Those outside Italy see it as the home of Roman Catholicism and a birthplace of the early Christian Church. They see the multitudes gathered in St. Peter’s Square. On the surface, Italy appears to be well-grounded in Christian faith, not in need of missions work.

But statistics from Operation World paint a different picture:

● Only 2.8 percent of the nearly 60 million Italian citizens are Protestants.

● Upwards of 90 percent of Italians are Roman Catholic, but only 6 percent claim to be devout Catholics.

● An estimated 80 percent of Italians are turning to atheism, Eastern religions, Satanic cults and other religions. In fact, Islam is now the second-largest religion in Italy.

● Occultism and Satanism are rampant in Italy, and for every Catholic priest, there are three occultist sorcerers.

As many as 90 percent of foreign missionaries remain in Italy for less than four years. For these reasons and others, Italy has been labeled the “graveyard of missionaries.”

So it’s by the grace of God that Jim and Caranita Wolsieffer have survived as Christian missionaries in Italy for nearly four decades.

“So many missionaries have gone to Italy with great expectations and have left in ruin,” Jim says. “There is a very definite satanic effort to close down Italy to the evangelical church. They pray daily to Satan that missionaries will get sick, die or become discouraged and leave Italy. It is scary.”

Grace under pressure

The Indianapolis natives were on furlough in the United States this fall and stopped by the churches that support their mission, Italy for Christ, including First Christian Church of New Salem in October.

They began their missions work in 1971 and set their sights on Europe, where communism was spreading and closing doors to evangelical missionaries. Italy was a country the communists targeted, so Jim and Caranita set out on a two-year internship there.

After their first year, the Wolsieffers moved to Francavilla, Italy, where Jim preached on Sundays and Caranita worked with children. They worked hard to overcome the language barrier (they spent their first year doing little more than studying Italian), and they labored to gain the trust of the overwhelmingly Catholic citizenry, many of whom were wary of them and afraid to be seen entering an evangelical church.

Yet, the couple persevered and gained a foothold in the community. All was going well, Jim says, until his wife nearly died while giving birth to the couple’s first child, Christina. They returned to the U.S. a few months later, with Caranita vowing never to return to Italy.

But after the couple spent several years working in ministry in the States, Caranita had a change of heart, Jim says: “She said, ‘I’ve been fighting with the Lord, and he has convinced me that we need to go back to the mission field.’ Then she said Italy.” They returned in 1977.

An ever-changing ministry

When the Wolsieffers first went to Italy, Jim was a healthy young man who did the legwork necessary to build bridges of trust and evangelize. But due to health problems, time and changing demands, the Wolsieffers have been forced to adapt their missions work to suit the needs of the faithful. In the process, they’ve become pioneers in ministry.

In the early 1980s, they launched a Christian radio station in Italy. “We had some tremendous success stories and got the name of the Church of Christ out farther in the community than just the local area,” Jim says. They were on the air for about 10 years until government regulations forced the station to shut down in 1991.

Despite the setback, the Wolsieffers found a new way to evangelize, and they capitalized on the fact that more Italians had telephones in their homes. Once the station closed, the couple launched a phone prayer ministry, allowing people to call and listen to a daily meditation and leave a message after the recording if they had specific requests or needed help. Eventually, the call load grew to about 300 a day, so the Wolsieffers started manning the phones at certain hours to provide crisis intervention.

“We were still new at the job and thought that all we had to do was point people to the church and the Word of God and their problems would be solved,” Jim says. “Eventually, we got some problems that weren’t that simple.”

While the couple was on furlough one year, a woman with whom they had worked over the phone committed suicide. “That has impacted my life,” Caranita says. “That was the failure.”

“We realized that we needed to bone up on how to counsel and work with these types of problems,” Jim adds. “We had our eyes opened up to a lot of the needs that were out there.”

Caranita went back to school and earned a master’s degree in Christian counseling. In 1996, God led the couple to an old Italian farmhouse that they developed into a resource, leadership training, and counseling center. The center remains at the core of their ministry today.

They do pre-marital and marriage counseling, helping families to improve communication and resolve problems. Caranita—one of only eight accredited counselors in the Italian Christian Counselors Association—deals with more troubled clients, including suicidal people. She works to help them overcome problems with self-esteem that originated in their childhood.

“Self-image is so low in Italy,” she says. “I’ve had Italians coming to me in their adult life and they’ll sit there and cry because they remember how they were belittled when they were younger. A lot of our work is convincing them that each soul is priceless in God’s image.”

Changing times

As the Wolsieffers’ work has changed over the years, so has the political and religious climate in which they minister.

They’re more accepted now than when they first arrived. In the early days, Jim recalls, the couple would pass out Bibles in the town square, and a Catholic priest would go behind them, collect the Bibles and burn them. “They also would tell the people in those early years that they could not read the Bible because they could not understand it. It was the priest’s position to tell the people what the Bible says, and so people didn’t read it,” Jim says. “Today, that has changed, and that is a big victory.”

Gone is the communist threat, replaced by what may be a greater enemy: the occultists and apathy among many Italians concerning matters of the soul.

“It is a nation that knows that Jesus Christ is supposed to be the son of God,” Jim says. “But if that same nation does not have a personal walk with that same Jesus Christ, if they have not taken him as their personal savior, then that is a nation that needs to be evangelized.”

But with God, there is always hope. Before the Wolsieffers left for their most recent furlough to the U.S., a 70-year-old man who attended worship services embraced Jim and made a simple request. Jim recounts the experience: “He said, ‘I want you to promise that every occasion that you have when you’re in the States, when you are with my brothers and sisters in the Lord, that you will tell them how grateful I am that they had the foresight and the love to send missionaries to my country. I believe firmly that I would not be a Christian today if they had not done that.’”

Caranita adds, “Summing it up in one word, it’s grace. It’s God’s grace. Italians don’t have a grasp on what God’s grace can do for them. Our ministry is all about ministering His grace to them.”