Britain and Italy's Waldensian Church.

MOST people well-grounded in English literature have encountered the Waldensians once--in the famous sonnet written on 'the late massacre in Piedmont' when John Milton, despite encroaching blindness, was still consultant spin-doctor for Cromwell's very Protestant foreign policy. It begins, 'Avenge O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints ...', and it is probably the end of most Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the people once styled 'the Israel of the Alps'.

But that massacre in 1655 was only one episode in the turbulent history of this religious minority descended from the twelfth-century reforming revivalism of a born-again merchant of Lyons, Peter Valdo. His movement hoped to be accepted as the near contemporary Franciscans were but was anathematised and fiercely persecuted. By the time it adhered to the Protestant Reformation it survived mainly in the mountains between France and Turin. The community was largely in Piedmont but the dialect of its valleys was Provencal and the formal language of its Protestant worship for more than 300 years was French.

Milton's sonnet itself was only one episode in a long series of British connections with the Waldensians, not only in centuries when they were usually referred to as Vaudois but in the age of Italian unification when they became Valdesi. The alliance was most fervent in the decades after Waterloo, when it mainly involved evangelical Anglicans, and in the mid-Victorian era, when it was dominated by Scots Presbyterians, but the connection has continued.

It survives among relatively small groups of British enthusiasts and in a more generally diffused good-will on the Waldensian side, even if some of their English today is American-accented, the most obvious of their European links are with German Protestantism, and the greatest modern influence on their theology was Karl Barth.

Milton wrote one Waldensian sonnet but Wordsworth fitted four into his 'ecclesiastical' series. In the age when the Waldensians enjoyed the benefits of English enthusiasm for Protestantism, Italy, and the newly-fashionable Alps, Jane Austen's brother Henry wrote a pamphlet on their behalf, the young High Churchman Gladstone gave them an ill-natured visit and grudging donation, and the Duke of Wellington kept an account of them in his ante-room. That influential book, written by the East Anglian (later Northumbrian) clergyman W. S. Gilly, was read there by a one-legged Waterloo veteran awaiting audience, Charles Beckwith. This English officer born in Nova Scotia devoted the rest of his life to modernising the primitive schools of the Waldensian valleys and encouraging a tiny ethnic Church to become a Protestant mission to Italy. He made such an impact that Waldensians were reproached by their Catholic neighbours: 'You will not venerate the Virgin yet you worship an English colonel'.

Much of this is well-documented but neglected history, a marginal note to the complex story of the Risorgimento and Italian unification. But there are three reasons why this British-Waldensian connection deserves modern attention and new perspectives.

The first is that it was something more than a minor religious side-show in British and Italian history. It was an important part of the complex religious dimension to the Victorian love affair with Italy, probably the most passionate attachment the British ever allowed themselves towards any foreign country. Specialist and propagandist historians have tended to look at the religious phenomena in isolation from this cultural context.

The second is that it had both English and Scottish dimensions, closely allied yet in some ways distinct. Because the Waldensian connection went out of fashion in the twentieth century, these subtleties have been rather neglected by historians and some important but hitherto obscure Scottish sources (now in or destined for the National Library of Scotland) have remained unexplored. The third is that there are parallels or affinities between Victorian religious controversies and modern Christian dilemmas. Some of them are evident in a changing and even pluralist Italian society, in which the Waldensians, now united with the Methodists, are the most disciplined and historically significant group (though not at all now the largest) among Italy's 600,000 Protestants.

The most intense age of Anglo-Saxon affection for Italy began with the resumption of travel after the Napoleonic wars and is evident in the lives and works of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But the interest deepened and widened with the coming of steamships, Murray's Traveller's Handbooks, railways, reform, and the Risorgimento. The Italian connection confirmed the conversion to Liberalism of Gladstone, who had enough Italian to translate an anti-papal history of Rome. It inspired Browning's home thoughts and Trollope's ghastly Stanhope family, whom he tactfully associated with Lake Como as well as Barchester, probably to avoid embarrassing his mother and brother in the expatriate society of Florence.

It is not surprising that this Italian connection had important but contrasting religious dimensions in the aftermath both of the Evangelical revival and the Oxford Movement. Lord Shaftesbury, tireless in so many causes, found time to harry the Foreign Secretary over persecuted Bible-readers in Tuscany. Proof-changes in the drafting of a petition show uncertainty whether to describe them as Protestants. Henry Manning, who progressed from convert to ultramontane cardinal, encouraged Pius IX to consolidate authority and claim infallibility when pronouncing ex cathedra.

But the poet Christina Rossetti, though drawn to the Oxford Movement, opted for celibacy rather than a Roman Catholic she might have married. One Victorian biographer put it: 'As an ardent Italian patriot she could not become a Roman Catholic'. She was the daughter of a Protestant Italian liberal exile who loathed the Papacy as much as he loved Dante and mixed both enthusiasms in his view of Italian history.

Politics and religion were inseparable in nineteenth-century Italy, and those British who cared most about their favourite foreign country tended to have strong views on both. It has been suggested, for example, that the news of the death of Count Cavour, the architect of Italian unity, brought on the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Pius IX himself emphasised that inseparability both when he raised the hopes of Italian liberals and nationalists and when he took fright in face of revolution, and of the liberalism which had triumphed in Piedmont when Italy was still, in Metternich's phrase, a mere 'geographical expression'.

Not only the Protestant British enthusiasts for Italy but their Waldensian friends and allies were drawn into the maelstrom. The Piedmontese reforms of 1848 had given Protestants (and Jews) civil liberties and religious toleration and the fervent Beckwith moved from educational consultancy to funding and supervising the building of a prominent Protestant church in Turin. But a dozen years later Italy was united (with some delay for Venice and Rome) and open to Protestant activities, rather in the way ex-Soviet Russia was open to outside influences in the 1990s. The Waldensians, who had been celebrated as 'a peculiar people' and sought out in their mountain valleys, suddenly found themselves encouraged by British friends to prepare to move into a Promised Land too vast for their human resources and meagre funds. It was also, in everything but the new Italian laws, almost a foreign country to them.

They seemed French-speaking foreigners even to the few thousand Italians (mainly in Tuscany) who had taken seriously but independently to Protestant ideas and the larger number who were ready to turn their back on the Papacy but sought a more traditional religion. (Even the fiercely anti-clerical Garibaldi is said to have baptised children.)

Beckwith was one of the foremost advocates of the 'move into Italy' and towards a new Waldensian emphasis on Italian language. But even before his death the most fervent external support for it was not English but Scottish. One reason was a practical one. The Scots involvement in Mediterranean shipping and commerce encouraged the creation of Presbyterian chaplaincies, in Leghorn at first and then in Florence, Genoa and Naples. The most important of them, the Leghorn one, almost became a Presbyterian Embassy to Italy under R. W. Stewart, an aristocratic Evangelical whose wife was a daughter of the great Scots lawyer, Lord Cockburn. He had already won a footnote of Scottish Church history by a hectic scamper from Constantinople to be in time for the Disruption of 1843, reaching Edinburgh at 4 a.m. on the morning of the Free Kirk's walk-out and the great split in Scottish Presbyterianism.

But there had also been a doctrinal hitch in the consolidation of the Anglican-Waldensian partnership. One reason for the enthusiasm of the original Waldensian publicist in England, W. S. Gilly, was his belief that in the Alps there had survived an apostolic fragment of a pure early Church with encouraging similarities to the Church of England. His hope was that Waldensians might turn their long-serving Moderator into a bishop and their forms of service into a Book of Common Prayer. But the Waldensians, encouraged by the Scots, held to the forms shaped by their own traditions and the Swiss Reformation, though they were almost equally resistant to Scots pressures to turn them into sabbatarians. They sometimes held dances on Sunday evenings and had been known to cut morning services short to let young men away for shooting competitions.

One glorious passage in a private letter from Thomas Guthrie, the Scots social reformer who created 'ragged schools' in Edinburgh and raised funds for Waldensian missions, complained that this laxness was the fault of Calvin, who was unsound on the full rigour of the Sabbath Commandment. But Guthrie was not the most sociably minded of clergymen. When he stayed in Florence in 1869 his daughter only just managed to drag him to an American Presbyterian reception at which the star attraction was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The real Waldensian problem, however, was not retaining diplomatic relations with Anglican Evangelicals and Presbyterians but finding their role in the new Italy, especially as British supporters were themselves divided. Gilly, Beckwith, Stewart, and Guthrie, despite their differences, were agreed that the Waldensians, shedding much of their ethnic and Alpine character, should be Italy's alternative Church. The Waldensian leaders were enthusiastic and moved their divinity faculty from Alpine Torre Pellice to one of the Florentine Salviati palaces, not only because it was in united Italy's first capital but to acquire the purest Italian. Stewart's Scottish and Irish Presbyterian backers found the money.

However, there were other brands marketed in the new Italian free market for religion. Some Tuscans, including the gifted and scholarly Count Guicciardini, were influenced by Plymouth Brethren and set up a church (which survives) behind the great palace on the Piazza della Signoria. One tiny group caused scandal when an expatriate Miss Johnston presided at the Lord's Supper. More numerous Italians, among them eloquently argumentative ex-monks and priests, even a former chaplain to Garibaldi, Alessandro Gavazzi from Bologna, had visions of an Evangelical Church of Italy on a more colourful and flamboyant pattern than the Waldensian one.

After 1870, when Pius IX secured the doctrine of infallibility from the First Vatican Council, there were more seceders who tried to create an Italian parallel to the Germanic 'Old Catholics', though their two significant leaders later parted, one returning to Rome and the other, the ecumenical pioneer Ugo Janni, becoming Waldensian.

But the non-Waldensian Italians who disputed the claims of the Papacy were equally disputatious with each other. They even managed to divide their Scottish allies. Stewart brought a young minister, John McDougall, to Florence. He was meant to combine an Italian mission with his ministry in the expatriate Scots Free Church by the Arno, where the Brownings had been supporters. Other occasional worshippers ranged from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Lord Tennyson's brother Frederick, also a poet. McDougall was also to manage the Waldensians' publishing house, which still flourishes today as the Turin-based Claudiana Press. But McDougall became the main British fund-raiser and enthusiast for the rival 'Free Italian Church' and ultimately the victim of the internal wrangles (in which another of the Rossetti family took a prominent part) which by the 1890s had torn it apart and virtually destroyed it.

These quarrels are now of antiquarian interest and only by-ways of history link them to modern Italian life. Waldensians retain long memories, but their twentieth-century experience was dominated by resistance to Fascism, the ordeals of the valleys during the partisan war of 1943-45, and their efforts (uncompleted until the 1980s) to make a reality of the Italian constitution's promises of full religious freedom and equality. They have long since moved their seminary to Rome and the Florentine palazzo on the Via de' Serragli is now a Protestant social work centre. What was the Scots kirk by the Arno is in Swiss ownership but rented out for commercial use. The modern Waldensians in Florence use what was once the main Anglican church near the Piazza San Marco. The main visible trace of the 'Free Italian Church' is a church, close to Santa Croce, which eventually became Methodist.

But there are things of more than antiquarian interest in parallels between the turbulence of the Risorgimento and the uncertainties of modern Italy, and some ironies as well as lessons in the transformation of the Waldensians from the Church of an Alpine enclave into a minority scattered across Italy with a diaspora in Argentina and Uruguay. The valleys have not lost their character but agricultural and industrial changes have depopulated some areas and opened others to an influx of lowlanders seeking holiday and retirement homes. Television has probably been more successful than Fascism in promoting Italian at the expense of the local dialect.

More significantly, the Waldensians face the problem of whether they can establish their relevance at a time when many of the old certainties of Italian society have been weakened, and with them the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, both as source of spiritual certainty and expression of Italian identity. But once again there are uncertainties about how far a tradition for so long on the periphery of Italian life, culturally as well as geographically, can become a significant force in Italy. It remains at odds both with traditions of Italian popular piety and the secular dogmatism of much of the Italian intelligentsia. Its style of 'plain living and high thinking' is as remote from many modern Italian life-styles as from monasticism.

As in the nineteenth century it may seem by-passed by more spectacular forms of Christian revolt against the forms and authority of the Roman Church. There is an irony in the way Waidensianism has adopted much of what it and its British allies found suspect in the 'Free Italian Church' and other evangelical groups of the Risorgimento. Its theology reflects liberal influences as well as Barthian ones. It has tried to reconcile the traditions of infant baptism with the enthusiasm of some pastors for 'believers' baptism'. It has been among the most enthusiastic promoters of women's ordination. Its centre of political gravity has moved from conservative liberalism to social democracy and environmentalism.

Yet it remains separated from the nearest thing Italy has to a populist Protestant movement: Pentecostalism. Waldensianism is still, to quote a clumsy but revealing figure of speech 'a literary Church rather than an oral Church'. To-day, as in the nineteenth century, its insistence on a highly educated and theologically trained (though poorly paid) ministry and on synodical government keeps it apart from movements which rely on personal inspiration and incline to local autonomy, as Italian Pentecostalism does.

There are two further ironies in this situation. One is that a powerful evangelical current can be traced indirectly to Luigi Franceson, a Waldensian from Udine who became influential in Brazil and helped inspire South American Pentecostalism, which has had more influence on Italy than the North American variety. Another is that at a time when great Waldensian efforts have gone into becoming a serving 'Church for the poor' in the South (as well as among immigrants to Italy and urban drop-outs) it is the Pentecostalists who have more obviously become a Church of the poor.

Perhaps there is a third and more political irony for the Waldensians. Recently many Northern Italians have grumbled that the Mezzogiorno is an intolerable burden and their discontents have become a force in politics. But this small Church, with its frontier traditions, Alpine heartland, ethnic background, and foreign connections, has made itself a minor symbol of Italian unity, even though its culture, faith, and tradition inevitably separate it from the great majority of Italians, whether piously or nominally Catholic or fiercely anti-clerical.

Its future is uncertain. It is under pressure as always from the cultural power of Italian Catholicism and secularism and outflanked by the raw enthusiasm of the Pentecostals and the scattered but numerous evangelical cells which want to retreat from the world. But that uncertainty has always been its lot, for more than three centuries before the Reformation and in all but a few happy interludes since.

The Valdesi retain an importance out of all proportion to their numbers, not least in a more ecumenical age when they have good relations with many Roman Catholic dioceses and even hear an occasional soundbite from their Moderator picked up by Vatican Radio. They yielded some of the best Protestant analysis of the Second Vatican Council and are ideally placed to assess Roman Catholic theory and practice, and sometimes the differences between them, including those which reflect distinctively Italian influences.

And in an age when all Churches are in some sense 'minority Churches' the Waldensians' experience of testimony and survival in a hostile environment may have lessons for other parts of the universal Church, including those which once persecuted them as well as those which supported them.

R. D. Kernohan was for eighteen years editor of the Church of Scotland's journal Life and Work.