Yet this arrangement did eventually lead to difficulties, caused, as usual, by the arrogant intolerance of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. First these, and their masters the Emperors, constantly demanded that the South of Italy should belong to the Byzantine Patriarchate, on the strength of the fact that so many people there used the Byzantine rite. So we have the beginning of a new principle. It is no longer that normally rite follows Patriarchate, with exceptions for foreigners, but that in every case Patriarchate is to follow rite. Whoever uses a certain rite is to obey the Patriarch of the city where that rite has its original home. This is just a reversal of the old relation of cause and effect. Instead of the lesser, the mere outward symbol, following the thing of prime importance, the primary thing was proposed as a consequence of its natural effect.
But this Byzantine idea was not applied to the East. According to their new principle, the Patriarchs of Constantinople should have ceased to claim any jurisdiction over the Latins in their own Patriarchate. They found, however, a simpler way out of the difficulty.
Michael Cerularius in 1053 opened his campaign against the West by suddenly shutting up all the Latin chapels at Constantinople, and telling the Latins in his power to cease being Azymites and adopt the Byzantine rite. He even had the insolence to do so in the case of the Papal Apocrisarius. Again the contrast between this insolent person and the tolerant Popes is significant. At that time the Popes had Byzantine churches throughout Italy. They claimed the people who used these churches as members of their Patriarchate, since they lived in the heart of it. There was a Byzantine monastery, Grottaferrata, at the very gates of Rome. Yet never once in all that bitter controversy did they think of retorting on Constantinople by shutting up these churches; never once did they suggest to their Byzantine subjects that these should give up being Fermentites and turn Latin.[1]
However, eventually the situation has produced very much the effect desired then by the Greeks. No longer can we say that rite follows Patriarchate so much as that, inversely, Patriarchate follows rite. The cause of this is, first, the
- ↑ See, e.g., Leo IX's letter to Cerularius, § 29 (Will, "Acta et Scripta de Controversiis eccl. græcæ et latinæ," Leipzig, 1861), p. 81.
naturally do so. The Italo-Greeks, subject not only to Roman Patriarchal authority, but even to the jurisdiction of Latin Ordinaries, yet keeping (by authority of these Ordinaries) their own Byzantine rules, are an example of this. See p. 76, seq.
