Pietro Bandini

Pietro Bandini (March 31, 1852 – January 2, 1917) was an Italian Catholic priest and missionary to the United States who was prominent in the Italian American community. He began his career as a Jesuit missionary in the Western United States, where he worked with Native American tribes, and went on to establish the Saint Raphael Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants and Our Lady of Pompeii Church in New York City. He led a group of Italians to Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas in the hopes of establishing an immigrant colony and later founded the city of Tontitown with them. For his work on immigration, he was lauded by Pope Pius X and the Queen Mother Margherita.

Early life Pietro Bandini was born on March 31, 1852, in Forlì, a comune of the Emilia-Romagna region of the Kingdom of Italy to an upper-class family. He had two older brothers, one of whom became a Jesuit priest. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Monaco in 1869 and remained there, studying philosophy, until 1871. In September 1874, as part of his priestly formation, he began his regency at the Jesuit seminary in Aix en Provence, France, where he studied theology. On September 30, 1877, Bandini was ordained a priest in Bertinoro, Italy, and went on the found a school there.

Missionary work In 1882, Bandini was sent to the Montana Territory of the United States to work in the Jesuits' Rocky Mountain mission. He was stationed as a missionary in the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Church in Helena, Montana, where he learned English and various Native American languages. The following year, he was sent to St. Ignatius Mission in St. Ignatius, Montana; there, he built a church and school and preached the faith in Crow and Kootenai villages. Eventually, he established a mission to the Cheyenne Indians. to prepare for their American citizenship examinations by holding instructional classes. In addition to aiding them with their worldly needs, Bandini also tended to the immigrants' spiritual needs in New York by establishing a chapel that he named after Our Lady of Pompeii. This chapel served the Italians in Greenwich Village in Manhattan and was housed in a building at 113 Waverly Place that Bandini purchased. The first winter forced the residents to live in abandoned farm buildings and survive off of meager sustenance. Bandini then established a schoolhouse and church, and divided the land into ten-acre parcels and distributed the allotments randomly. On the land, the immigrants grew their own food and cultivated grape vineyards, which became commercially prosperous; the Italian ambassador to the United States visited and spoke approvingly of the colony in 1905.