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language which the children brought home from school; some children even gained
status with their parents by acting as intermediaries in the general community. And
while children like Caterina Rodoni (see next chapter) might have arrived at school
unable to speak a word of English ~ apart from the few anglicised terms which had
entered her vocabulary ~ it was not long before most immigrant offspring were using it
as their principal language.
Though most ItaUan speakers attended govemment rather than Catholic
schools during their youth, the traditions and rituals associated with the Church
dominated many aspects of their rise to maturity. Family life in northem Italy and
Ticino had centred around the Church, its village bells a reminder of people's spiritual
duties and its teachings a guide to moral and social behaviour. The Italian speakers
tmsted in the power of the saints and prayed to them for guidance and protection.
They placed their statues and pictures in their homes and observed their feast-days
with attendance at Mass and processions.'* Though the early years on the goldfields
had seen many Italian speakers neglect their religious duties (see Scouting), the Church
had resumed its important position in the lives oi most once families had begun to
re-group. It was not, however, the same Church which they had left behind in Europe
but one dominated by an authoritarian Irish clergy. The Church in Ireland had
undergone considerable change after the famine: many large churches, convents and
asylums had been erected and new religious devotions, sodalities and church guilds
initiated. The numbers at mass and the sacraments had rocketed, many priests
becoming
determined to weld their parishioners into a solid, loyal phalanx, to
stamp out any reminders of pre-famine pagan rites, and to cmsh the last
vestiges of the relaxed religiosity of an older Ireland.'^
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