  It gradually merged with other colleges and institutes - Beulah Heights (1912), Metropolitan Bible Institute, the New England Bible Institute, and the Italian District of the Assemblies of God's training school, Pine Crest Bible Institute (founded 1958 and merged 1962).   While at Eastern Bible Institute, he formed (as second tenor) part of a male singing group called the Pilgrim Quartet, which included other EBI students Francis Foti, Angelo Nesta and Augusto Moceri. In 1950, the toured the eastern US states, during the summer break, ministering and singing in churches. Foti was musically talented, and a determined spirit, over the years learning to play guitar and trombone, skills which were helpful in Italian church camp settings in later years. 

Originally working with the Christian Churches of North America, with which the family church in Niagara was associated,  the challenges of the draft and war led many young Italian ministers to join the expanding 'Italian Branch' of the Assemblies of God (IB-AGUSA). Bongiovanni would go on to become a significant  figure in the CCNA, and Frank (Anthony's brother) would spend a considerable amount of time in the CCNA (ordained 1959) as a longtime evangelist, a missionary (spending 13 years in Venezuela) before later transferring to the AGUSA in 1981, after which he spent nearly 20 years as pastor of Pentecostal Christian Assembly in Syracuse, NY. Anthony would serve as a minister for the Assemblies of God for a total of 45 years: including 3 years in Buffalo,NY; 7 years in Shelton, CT; 6 years in Pittsfield, MA, and 29 years as a missionary in Australia.

On 29 September 1951, Anthony married a former fellow student, Jean Castellani, after they both graduated. Jean's father Vittorio Castellani (29 March 1893, Perugia –1982, Dalton, PA) arrived with his parents (Eugenio Castellani, 1960-1929 and Caterina Menghini, 1864–1941) on the Noordland on 27 Feb 1896, at the age of 2, and was raised on the family farm in Pennsylvania.  In turn, he raised his own children with his wife, Anita nee Notari (daughter of John Notari, 1857–1933, a grocery store owner in Old Forge, PA, and his wife Rose Mascioni, 1862–1957), on their hard scrabble farm in Falls, Wyoming County, PA. The Notari family had migrated to the USA in 1887. This was a hard life, a good preparation as it turned out for the practical, disciplined life that Jean would live as a missionary church planter in Australia. 

In 1954, the Fotis locumed at the Italian congregation meeting in Faith Gospel Tabernacle (a 'cooperating Assembly' rather than one directly under AGUSA Council control. This was originally at 319 Longnecker Street, Buffalo, before it moved to Chenango St & W. Utica St). It moved again and was later renamed as Expressway Assembly of God under his fellow 'Pilgrim', August Mocero. The original site is now an empty block, while the Chenango St property is a Spanish language congregation.) 

In 1955 they took up the pastorate of the Italian Christian Church (also called First Christian Church), 125 Long Hill Ave., Ansonia, Shelton, and living at 257 Caroline Dr, Ansonia, Connecticut.  At first they lived at 257 Caroline St., Derby, but by 1959 the family was living at 105 Oak Ave, Shelton. One of the challenges of the Church was maintaining his Italian language - learned in family circles, practiced under Tosetto's preaching, and now needed for the small group of Italian members for whom he ran a specific service each week. It would be an important asset to have.  Anthony took an active role in the local ministers fraternal, and would in later years be invited back to preach at the Union Lenten service in 1960. [Bridgeport Post, 7 March 1960, p. 24] Even then, his "love for God & family, easy smile and demeanor" made a way for him even outside his own denomination. 

It was in Shelton, and in the context of the Italian Branch of the AGUSA, that the Fotis first heard the call to mission in Australia. The Italian Branch had, since it's foundation, been active in sending support and missionaries to Italy, following in the footsteps of the CCNA before them (to which, indeed, many IB-AGUSA pastors had previously belonged). As a consequence they had been reading about missions in AGUSA and Italian Branch publications, and hearing from and supporting itinerating missionaries. Jean noted that about 1959 she was 'ready' for a change, for a missionary call. At just that time, Giuseppe 'Joseph' Giusti [q.v.] was itinerating through IB-AGUSA churches, raising funds for his work in Australia. By 1961 he had been in Australia for nearly three years, and had established a number of works in Sydney and Queensland, and had assisted in bringing order to a work in Melbourne.  (Giovinazzo 2006) He was looking for a replacement pastor, so he could go back to his preferred work of evangelism (and visit his family in Wilmington, where he was nominally pastor of a church). Foti remembers him coming to their Shelton church, and preaching a missionary message about Australia, about the great towns there, and the multitudes of Italians lying 'in Egypt' waiting to be set free by the Gospel of Christ. The Fotis took counsel from IB-AGUSA and AGUSA leaders, and volunteered for a seven year stretch on the other side of the world.  

In August 1961, the District Council of the Italian Branch of the Assemblies of God approved their missionary status [Foti to Springfield Travel Agency, 13 September 1961, LHCC Archives]. They spent the first six months itinerating among AGUSA churches to raise finances for their missions fund. Of course, there was Shelton and Niagara, where they were known well, but another supportive church was Mechanicville, where John Beretta was pastor. 

The Fotis arrived in Sydney on the Orient Line's SS Orcades (after an 18 day journey out of San Francisco) on 11 February 1962, and were met by a delegation of church members who took them to the rented house in Sydney's 'little Italy', Leichhardt, which had been obtained for their use. Their first surprise was that Giusti was not quite ready to leave Australia. For almost half a year, despite letters from America requesting his return and pressure from new converts in the group unhappy about his legalistic leadership style, Giusti continued to dominate the pulpit, pushing the new arrivals into the background. He also let people know he wasn't entirely happy about the new couple: the Fotis were too American - Jean, in particular, had a modem hair style (though she hid it under the veil), and spoke hardly any Italian. (Through lessons with the later famous Mamma Lena, immersion in the Italian speaking community and with Paolina Infantino's help, she was enabled to master the language in which they were to minister). Anthony was 'too loose' on the enforcement of traditions. Giusti eventually left in June 1962, but attempted to control the work from his base in Delaware. When Foti refused to tax the missionary fund with the expense of bringing him back to Australia, Giusti saw it as a personal attack. He contacted various church authorities, and the father of another Italian born American minister soon to be a missionary in the Australian field (Joseph Roma from New York), making rash promises about how Foti would be removed. The event undermined, rather than mobilised, confidence in the work at a crucial stage, and in the end came to nothing: in 1965, Giusti tragically died from injuries sustained in a car accident. The Fotis were on their own in terms of building a national Italian-Australian work. 

They set about confirming the connections to bind together the scattered Italian mass migration. Giusti had left them a small preaching point in Hoxton Park, and they spent a good amount of time shuttling people (many of whom did not own cars) between the rented Presbyterian church in Leichhardt (where inner city industrial workers met), to the Union Church building in Sydney's outer west (where gathered the market gardeners and service industry workers who were purchasing large blocks in Sydney's expanding outer suburbs).  Small works were to be found in Bankstown and (3 hours to the north) Newcastle. To facilitate this, they traded in Giusti's car for a Volkswagen bus which (because their heavily indebted members did not tithe) they had to pay off. Down the road from Leichhardt were the overseas ship passenger terminals on the harbour where some church members were dock workers or fishermen:

We'd go down to meet someone, perhaps someone in the church [who was having] someone coming from overseas. We'd go down to Woolloomooloo, Circular Quay or the ports there, and you'd just wait there. Before you even got there there were hundreds of people, lining up and pushing and jostling for position. Finally, the Oceania would come in, or the Marconi, or the Lloyd Triestino would come in, and there would be screaming, crying, waving... very emotional scenes, people crying. I'll never forget that - every month there were boatloads coming in with all their personal effects, and their bags and their ports, and large handkerchiefs and sheets tied up with stuff, all kinds of makeshift apparatus. (Interview with Jean Foti, LHCC Archives). 

Many times they were meeting people with family connections - many of those who would join Foti's congregation in Sydney were from the same area out of which his own parents had migrated in 1924 (Roccavaldina is a hill town in the mountains behind Spadafora, from which the Aloe, Fiumara, Dimento, LoSurdo, Ilacqua and other families came).

In a sense, Giusti was right - the Fotis really were connected to expanding post-War American global missions. Sometimes this was not of their making - the Assemblies of God in Australia was still a very Anglo work, not yet keen to take responsibility for expanding ethnic works, or to cross reporting lines with their American cousins. (When they discovered that their Italian guest church held a wedding at which there was wine, Petersham Assemblies of God rapidly found themselves disinvited and having to rent a local Presbyterian church.)  The Italian Assemblies of God (the ADI) had no effective ability to fund missions, and preferred that either the Americans or Australians funded it. (A Foti to Italian Branch, AGUSA, A Report on the Existing Italian Work in Australia, 9 March 1962).  Given the lack of support from Rome, Foti's first response was to encourage the formation of a separate corporate entity from main overseas denominations, which he proposed calling the Italian Assemblies of God of Australia. The Fotis and their home became a clearing house for many visiting American missionaries, and even AG functionaries (such as W. E. Kirschke, who in 1961 toured Australia to promote the Sunday School materials of Gospel Publishing House in Missouri; or Leland and Carol Schaad on their way to Papua New Guinea, or Jay Adams and his wife; or the evangelist Bro. Remick, whose ministry saw many in the Sydney church baptised in the Spirit.).  In distant places such as Geelong and in Queensland, they would answer the call of Australian churches who had Italian members, and run revival meetings often centred on a film - such as T. L. Osborn's Java Harvest or Holland Wonder. Their work was reported on the AGUSA's Pentecostal Evangel and the Italian Branch's Il Faro, while Tina Tavilla Maselli of Camden, New Jersey (the wife of Aldo G. Maselli, and President of the Women's Missions Committee) circulated coloured slides illustrating the Fotis' work in Australia. 

The perpetual problems were distance, finance and human capita.l. For the first, the churches knit together via private cars which were coopted to carry the many members who did not drive out to and/ or back from the 'country' church in Hoxton Park.  One of the markers of the Church's history would be a tragic accident involving the church bus, contingent on the scattered nature of the constituency. For the many Italian people who incidentally found themselves looking for a Protestant church - as a result of T L Osborn film campaigns in norther Queensland, for example, or via conversion in English speaking churches which had nothing for them - Foti sought to patch together solutions and outreaches in the very distant parts of Australia - Can River, Geelong, Innisfail, etc - where Italians had found work in places where Anglo labour was scarce. For the second, the Fotis often accepted cased of vegetables or other food gifts instead of the tithes which were not available in the still relatively poor factory- and farm-based sectors. Finally, some funds were set aside to sponsor a trainee minister - the first of these would be Anthony Iannuzzelli (who, born in Castel Nuovo di Conza, Salerno, came from a family in which his grandfather been converted under Giacomo Lombardi, and his parents at the 1959 Billy Graham Campaign in Sydney), while others attended night classes while working through the day. (Iannuzzelli would later pastor in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Newcastle). While his early hopes were disappointed that the ADI or AGUSA would send out Thomas Grazioso, who had been working in Sicily among youth,  in September 1966 the Melbourne church scene was was reinforced by the appearance of Joseph Roma. An Italian speaker converted among the Australian Churches, a Brother Salvine, filled the space in Newcastle until the Ienco family took over the work. At the same time, and old tennis court on the corner of Catherine and Kelly Streets, Punchbowl, came on the market, and Foti began negotiating for this site which was close to rail transport, and in a suburb which at the time had a significant Italian population. The Church would be opened in 1969.  

It did so in the midst of a charismatic stirring among many churches in Australia. The Fotis were part of a wave of revivalist influence which was easily at home with the preaching of Oral Roberts or T. L. Osborne, and Foti himself had personally met Italian ministers who had been involved in the Latter Rain movement (see Giuseppe (Joseph) Terlizzi, 1898-1983, q.v.).  This was reinforced by influences from New Zealand, including Frank Houston. In 1966, he recorded that, as he circulated in the Australian churches and youth movements as a guest preacher,  there was: 

a tremendous atmosphere of faith and expectancy among the Australian Pentecostal brethren as they feel God is sending a final, mighty earth-shaking revival prior to Jesus' coming. Several have received spirit revelation from God and others have been sent to this land under divine guidance to implement this move. May God grant us a heavenly visitation! [Missionary letter, September 1966)

His reports home include multiple references to church members being baptised in the Spirit.  The need for both city and an outer suburban centres (in order to connect to the major centres of Italian settlement) stretched the congregation, and sparked the need to find a permanent location. A small group of members (the D'Ali, Fiumara and Puntillo families, for example) were already living in the suburb of Punchbowl, which had the advantage of being on the train line between the city and Liverpool. The Fotis moved into, first, a house in Yagoona, and then eventually into a manse in Greenacre. In 1967, the church was formally incorporated, and purchased a former tennis court in Punchbowl, on Catherine Street, opposite Punchbowl Boys High School. The 'subscribers' at incorporation said much of the socio-economic and geographical distribution of the membership:

• • Pasquale Losurdo / Cnr Douglas and Railway Road Quakers Hill / Shopkeeper (Sicily, Prov. Messina)

  • Pietro D'Ali, 20 Matthews Street, Punchbowl, Labourer (Sicily, Prov. Messina)

  • Antonio Caltabiano, 20 Tangara Street, Enfield. Labourer (Sicily, Prov. Catania)

  • Giuseppe Puntillo, 32 Violet Street, Punchbowl. Labourer (San Fele, Prov. Potenza)

  • Ernesto Potenza Seventh Avenue, Austral. Carpenter (Potenza, Prov. Potenza)

Financed by numbers of families who re-mortgaged their homes, and gave generously, the church (an A-frame brown brick building of modern type) could also call on the many members who were involved in construction. Women and children dug foundations and shifted bricks, including Jean Foti, who at the time was in the early stages of pregancy with her the last of four children. Andrew, who five decades later, would go on to become Senior Leader of the Church, would be born when the Fotis returned on furlough to the USA shortly after the church was opened. Missionary account money was running low, and the Fotis were thinking about what would happen to their children when they retired. Retirement would not come for two decades, but the three older children would indeed return to live in the eastern United States, among the (then still) strong pentecostal Italian congregations there. 

The next generation was now becoming a central question for the church which was now called 'Punchbowl Italian Assemblies of God.' 

[up to 1960 in Flower Ministerial listings]

He was an avid bocce player and loved fishing; enjoyed being creative with his hands with sheet metal, woodworking, gardening, and playing guitar and trombone.

1996 - 309 Cleveland Ave, Cinnaminson, NJ

Anthony Foti passed away at the age of 94 in Haddon Township, NJ, on May 11, 2022. His funeral was held at Kingsway Assembly of God Church, in Cherry Hill, NJ, a church with Italian District origins and which had become the family church on their return to the USA in the 1970s. He was buried at Locustwood Memorial Park in Cherry Hill.

Having lived longer than all of his siblings, he was survived by his wife, Jean, his children Dominic Paul Sr. (married to Luanne), Anthony Mark Sr. (married to Lisa), Anita C. (married to Stephen Genca), and Andrew James (married to Antoinette Versace), and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Sources:

Fast, Timothy R., 'Niagara Falls 1901-1911: Immigration, Industrialization and the Creation  of an Ethnically Diverse City', MA Thesis 2017, Brock University.

Hutchinson, Mark P., Pellegrini: An Italian Protestant Community in Sydney 1958-1998 (Chester Hill: AAPS, 1998).

Giovinazzo, Rocco, The Upper Room: A History of the Italian Pentecostal Church in Melbourne, Marden, SA: PDV Publishing, 2006.