Piraino, Anthony

Anthony Piraino was born on 26 May 1915, in Palermo, Sicily. In 1921, Piraino's mother, Vincenza nee Armetta (1889-1976), followed her sister (Rose Lisciandrello, arrived 1913) and husband (Mariano Piraino, arrived 1920) to the USA. As well as Anthony, there were two siblings, Maria (aged 4), and Rosario (aged 1). His father, Mariano Piraino (1883-1938), was already living at 121 Central Ave., Brooklyn, a suburb in which Piraino would stay for most of his young life. (In 1949, his address is given as 33 Bleecker St., Brooklyn, a 3 storey weatherboard multi-family home built in 1931). The possibilities before him are illustrated that his almost exact contemporary and namesake (the New York mobster Anthony Piraino/ Peraino), born only two months after Anthony: that young man went the other way and became involved in the Profaci crime family. Anthony's mother and her sister, Rose Lisciandrello had grown up in Palermo in a Catholic orphanage. It would be Rose and her husband, Dominick Lisciandrello, who were the first to bring the pentecostal faith to the family.

Around 1930, while Rose was quite ill, the Lisciandrello family had moved to Rochester, New York. There, through friends who were involved in a pentecostal church, she received prayer and was healed. This encounter sent them back to Brooklyn to spread the pentecostal message among their relatives and friends. Out of this group emerged 'Calvary Pentecostal Church', Brooklyn, where the Pirainos would grow up and become involved in Italian youth work. He and his uncle formed a radio ministry entitled 'La Voce nel Deserto'. The ministry both confirmed Anthony's sense of calling to Italy, and prompted him to learn Italian (rather than the palermitano dialect spoken at home) from a Professor Narelli. A good student at school, he was selected to proceed to boy's high school. When he matriculated at the age of 16, however, it was the depth of the Depression, and he needed to find work to help contribute to the family. He worked in a shoe factory. Though he came to the notice of the management and was even offered a partnership, Piraino preferred piece-work, which would enable him to finish early and use the rest of the day for ministry work.

About 1940, Anthony married Josephine Rose nee Di Bello (b. 1918, New Jersey). They would have one son, Andrew, named after Piraino's great friend, Andrew Nelli. Three years later, Piraino was ordained in the Evangelical Christian Pentecostal Church and then added to the AGUSA Ministers list in 1947, just as (with the help of Joseph R. Flower) the Italian District (ID) of the AGUSA was organising itself at the Syracuse Convention held at Grace Tabernacle. Piraino is listed as among those who signed the membership roster of the new District in January 1948, transferring his ordination to the Italian District in March that year. In May 1948, at the first Italian District conference (held at Dominick Lisciandrello's 'Calvary Pentecostal Church' in Brooklyn), Piraino (referred to as an 'elder' rather than as 'pastor') was elected to the Executive. One of their pressing jobs, and no doubt on the cards for Nello Gorietti when he met the Executive in Brooklyn in May of 1948, was to agitate for religious freedom in Italy. At the time, the AGUSA paper was reporting evangelical voices in Italy (such as Manfred Ronchi, of the Baptist Union in Italy) who had similar concerns about police application of outdated Fascist regulations. In July 1948, the ID Executive, attended by Gorietti, leaders of the Italian Baptist movement (Dr. A. di Domenica), a representative of the National Association of Evangelicals (Dr. Clyde W. Taylor) and the Italian evangelical press (Francis Panetta, editor of Il Risorgimento) called upon the Italian Ambassador to the USA (Alberto Tarchiani) to act for full religious liberty in Italy. Tarchiani, a former journalist and antifascist activist, assured them of his 'cooperation'. Piraino would be an intrinsic part of the campaign--as translator, activist, organizer, intermediary--which would eventually bring about the recognition of the constitutional rights of the Pentecostal churches in Italy.

In July Piraino accompanied Gorietti as translator on his tour through the USA, covering some 20,000 miles and dozens of churches. He was translating, for instance, when Gorietti spoke on 'Preaching the Gospel in Italy' to the Central Assembly, Springfield. It was while translating Gorietti's powerful rhetoric and accounts of the sufferings of Italy that Piraino finally felt sure that he would follow the calling of a missionary in Italy. The AGUSA had committed $25000 to the support of the Bible School in Italy -- money that in fact needed to come from its member churches. At the end of his 1948-1949 tours, Andrew Piraino would remember, Gorietti and his father sat around the dining table and counted out the donations made on the speaking tour. They counted $26,000, a huge sum for a fledgling movement, indeed too large for a movement which would in fact not be formally recognised by the Italian state until 1959. Knowing that one of the female members of the church was making the trip to Italy with Gorietti, they went to the airport and watched them board a TWA Constellation, with the money tucked into her knitting bag.

In 1950-1 Piraino was ID Branch Secretary, helping organise the third, fourth annual conventions. The 1950 convention was held at the Italian Pentecostal Church (later Trinity Assembly of God, 138 Henry St., New York) in a 'a spirit of praise and victory'. The 1951 convention moved to Phil D'Angelo's Church, Broadway Tabernacle, 39-41 Broadway, Paterson, New Jersey. Piraino would, while in Italy, give this as his USA home address. In these conventions, the District prepared for placing a field secretary in Rome in order to manage the by now slightly chaotic situation of American Italian missionaries coming back to evangelize, and to ensure that the District's funds were spent well. They campaigned under the title "Millions of Italians for Christ."

In 1951 the District Convention appointed Piraino as the first permanent Field Secretary to Italy, and made a special offering of $1500 to send him and his small family on their way. They arrived in Rome in September that year, initially planning for a stay of two years only. The District later decided to make a significant push into the development of local Sunday schools, and shortly after supported Josephine Furnari to establish these in Italy. Through the 'Italian Christian Educational Foundation' under Vincenzo Burchieri (1893-1962) of San Cataldo (Caltanissetta), the Branch also raised money for the support of the ADI's bible school in Rome (opened 1954). Piraino oversaw the other AGUSA groups moving through Italy, including the CA 'Gospel Teams'. His work with Furnari, and later with the year-long 'Sunday School Teams led by people such as Richard Scotti, saw them involved in teacher training, direct ministry, the production of 'Sunday School quarterlies', and other literature (provided by organisations such as the Boys and Girls Missionary Crusade) which they found snapped up by churches wherever they went. Teacher training was difficult because it needed to be localized, a problem solved in part by running 'Sunday School Conventions' up and down the 'boot' of Italy, with speakers such as Scotti, James Hamill, Paul Copeland and Gayle F. Lewis (Asst Gen. Supt. AGUSA). The Bible was central to the task, Copeland wrote when he returned, 'Italy needs the Book of books.' (PE 15.6.1952, p. 11) The (American) emphasis on 'system' and method was marked, themes of Sunday School conventions including 'Sunday School Organization', 'Teaching Methods', 'Workers' Conferences', 'Opening Service', 'Importance of Records', 'Literature', etc. For a country much divided over the 'organised church', it is remarkable they did not have more opposition than they did. Instead, Piraino reported, Sunday school teachers 'ate it up'. Classes were divided into functional parts, training provided to teachers, doubtful pastors (for whom the approach smacked too much of 'organisation') won over, and resources provided. With the push out of America by the Sunday School Training Squad, by 1954, Piraino was reporting that 'most of our activities are centred around Sunday School work' - perhaps to his own surprise, by 1956, he was aiming to put 'a Sunday school in every church, and a church in every city' in Italy. (PE 16.5.1954, p. 6; 20.5.1956, p. 12) In May 1956 he could report joyfully that the Sunday School Conventions at Bari and Catania were having significant impact:

eighty-nine pastors, Sunday School leaders and teachers gathered at Bari, coming from seven different provinces and thirty-four cities and towns, and that ninety-four pastors and workers came from nine provinces and forty-two cities and towns for the Convention in Catania. (PE 20.5.1956, p. 12)

Conversions did not, through this approach, come in ones and twos, but rather in whole family groups. This concept grew over time into ‘"Get Gospel Literature into Every Home of Every Town and Village in Italy," a theme observed by B. H. Pearson in his tour of Italy in 1959. Pearson (of World Gospel Crusades) promised to match AGUSA funds up to $27000. The AGUSA mobilized in order to take advantage of the offer, BGMC providing $5000. (PE 26.4.1959, p.16)

Over time, Italy became a net exporter, rather than an importer of such materials, as translated quarterlies such as 'The Adult Student' were mailed to the Italian diaspora in in America, Canada, North Africa, SwitzerIand, France, and Belgium. In addition, Piraino's office became the centre for translating the Home Study Bible Course into Italian, an early attempt to deal with the scattered and poorly trained ADI pastorate, and the distance of Rome away from the economic and social worlds of most of the churches. Aware of minimizing costs on the Italian District missions budget, he directly appealed for an automatic printing press, so resources could be produced in Italy. As transport (such as his 'Speed the Light' Fiat gifted to him by Andrew Nelli’s North Hollywood Assembly) and capital (such as the funds the initial purchase of the bible school on Via dei Bruzi) came out of different budgets, comparatively little emphasis was placed on these. He got a start in 1954 when Camden AG in New Jersey sent $800, sufficient for a small press and a hand cutting machine. ‘Speed the Light’ then upgraded this to a larger press and folding machine.

When Piraino had arrived in 1951, all the literature available was the ADI’s 12-page magazine. By 1959 they were running five high speed presses with attendant folding, and other machinery. Their operations published four Sunday school quarterlies (Adult Student, Junior Pupil, Primary Pupil, and Primary Teacher), the Sunday School Counsellor, Sunday school materials (such as record books), as well as hymnals and doctrinal books. In essence, he had replicated the Bible Society with a missional Pentecostal edge. (PE 27.9.1959, p. 16) In 1956 when the Shelley and Persings from California visited Piraino in Rome, they were shown a print room out of which six tons of gospel literature had been mailed around Italy in the previous month. He was planning, he noted, to distribute a million tracts throughout Sicily. Squeezed between Catholicism and the largest Communist party outside Russia, the Shelleys’ tour connected with all the major fears of Americans in the 1950s. When they met the ex-priests, Pietro Selvieggio and Lorenzo Ramacini, who between them handled translation and printing, their sense of Piraino's effectiveness on the 'front line' of the free West was confirmed. Piraino himself had to handle the diplomatic tension between enthusing American pentecostal interest (which was in no doubt that the Vatican was behind the oppression of Pentecostal churches) and the increasing interest by the secular press. To the Detroit News in 1959 he made the nice distinction that 'interferences were never the known policy of the Catholic church but ... the zealous police were bolstered by "ecclesiastical influences."' (PE .1.2.1959, p. 23) Numbers of times, he travelled into the Italian South in order to intervene in the case of Italian pastors who had been arrested and charged, or to help churches which were being harrassed, often not by the authorities as such but by 'special' local groups or families who carried out the tacit will of the Church or the Questura.

As became necessary for most Italian pastors in the mobile post-war period, Piraino also hosted the clerical tourists who came through the city which contained so much of Christian history. He used occasions such as a visit to the Mamertine Prison to encourage his American guests to consider the persecuted nature of the Italian church. While driving up the Appian Way in a tiny Fiat ('these little European cars are not made for six-footers') Ken Schmidt, CA President from California, described it this way:

Brother Gorietti is driving and to the other side of me is Brother Bracco. Each of these brethren has been imprisoned and persecuted many times for the gospel's sake. Their arrests and imprisonments have not abated their love for Christ. Behind me are Brother and Sister Zizzo who are laboring for Christ in Torino, Italy. They are now talking about Paul's journey up this very road and the conversation drifts to present-day persecutions and the recent closing of thirty-five of the Pentecostal churches in Italy. This picture fades and again I am walking down the winding stairs into Paul's prison in Rome. Brother Piraino, Secretary of the Italian assemblies, is explaining about the post where Paul was chained. Here the apostle wrote many of his inspired words. It is so damp and cold. (PE 22.6.1952)

Piraino attended the World Pentecostal Conference (WPC) in London, 1952, where the appeal of the ADI asking for help from the AGUSA was read out by Noel Perkin. The WPC established a permanent standing committee on religious liberty, and called for 10 days of prayer and fasting (19-31 September).

As his Italian Branch brethren met in Schenectady, NY, Piraino attended a meeting of 'La Consulta', a network of Italian activists for religious liberty. Most of these 'outstanding citizens... many of them Catholics,' such as the lawyer Arturo Jemolo, the economist Ernesto Rossi and Leopoldo Piccardi (Honorary President of the Council of State), sought merely to defend democratic rights. In general, they did not cover religious issues in their meetings. Giacomo Rosapepe (the ADI lawyer), however, had compiled a brief outlining the hundreds of cases of persecution, which Piccardi had discussed before the Council of State. He had come to the conclusion that, despite the guarantees of Articles 8 (equality before the law), 17 (right of assembly) and 19 (freedom of profession), the appeal to the Buffarini Guidi provisions meant that there was no religious liberty in Italy. For the AGUSA, Bert Webb (pastor of Central Assembly, Springfield, MO, and Asst. Gen. Sup. AGUSA), Emil A. Balliet (pastor Central Assembly, Springfield, MO.; and Umberto Gorietti. They heard Jemolo outline the steps which needed to be taken to ensure that all laws prior and in contradiction to the Constitution were ruled invalid. Cases of persecution in other traditions had occurred, but Pentecostals were the largest and most active, and therefore the major target for the laws.

In October 1954, Piraino and family returned to Brooklyn, and commenced itinerating among American churches. They returned to Italy on in June 1955, in time to maintain pressure for legalisation of the status of ADI ministers. Now based at Via dei Bruzi 11, he wrote home in exultation in October 1955 to report the recognition of three ADI ministers by the state, the first since 1931. A favourable showing in front of the Council of State, and pressure from the AGUSA, had brought about the situation where churches could now legally marry and bury their own (if they could find a cemetery which would take their dead, no certain thing). He was under no illusion that the situation was either as could be desired, or in any way permanent, but it was, in his eyes, 'victory in Italy.' (PE 23.10.1955, p. 9.) The military reference was not unsuitable: as well as working with the ADI, Piraino cooperated with visiting evangelists who began to tour through the country, including those at the Allied Forces Southern Europe Command and NATO offices in Naples. As many of these expat-centred campaigns did not plan for Italian language outreach, Piraino's presence enabled them to bridge to the Italian population. In 1956 he hosted Paul Boyer, who was present with him on 1 May when the right to religious freedom was affirmed by the Council of State. ‘How well do I remember the rejoicing in the church that day…’ remembered Boyer later, who became a test case for the new legal standing: ‘plans were immediately put into action’ by Gorietti and Piraino for short meetings to be conducted in ten of the most needy cities south of Rome to Sicily …’ (PE 31.1.1960, p. 27) Meetings were held in Foggia, Bari and other places. In 1958, Piraino spoke at the 5 day 'Assemblies Retreat' for US servicemen and their families in Berchtesgaden, Germany.

In 1959, J Boyd Wolverton (Full Gospel Church, Richmond CA) and Bert Webb (Asst. Gen. Sup. AGUSA), addressed the AGUSA missionaries in Europe at a conference at Via dei Bruzi. Piraino was naturally there to help organise the event, and translate. Later that year he returned to the USA on leave, A. J. 'Al' Perna taking his place. In an interview with BGMC in the Evangel, he noted that ‘literature with the help of the Lord has been the largest single factor in our success in Italy.’ His return to the USA was important for a number of reasons. His children (such as Andrew) were now old enough to be considering their own education and futures. James Hamill organized for Andrew to receive a scholarship, which enabled him to attend Evangel College. When they returned to Italy after furlough, he moved his focus to the north, the 1961 AGUSA Ministers List placing his address as Via Valvassori Peroni 55, Milano, Italy. Al Perna stayed in Rome at Via Valle Scrivia 14.

In 1962 Piraino returned the USA again, working out of the North Hollywood Assembly. In an interview in 1966, he reflected on the changes which had come across his ministry to the readers of the Pentecostal Evangel. While speaking with Andrew Nelli c. 1963, the problem of evangelism among the Italian diaspora led them both to consider running campaigns among Italians outside of Italy. Piraino had become aware of the huge numbers of Italians moving overseas: in a 1958 report to AG Foreign Missions in Springfield, for instance, he had virtually begged the AGUSA to fund a churchplanting and evangelistic team to work among migrants to Australia. Unfortunately, a national AG already existed in Australia, and the AGUSA did not see it as a key missionary field. It would be up to the Italian District to support first Giuseppe Giusti, and then Anthony and Jean Foti, for the Australian work to take off: in the Ministers Roll, they appeared as missionaries based in Italy. It was back to the drawing board for he and Andrew Nelli. In 1963 he returned to Europe, working out of Lugano, Switzerland, with Hermann Parli. For nearly three years he prayed for an opening among the Italians living in what was considered a mission field, Western Europe. As his 1958 proposal indicated, he had a flair for the dramatic, and yet an eye for ways of creating a splash for a strategic evangelistic initiative. In 1966 he is listed as living in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, 'Sunrise Court,' 300 E Main St Apt 8D, planning campaigns. By 1967, he had re-established himself in Francavilla, prov. Chieti. Light for the Lost (missionary arm of Nelli's Men's Fellowship) had arranged to provide literature, which would be used in large amounts. By mid-1966 he had already arranged 10 such city-wide campaigns, the first of which was held in Crotone. (PE 14.8.1966, p.10) Piraino's idea was caught up in the AGUSA's plan for expansion, which saw 'Good News Campaigns' developed in every country in Africa, in many Pacific countries, and Asia, featuring evangelists such as Hal Herman, Willard Cantelon, Quentin Edwards, Watson Argue, and Eddie Wilson. His 'Missione Buona Novella' would be their main activity for the rest of his life. In 1969, this would lead to them holding one of the first protestant campaigns held in Siracusa, a series of five nights of preaching which featured Roberto Bracco. Such campaigns significantly increased the sustainability of local pentecostal churches and maintained their connection to the USA in a period when evangelical protestant interest had general been redirected elsewhere.

While the Pirainos retired to Clearwater, Florida, in 1981, they maintained connections to Italy, returning numbers of times to run campaigns and preach. In 1982, for example, a tour involved 55 meetings in 33 towns. It was on the last of these that Anthony Piraino, who had been suffering from 'pulmonary emphysema', died suddenly in Pescara on 21 November 1992. Josephine died on 11 Apr 2013 and was buried alongside Anthony in Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park, Clearwater, Florida.

Mark Hutchinson

Sources:

Interview, Andrew Piraino, 16.7.2012, PHC, Alphacrucis College

Pentecostal Evangel

Ministers files, iFPHC Archives, Springfield, MO.

'Italy' File, CN165 Bill Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, IL.