Bartolomeo the Younger, Saint

BARTOLOMEO THE YOUNGER, Saint. - He flourished between the 10th and 11th centuries and was the most illustrious disciple of St. Nilus, with whom he shared Calabria as his homeland. His feast is recorded in the Roman Martyrology on November 11.

Having become a monk while still a youth at Serperi near Gaeta, he followed his revered master into the Tusculum region, where the cenobium of Grottaferrata (v.) was to arise. After Paul and Cyril, the immediate successors of St. Nilus, he was designated hegumen for his rare gifts of mind and his virtues, in which he emulated the founder.

With remains of ancient Roman villas he had built the church that he dedicated to the Madonna and that in 1024 was consecrated by Pope John XIX himself. The saint's relations with the powerful family of the counts of Tusculum were such that the nephew and successor of John, Benedict IX, addressed a letter to him as Bartholomaeo spirituali ac venerando patri. It has therefore been believed that the young and inexperienced Pope yielded to the entreaties of St. Bartholomew in abdicating the pontifical throne and betaking himself to do penance at Grottaferrata, where he was buried. In April 1044 Bartholomew took part in the Lateran Council and there subscribed second among the abbots; some years earlier he had hastened to Gaeta as peacemaker between Duke Adenolf and the prince of Salerno. He died in the early years of the second half of the 11th century, leaving numerous compositions of sacred hymnography, preserved through the precious Greek manuscripts of the library of Grottaferrata. But his two principal works would be the account of the life of St. Nilus and the drafting of a Typikon, or liturgical ordinary, which are attributed to him by tradition, supported by critical reasons not to be despised.