Images of the Celestial Messenger. Part 1.

Giuseppe Maria Abbate (1886-1963) was the founder and leader of the New Jerusalem Church of the Celestial Messenger, based in Chicago. He was also God. In 2018, I co-authored a book about him. A few years later, I wrote a group profile for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, summarizing Abbate’s and his Church’s history and beliefs. At the time, we thought the Church’s archives had been destroyed in the early 1990s and had to rely mainly on secondary sources, including press material.

However, in 2021, something remarkable happened. I was contacted by a Chicago antique dealer who had bought a bulk of strange papers and objects as part of an estate. It proved to be a central part of Abbate’s archive! Some 100 kilos of material. The collection had been hidden away in a garage for about three decades. With the help of the Department of Theology at Uppsala University, I acquired the collection.

The discovery of the archive enables the study of the history of the Celestial Messenger and the detailed analysis of his theology and the religious practices of his Church. This is an ongoing project, and the results will be published in specialized works. However, here and in a series of posts that follow, I will briefly introduce the biography and ministry of the Celestial Messenger through a selection of the many images and photos that the Church distributed to members and potential followers.

In this first post, we follow Abbate from his birth in 1886 to the formal organization of his Church in the late 1910s. With time, Abbate’s official biography and self-understanding developed. Through much of the 1910s, he understood himself as a special envoy from heaven or a heavenly being with supernatural powers. However, in the 1920s, he became convinced of his pre-existence: he had lived on Mars before coming to earth. It also became increasingly clear that he believed he was the reincarnated Christ; that he was God. In this text, however, I will not include the elaborated biography presented in later church publications; instead, I will use the version he disseminated in the late 1910s.

The future Celestial Messenger was born in Isnello, Sicily, a small town about 80 kilometres east of Palermo. His father, Carmelo Abbate (1844-1918), was a police officer. After being widowed, he married his more than twenty years-younger niece, Marianna Abbate (1866-1902). Though the testimonies are conflicting, it is clear that Giuseppe Maria Abbate got more than the most basic education. He seems to have attended a seminary for some time.

Though Abbate felt a calling for the priesthood, in 1901, at the age of 15, he left Sicily for the United States. After a brief stay in New York, he moved to Chicago, where he would remain until he died in 1963. Already back in Italy, Abbate had been trained as a barber and continued this trade in the new country, though he also studied to become a bookkeeper.

According to later testimonies, in 1906, Christ appeared to Abbate when he was alone in the barbershop. On this occasion, Christ ordained him a priest and entrusted him with the mission of converting humanity. During the first half of the 1910s, Abbate claimed to have received a series of revelations about God and his own role in the apocalyptic era. He believed he had been granted the grace to understand the hidden meanings in biblical texts correctly, through numerological analysis. He preached and healed, but also said Mass. However, Abbate continued to work as a barber until 1915, when he could devote himself to a full-time ministry. With time, news about his healings attracted hundreds of followers. He preached in rented halls, but planned to acquire a church building, which he did in 1917.

At that time, Abbate formally founded La Chiesa Cattolica Nuova Gerusalemme del Messagiero Celeste (The New Jerusalem Catholic Church of the Celestial Messenger). The Church acquired a house at 2021 DeKalb Street, which housed the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, and in 1919, the church organization was officially recognized by the state of Illinois.