mistake is that they confuse the Metropolitan province with the Patriarchate. The texts they quote defining the Pope's jurisdiction to the Sees close to Rome and to the South of Italy mean his authority, not as Patriarch, still less his universal authority as Pope. They describe his Metropolitan province.
The proof of this, that Southern Italy and Sicily had the Pope himself for Metropolitan, is first the fact that there was no Archbishop there till the Byzantine usurpation of the eighth century. This is curious and significant.
The earliest Archbishopric in these parts is Naples in the eighth century, made so by the government and Patriarch at Constantinople; and this is just one of the examples of the change made by their usurpation at that time.[1] Then the Emperor made Sicily a province under an Archbishop of Syracuse, again a new dignity, and set up Rhegium and Sancta Severina (ἡ ἁγία Σεβερίνη) as Metropolitan Sees in the same way. Before that there was no Archbishop in Southern Italy and Sicily, or rather there was one only, the Pope himself.
Another proof of the Metropolitical authority of the Popes in these parts is that all the bishops in them had to come to Rome to be ordained. Thus Pope Celestine I (422-432), writing to complain of the candidates for episcopal ordination sent to him from Apulia and Calabria, shows clearly that he himself ordains all these bishops; "they think," he says, "that we can consecrate such people"; and again, "they think very ill of us since they believe that we can do this."[2] Leo I says the same (p. 71). Gregory I (590-604) writes to Peter, Bishop of Hydruntum (Otranto), giving him delegate jurisdiction to visit neighbouring, sees, and he insists that the bishops "must come to us to be consecrated."[3] Nearly three centuries later, in 860, when the Holy See was first beginning to admit the title of archbishop in what had been its own
- ↑ P. 85.
- ↑ Cœl. I, Ep. 5, ad Eppos Ap. et Cal. (P.L., l, 436).
- ↑ Greg. I, Ep. vi, 21, ad Petrum eppum (P.L., lxxvi, 812).
sisting of the Suburbicarian Churches.'" What Rufinus really says is, "Hic suburbicariarum ecclesiarum sollicitudinem gerit" (loc. cit.). There is no question of describing the limits of jurisdiction; he says merely that the Pope has care of those Churches, and he means the special "sollicitudo" of a Metropolitan. As for the Patriarchal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, at about the same time as Rufinus wrote this paraphrase of the sixth canon of Nicæa, St Jerome (Ep. 17 ad Marcum; P.L., xxii, 360) describes it simply as "the West." That has been the conviction of antiquity ever since there was a clear idea of Patriarchates. Cf. Hefele-Leclercq, "Hist. des Conciles" (Paris, 1907), vol. I, pp. 562-566.
