Apostolate with tram drivers
On Labour Day, today’s episode is dedicated to the tram drivers. In fact, not many know that the Society of Jesus for many decades was involved in their spiritual care.
It is not the first time that our documents help us recount the professions and trades of men and women who for different reasons had points of contact with the Society of Jesus: suppliers, professionals in the service of the Order, Jesuit brothers with a past as artisans.
The Society of Jesus through the popular missions had. Some time ago, identified new subjects in need of spiritual accompaniment: peasants, workers, families who lived in the countryside or in very remote places. The aim was to draw the masses of workers away from nascent socialism and then communism and to strengthen their faith. The popular missions, for the Roman Province, covered both the Tuscan countryside and the Frusinate area. The so-called flying mission in Albania also aimed to reach families living in isolated mountain villages. The mission was considered “flying” because the Jesuits for a few months of the year dispersed throughout northern and central Albania, travelling along impervious roads to proclaim the Gospel.
Workers were the object of renewed interest, therefore, and the Jesuits were able to reach out to many categories of professionals thanks to the Workers’ Retreat Society, which organised spiritual retreats in Jesuit retreat houses throughout Italy.
In some cases, the closeness to the workers was linked to specific events, as in the case of the Polesine flood, when Bishop Baldelli involved the Jesuits in the animation of the parishes, in the factories. Like Fr. Massaruti’s soldiers , this was not only spiritual but also material assistance.
The source
The papers that allow us to tell this story are kept in the Apostolate of Prayer fund, which arrived in our historical archive a few years ago. From the same fund, the story of Aurelio Lucci had already emerged. Aurelio was also a tram driver and precisely because he experienced first-hand the care that the Jesuits, through the Apostleship of Prayer, lavished on the working classes, he wanted to realise the project for a church.
The fund contains correspondence relating precisely to the activities organised for tram drivers in the period between 1926 and 1957.
The documentation mainly concerns the city of Rome but there is also some data on the different locations the tram section had in some Italian cities: Brescia, Genoa, Milan and Padua.
Spiritual assistance to tram drivers
What did spiritual assistance to tram drivers consist of? Fr Rotondi answered this question during an interview published in the magazine “Jesuits of the Roman Province” at the end of 1945.
The Jesuit recounts that there were about 1,400 tram drivers assisted at that time. He specifies that he does not limit himself only to those who are members of the ‘Tramvieri Section’ of the Apostleship of Prayer, but that he dedicates himself to all the employees of Atac, the name of the company that still manages urban transport in Rome today. However, the Apostleship of Prayer was also dedicated to the spiritual assistance of the workers engaged in street cleaning. This accompaniment lasted a long time, so much so that the most recent photos of processions involving these workers are in colour.
The purpose of the apostolate, as the Jesuit confirms, is twofold: spiritual and material. Let us first dwell on the second. The workers were guaranteed “category” pilgrimages, catechism, conferences, processions, mass directly at the workplace, confessions, but also sacraments such as baptisms of the tram drivers’ children or marriages of the workers themselves. One might think that the themes of the conferences were always evangelical but, as Fr Rotondi himself recounts, they were also topical. He states: “Prof. Enrico Medi, director of the Physics Institute in Palermo, dealt with a topical subject “The Atomic Bomb”. Only a little over two months had passed since the bursting of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had forced Japan to surrender, the last chapter of the Second World War. Many Jesuits were involved in the activities of the Apostleship of Prayer, but also in the Workers’ Retreat which was expressly dedicated to the spiritual care of workers.
Once a month, then, the tramway workers attended a spiritual retreat in the Sacred Heart House and participated in large numbers in the end-of-year Te Deum held in the Gesù church in Rome, at which, at one time, even the mayor of Rome participated. Great prominence was given to this apostolate in the magazine of the Roman Province, which periodically reports on the initiatives for these workers and their testimonies. We find evidence of all this not only in the Jesuit’s words but also in the many photographs in the collection and documentation.
Material assistance
After-work shows were organised for the tram drivers, but also various activities for their children, such as the 1945 summer camp at Ponte Milvio, mentioned by Fr Rotondi. At Epiphany and Easter, the Apostolate of Prayer also organised the distribution of sweets and eggs to the children. Mention of these initiatives can be found in the journals of the Province.
The apostolate that so many Jesuits dedicated to workers, peasants, tram drivers and garbage collectors has not yet been fully reconstructed and there are many papers available in our historical archives on these topics worthy of further study.
Maria Macchi
