BARTOLOMEO il GIOVANE, saint. — Flourished between the 10th and 11th centuries and was the most illustrious disciple of s. Nilo, with whom he shared Calabria as his homeland. His feast is recorded in the Roman Martyrology on 11 November.
Having become a monk while still very young at Serperi near Gaeta, he followed his venerated master to the Tusculanum, Grottaferrata (v.) was to arise. After Paolo and Cirillo, the immediate successors of s. Nilo, he was appointed hegumen because of his rare intellectual gifts and his virtues, in which he rivalled the founder.
Using the remains of ancient Roman villas, he had the church built which he dedicated to the Madonna and which in 1024 was consecrated by Pope Giovanni XIX himself. The saint’s relations with the powerful family of the counts of Tusculum were such that Giovanni’s nephew and successor, Benedetto IX, addressed a letter Bartholomaeo spirituali ac venerando patri. It has therefore been believed that the young and inexperienced Pope yielded to the pleas of s. B. when he abdicated the pontifical throne and went to do penance at Grottaferrata, where he was buried. In April 1044 B. took part in the Lateran Council and signed there second among the abbots; a few years earlier he had hurried to Gaeta as peacemaker between Duke Adenolfo 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 s. Nilo and the composition
of a Typihón, or liturgical ordo, which tradition attributes to him, supported by arguments of no little critical weight.