The Book of Common Prayer for Immigrants in London and the United States

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs both the use of the Italian version of the Anglican liturgy in the short-lived nineteenth-century Italian congregations established in England to serve the growing number of Italian immigrants and the history of the Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. In 1874 and in 1876 the Italian Costantino Stauder published a partial Italian version of the American Prayer Book for the first Italian-speaking Episcopal congregation in New York. The first complete Italian edition was published in Philadelphia in 1904 by Michele Zara, minister of the Italian Episcopal Church of the Emmanuello of that city. His successor, Tommaso Edmondo della Cioppa, published in 1922 a bilingual selection of the Book of Common Prayer.