. . . we seek to present individuals, the Church and society in general with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the challenge and inspiration it brings . . . when the Gospel is presented faithfully it not only brings release and freedom, but is also culturally subversive and politically incorrect

Signs in the Land to the Land

A Community Story

In his book 'Outliers,' Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a remarkable little Italian-American community living in Pennsylvania that sprang up around the beginning of the twentieth century.  We re-tell the story here because it challenges some of the fundamental presuppositions we adhere to today, particularly in the West.

The community in question sprung up as first a small group of Italian immigrants and then large waves made their way to America enticed by the promise of the land of opportunity across the ocean.  These particular immigrants left their small village of Roseto Valfortore, which lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, and settled in Pennsylvania near the town of Bangor.

Soon they established a town they called Roseto that they modelled on the town they had left behind in Italy.  The neighbouring towns were largely English, Welsh and German, which meant that Roseto stayed for Rosetans.  Roseto was, Gladwell comments, 'its own tiny, self sufficient world.'

Roseto and its community came to the attention of a doctor called Stewart Wolf because he had heard that hardly anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty five was ever diagnosed with heart disease.  This came as a shock to Wolf because heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States.  They were in fact the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty five.

After some initial research what Wolf found was astonishing.  In Roseto virtually no one under the age of fifty five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease.  For men over sixty five the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole.  The death rate from all causes in Roseto was, in fact, roughly 30-35 percent lower than expected.

With the help of sociologist John Bruhn further tests were carried out and what they discovered continued to amaze them.  Bruhn himself said that 'There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare . . . These people were dying of old age. That’s it.'

In an effort to understand this remarkable situation Wolf and Bruhn looked at all the factors typically associated with good health.  They investigated their diet, exercise regimes, genetic history and geography. None of these, however, could adequately explain the unusual health of the citizens of Roseto when compared to national averages and neighbouring towns.

What Wolf and Bruhn began to realise was that the explanation must have something to do with Roseto itself.  This is what Gladwell says:

They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards.  They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure.  They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded.  They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church.  They counted twenty-two separate civic organisations in a town of just under two thousand people.  They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures (Outliers, page 9).

Wolfe and Bruhn realised that they needed to begin to think about health in terms of community.  For so long they had believed that health was solely to do with an individual’s genetic history and the decisions they made about where to live, what to eat and how often to exercise.  Their Roseto experience, however, taught them that, in Gladwell’s words:

They had to look beyond the individual.  They had to understand the culture he or she was part of . . . they had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

What makes this story so remarkable and relevant is that today we live in a world that is fiercely individualistic.  Even the family - the most fundamental and basic of social institutions - is collapsing.  Time and again we are told that to be truly happy we must fulfil our individual potential, that we must become self actualised.  Young people, for example, are consistently told that moving out of home and making one’s own way is a sign of true maturity, both mental and emotional.  How different this is to the findings of Wolf and Bruhn in the small Italian-American community of Roseto . . . 

An open letter to our friends

To explain our change of name . . .