Giuseppe Petrelli

Giuseppe Petrelli was born on 27 December 1876 in Noepoli, Provincia Potenza, Basilicata, Italy, the third of four children of Pasquale Petrelli and Egidia Santomartino. Although born with a besetting illness, his mother prayed that if the Lord healed him she would consecrate her son to His service. It is said that her prayers were answered. Sadly, she never got to see the fulfilment of her prayers, as Egidia died when he was only twelve. Petrelli's broader family were a quite wealthy, Roman Catholic family with distant aristocratic connections. When his father remarried, Petrelli's younger sister (Maria Stella Filomena) was sent to a convent by his stepmother. Petrelli married in 1895 to Lucia, but tragedy continued to follow him: within a year, his wife passed away, having given birth to a son who did not survive.

Petrelli began studying law at age eighteen. He matriculated in 1897, and began practicing as a lawyer, while at the same time writing as a journalist for one of Italy’s largest newspapers, Il Corriere di Napoli. In 1899, he was remarried in Naples, to Isabella Panzardi (b. 1871, Noepoli), with whom he had two daughters, Lucia and Candida, both of whom died at an early age (one due to heart disease).

In 1905 Petrelli was returning from a legal case which left him disturbed as to what he perceived to be an injustice, and walked by a Baptist Church with its doors open. He heard a sermon being preached in Italian by an old Scots pastor repeating the words 'Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life". After weeks of going back to listen, he joined the Baptist church, and on 13 September that year was baptized by Nicola Papengouth [qv] in water in the Bay of Naples. Papengrouth reported Petrelli perturbation of mind as to the corruption he had experienced in the Italian legal system. One author suggests that Petrelli gave away his wealth, and determined to serve Christ alone. Later the same year he departed from the port of Naples aboard the Liguria, arriving in New York City on 29 September 1905. In 1906 he accepted the co-pastorate (with Agostino Dassori) at one of the nation’s largest Baptist churches, an Italian American congregation then known as 'Marina Temple'. His wife joined him in New York later the same year. It was a position which gave him significant profile in the New York Italian community- in 1912, he was asked to teach Italian history at Colgate University. The year before, he had a brush with ill health, when he had an attack of sudden paralysis - through three days of prayer, he felt that God healed him, an experience which reinforced his faith-mission approach to dependence on God for resources across his later itinerant experience. In the same year, he returned to Italy to visit family, among other visits staying at the convent where his sister would become Superior. There is some evidence that she returned to the USA with him.

After ten years with the Baptist Church (including 8 years in pastoral ministry), in 1915 Petrelli was baptized in the Spirit (in the lounge room of his residence after prayer by a Swedish pentecostal) and in 1916 joined the Pentecostal ministry (Bernabei, 6). Although he never accepted the pastorate of a Pentecostal church, for some time he carried Assemblies of God ministerial credentials (a common approach to the protection of conscience during the War for independent pentecostal ministers, most of whom were pacifist). (draft card 1918) He ministered among Pentecostal congregations throughout the United States and Canada, and in 1918 (having been naturalized in 1911) applied for a passport to work among the Christian Congregation churches in Argentina (Villa Devoto and Buenos Aires), on the way to which he visited his brother, Leonardo, who had migrated to Bahia, in Brazil. Between 1920 to 1921, Petrelli served as a missionary to Italian migrants in Argentina and Brazil, establishing elders and founding several churches in the Southern Cone region. When he returned to the States, he began hosting weekly evening Bible studies in Belleville and Jersey City, New Jersey.

Petrelli was among the founding members of the Christian Church of North America, established in 1927 at the Niagara Falls church (pastored by Massimiliano Tosetto, qv), in an effort to consolidate Italian Pentecostal congregations in the United States. Although he originally resisted attempts to organize the churches, Petrelli saw that the future of the movement depended on enhanced structure and pledged his support to the promptings of Tosetto to consolidate the churches (Palma, 86). In 1930, he was living in Corona, California, where he was helping establish the CCNA among Italians in the area.

Petrelli was a mystical thinker whose teachings were adopted by the libertà (freedom) party, a faction that dissented from the main body of Italian Pentecostal churches over the notorious Blood Issue. Petrelli favored a non-literal (allegorical) rendering of the Jerusalem Council’s censure of blood products (Acts 15:28-29), maintaining that the command to abstain was particular to the ethnic makeup of first-century Palestine, implying discretion for believers today. In 1930, Petrelli defended the position of the libertà in the work, Fra i due Testamenti [Between the Two Testaments], maintaining that the Council’s restrictions were intended to moderate table fellowship among respective Jewish and Gentile Christians. Whereas the mainline of Italian Pentecostals, the astinenza (abstainers), opposed eating blood products (which appeared in the Italian diet in items such as blood sausage, sanguinaccio), Petrelli permitted the practice so long as it did not present a stumbling block to fellow Christians.

From 1929 to 1931, Petrelli established and wrote for the monthly magazine, Il Re ed il regno [The King and the Kingdom], (later 'Il Regno di Dio') distributed in both English and Italian. In addition, he contributed to an English quarterly magazine distributed in the United States and, from 1945 to 1948, to the bilingual monthly magazine, La differenza [The Difference].

Petrelli continued hosting the weekly evening Bible studies up into the 1940s. During the War years, a Tuesday night series on the book of Acts was transcribed by Joseph Garippa and distributed to former members of the study who left for the US armed forces. These lessons were later compiled in book form as The Acts of the Apostles: Tuesday Night Lessons (1995).

A leading theologian of the Italian Pentecostal movement, Petrellli is credited with more than twenty books, including: Simon Pietro (1911), Il Figliuol dell’uomo [The Son of Man] (1930), Lo Spirito Santo (1938; published in English in 1953 under the title, Heavenward: Book One: The Holy Spirit), The Redeemer (1947), The Church, the Invisible (1947; published in Italian, La chiesa, la invisibile, in 1952), Him–His (1954), and From Darkness to Light (1957). Possibly as large or larger than his published opus was the vast epistolary correspondence that he carried out with friends and believers around the globe, particularly in the Italian protestant world.

Petrelli’s wife, Isabella Panzardi, died in 1947. Upon her passing, he went to live with a friend in Belleville (Rev. Giuseppe Grinelli), with whom he had preached for some years, and with whom he and Isabella had lived for some time c. 1940. He lived with Grinelli and his wife Laura for the duration of his life. During the 1950s, many of his sermons were recorded and transcribed. In Italy, these were circulated by Aida Chauvie through a continuation of Il Regno di Dio entitled Il Granel di Senape, copies of which circulated via Italian community links throughout the world. A follower of Petrelli in Sante Fe, Argentina, Domingo Marino, took it upon himself to translate a number of Petrelli’s works into Spanish, .

Petrelli died in Belleville on 13 February 1957.

Paul J. Palma

Sources

Ancestry.com

Bernabei, Caterina Londino, Biografia del servitore di Dio, Giuseppe Petrelli, Torino, n.d., http://giuseppepetrelli.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/8/9/2689036/biografia__pdf.pdf.

BonGiovanni, Guy, Pioneers of the Faith, Farrell, PA: Sound Ministries, 1971.

Napolitano, Carmine, Giuseppe Petrelli: Teologo Pentecostale delle origini, Aversa, It.: Fondazione Chàrisma Edizioni, 2015.

Palma, Paul J., Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, London: Routledge, 2020.

Saracco, Norberto J., “Argentine Pentecostalism: It's History and Theology,” PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 1989.

Toppi, Francesco, E mi sarete testimoni: Il movimento Pentecostale e le Assemblee di Dio in Italia, Rome: ADI Media, 1999.