status of refugees and, if accepted, subsequent integration. The Humanitarian
Corridors are a safe way to leave places of danger or conflict without risking
lives in perilous waters and at the same time enriching the criminal gangs of
human traffickers.
Simone and Nigel
also visited Pachino,
where there has been
a Waldensian Church
since 1902 which has
always combined min-
istry, evangelism and
social care. Here the
Church provides after-
school care for chil-
dren—school in many
parts of Italy ends at
1 pm!—but also social
groups for the elderly
and Bible studies for all
age groups. Another place visited was Vittoria, where the Church is no longer
active but where there is an Old People’s Home, still excellent but which has
now fewer and fewer ‘customers’. It has therefore become a place where young
refugees and migrants are hosted alongside the elderly Italians and the results
are apparently very encouraging. Inventiveness, open-mindedness and Faith
can really perform miracles!
Erica Scroppo Newbury
Lecture to the Cromwell Association, London, October 2017
Cromwell’s intervention in 1655 to halt the confessional cleansing of Milton’s
‘slaughtered saints’ in Piedmont
I myself first came across the Waldensians at 14 years old as part of the then
O-level European History syllabus at about the same time as I came across
Oliver Cromwell in the English History ditto and also learnt Milton’s outraged
agit prop lines. This was fortunate because, over 15 years later in Venice, I met
a member of this audience and her sister and her dog and mentioned I could
find Venetian baroque oppressive—perhaps because I was a Protestant. ‘We
are Protestants too.’ Waldensian? ‘Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints …’
Milton’s words won the heart of a determinedly anti-matrimony journalist
and teacher!
Cromwell himself would have learnt about the heroic proto-Protestant
Waldensians living their faith ‘underground’ from Calabria to the Baltic at
Huntingdon Free Grammar School, where the Master Rev. Thomas Beard
taught through his textbook Theatre of God’s Judgements that all Nature mir-
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