here since the days of Leo the Isaurian, or even from the earliest period of Christianity in Italy.
After the Albanians had come the distinction between them and the older Byzantine element was still clear. Thus the Archdeacon of Spoleto writes to Cardinal Santoro in 1577: "You know that there are, in the diocese of Otranto, several lands and villages, which from time immemorial have always been Greek. These are called Italo-Greeks; they are natives of the land, going back to Minos and Diomede. They are not a collection of vagabonds, Albanians, Slavs, or schismatics. They are faithful, since the earliest times, to their special religion, which is considerably different from that of the East."[1] Mgr. Giuseppe Schirò, former Archbishop of Durazzo, in his notice about the Italo-Greeks sent to Rome in 1742,[2] makes the same distinction.
It is not surprising that the Byzantine rite in Italy should gradually die out. For one thing there were no bishops of this rite. Those who followed it were subject to Latin Ordinaries. It was not till the need became pressing, through the coming of the Albanians, that the Holy See established ordaining bishops for the Italo-Greeks. Even then, as we shall see, these had no jurisdiction (p. 123). Before that, sometimes a wandering Greek bishop from the Levant was invited to ordain, sometimes such travelling prelates usurped jurisdiction over those of their rite in Italy; generally, in spite of the canons, the Italo-Greek clergy were ordained according to the Latin rite by the Ordinaries. Naturally these Ordinaries preferred their own rite, and tried to put down what seemed so startling an exception to the uniformity of their dioceses.
Then the neighbours of the Italo-Greeks neither understood nor liked their ways. Nearly all Christians of the Byzantine rite were schismatics and bitter opponents of the Papacy. It is not surprising that there should be suspicion of those in Italy who
- ↑ Quoted by Jules Gay in the Revue d'hist. et de lit. relig., ii (1897), p. 491.
- ↑ In the archives of the Greek college at Rome, printed by Cyril Karalevsky (Charon), "Documenti inediti per servire alla storia delle chiese italo-greche" (Rome, Bretschneider, 1911), fasc. i, pp. 5-15, and in the review Roma e l'Oriente (Grottaferrata), vii (1914), pp. 282-285; 340-349. This notice, sent in answer to questions by an unknown person (probably a Cardinal of Propaganda) shortly before the publication of Benedict XIV's Constitution Etsi pastoralis (May 26, 1742), gives a valuable account of the state of the Italo-Greeks in the first half of the eighteenth century. There are MS. copies of it at Grottaferrata and in the archive of the church at Piana dei Greci (see p. 165). For Schirò see p. 117, n. 3.
