This archival inventory of a collection, deposited with Professor Magnus Lundberg at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, consists of records and objects from the New Jerusalem Church of the Celestial Messenger, Chicago.

It was a religious group that can be said to have existed from the early 1910s to the early 1990s. However, it is debatable when it became a formalized religious group and when, if at all, the church formally ended its activities, as the administrative and jurisdictional particulars are complex. From the late 1910s through the early 1960s, Sicilian-born Giuseppe Maria Abbate (1886–1963), the founder and church leader, claimed to be a celestial messenger, Messagero Celeste, and later God/Christ reincarnate, the Celestial Father, Padre Celeste.

Nevertheless, the records found in this collection do not have the character of a ‘complete archive’ that grew organically from the activities of the New Jerusalem Church of the Celestial Messenger/Sacred Heart of Jesus Church. Instead, it includes well-selected parts from a larger archive destroyed in the early 1990s. These parts were rescued shortly before the general destruction.