Father Michael Davitti doesn’t think he ended up in Chicago by chance. He believes that providence, greeted with an open mind, has guided him on a journey from Italy, where he was born in 1943, to Africa to the Saint Therese Chinese Catholic Mission, a small church near the heart of Chinatown where for the last three years he’s been the pastor.
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Over the next decade Davitti did things he thought would make his work as a missionary more effective. He studied theology with the Jesuits in Rome, and he studied Islam, since where he was going, Sierra Leone, was predominantly Muslim. Then he went to London to get a degree in cultural anthropology. He was convinced that if the church was to be successful in Africa it had to try to understand the people it was preaching to. And he believed that its insistence on doing things such as building Gothic cathedrals in the jungle was thwarting its efforts to take root there.
Davitti arrived in Sierra Leone in 1973, three years after being ordained as a priest. He was given the parish of the cathedral of Makeni, a small town in the middle of the country, and most of his job involved training young clergy. He got it because no one else wanted it. “Sierra Leone is called the white man’s grave,” he says. Food shortages and malaria and cholera made for a high mortality rate among the missionaries. “The missionaries that went there, some lasted two or three months.”
In 1989 he returned to Sierra Leone. This time he went to Freetown, where he worked as the liaison between the Vatican and the bishops of West Africa. His job was to help the Vatican understand what was really going on in Africa and to make sure that money donated by the West made it into the coffers of the churches in Africa.
He asked to be transferred. Two positions in the Chicago area were open–one at a missionary school in Mundelein, the other in Chinatown. He chose Chinatown, he says, because he’d rather work with people than books.
