“A Door Which No Man Can Shut”

On June 25, 1850, the Apostle Lorenzo Snow and other missionaries arrived in Genoa, Italy, to open a new mission of the Church. Most went north to teach in the Piedmont region while Joseph Toronto, an Italian who had joined the Church in Boston in 1843, went to Sicily to teach his family and friends.

In Piedmont, Snow and his companions were not permitted to publicly preach doctrines contrary to Catholicism. Instead, they were invited to attend small, private gatherings among the Waldensians, a group that had separated from the Catholic Church several centuries before the Protestant Reformation. After one long meeting, Jean Antoine Bose was convinced the missionaries taught truth. Bose soon became the first person baptized in Italy. “Sweet to us all were the soft sounds of the Italian, as I administered,” Snow recalled, “and opened a door which no man can shut.”

Other Waldensians also joined the Church. The Malan family was baptized: John Daniel Malan became the first local member ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood, and the Malan home soon became the unofficial headquarters of the Church in Italy. Another family of early converts, the Cardons, believed the missionaries fulfilled a prophetic dream. Ten years earlier, their young daughter, Marie, dreamed that three preachers came to her family teaching new doctrines and leaving books with them. They recognized the missionaries as the preachers from Marie’s dream.

Now a young woman, Marie Cardon began traveling with the missionaries and served as a translator. One Sunday, she faced a mob that had gathered to oppose the missionaries. Marie approached them, Bible raised, and commanded them to leave. “God was with me,” she later wrote. “That strong ferocious body of men stood helpless before a weak, trembling yet fearless girl.”

The Malan and Cardon families, along with many other early Italian converts, immigrated to Utah. The mission, unable to expand into other areas, closed in 1867.