DaShoW invites you to the Seton Hall University launch of The Apostle of Tennessee: The Indefatigable Life and Ministry of Father Aloysius Orengo by Joe Pagetta, published by Vanderbilt University Press. The author will be in conversation with Dr. Matteo Brera, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the University of Padua and Seton Hall University.
The event takes place on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. in the Chancellor’s Suite of the Bishop Dougherty University Center, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, as part of the Robert Tarte Lecture Series. The Alberto Italian Studies Institute hosts the event, sponsored by DaShoW, the University of Padua, Seton Hall University, and the European Commission, with support from Catholic Studies at Seton Hall.
Father Aloysius “Luigi” Orengo was an Italian-born priest who arrived in Nashville in 1848 and spent a working lifetime on the roads of Tennessee — sleeping in the woods with his saddle for a pillow, living on cheese and crackers, and building churches in Franklin, Columbia, Pulaski, East Nashville, Tracy City, Gallatin, Humboldt, Brownsville, Grand Junction, Covington, Jackson and McEwen. Despite the scale of that work, his story had never been told at length until Joe Pagetta’s book.
For DaShoW, Orengo’s life sits at the heart of the project’s concerns. Long before the mass migration of the 1880s and after, Italian clergy were among the first Italians to move through the U.S. South, and the parishes and institutions they founded became some of the earliest spaces in which Italian-speaking newcomers were counted, addressed, and placed within a Southern social order that was hardening around race. Catholic print culture and transnational Catholic networks — a core strand of Dr. Brera’s research — ran along the exact routes Orengo traveled. The conversation will explore what a single itinerant priest’s ministry can reveal about faith, mobility, and belonging in the nineteenth-century South, and how it prepares the ground for the Italian communities and the Italian-language press that DaShoW studies in the decades that follow.
Joe Pagetta is Director of Communications at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, TN, and a writer whose essays on arts, culture, and faith have appeared in America Magazine and elsewhere.
The event is free and open to the public. Register here to attend: https://events.shu.edu/event/49299-robert-tarte-lecture-series-the-apostle-of-tennessee
