false position. As Archbishop he was considered a bad latinizer by the Orthodox. At the end of his life he seems to have come back to the Church. At any rate, he was accused of betraying the Orthodox Church and was deposed in 1678. He died at Constantinople in 1682. From the great dislike to him shown by the Orthodox we may hope that he died a Catholic, repenting of his schism.[1] Rodotà calls both Ligarides and Tzigalas "bitter fruits of our college," but thinks that both, in spite of their defection, kept some good and some Catholic principles to the end.[2]
The Greek College counted among its difficulties the efforts of the Jesuit rectors to persuade students to enter their Society. This has always been the difficulty of the Roman Colleges ruled by Fathers of the Society. It is a real grievance, since the money spent on the education of these boys was certainly not intended to provide a nursery for future Jesuits. So at the Greek College, as at all those in Rome, severe oaths were required of the students, that they would enter no religious order, except that of the Basilians.[3] In spite of these oaths the Jesuits continually managed to get dispensations for the more promising students; so that a large number of the students enter the Society. In view of the constant complaints of Propaganda on this head, one rather wonders why they were not more firm in refusing to grant the dispensations.
It is strange that at the beginning the students of the Greek College had to conform to the Roman rite. It would seem that everyone would have realized from the beginning the importance of training these boys in their own rite. However, it was not so; indeed, till almost the other day, their position was not so much that of Byzantines with Roman infiltrations, as rather that of Romans with occasional observance of the Byzantine rite. The rectors were always Latins (this was an obvious abuse; it would have been easy to find priests of sound Catholic principles and of the Byzantine rite from the South of Italy); they kept their own rite, said Mass and all their offices in Latin; the students had to hear this Mass and to make their Communion in the form of azyme bread only. At first the Roman rite alone was observed in the college chapel; though
- ↑ Rodotà, op. cit., iii, 209-210; De Meester, 67; J. Hackett, "A History of the Orth. Church of Cyprus" (Methuen, 1901), pp. 214-215; quotation from his contemporary, Paul Ricaut, about him, p. 681.
- ↑ Op. cit., iii, 210.
- ↑ So Urban VIII (1623-1644), Alexander VII (1655-1667), etc. Rodotà, iii, 156; De Meester, 31.
