Bartolomeiti

BARTOLOMEITI. - An order of Armenian monks who fled to Italy from the regions of Armenia-Cilicia already threatened by the infidels, and settled in Genoa in 1307 under the leadership of the monk Martiros. With the favor of Pope Clement V they built in the following year a first convent and a church under the title of St. Bartholomew, apostle of the Armenians, which gave them their name. These monks, called Basilians in the bull of Clement V, and commonly "Armenian Friars" (although, after 1350, they were all Italians) followed the rules and wore the habit of the Dominicans and had adopted the Latin rite, suppressing the Armenian one.

The Order of the B. enjoyed a fair development and good repute as long as it was governed by a perpetual superior general; but when the office became six-yearly, dissensions and disorders arose such as to bring about its total suppression in 1650. The church was given to the Barnabites.

BARTOLOMITI. - Congregation of secular priests founded under the title Institutum clericorum saecularium in communi viventium in 1640 by Bartholomew Holzhauser (v.). The founder's primary aim was to bring effective assistance to dioceses and priests in the wake of the damage caused by the Thirty Years' War. The B. devoted themselves chiefly to the formation of young seminarians.

Their first seminary was that of Salzburg, followed by the founding of many others. The Congregation flourished greatly for over a century, especially under the superior general Johann Appelian (d. in Rome in 1700), who had the constitutions definitively approved by Pope Innocent XI (they had already been approved in 1647 in the founder's time). Innocent XI wanted a house of theirs in Rome itself, where however the institute did not achieve the success it had obtained elsewhere, and the seat founded there was short-lived. The B. exercised a notable influence on the formation of the clergy in Germany, particularly in the southern regions, in Austria, in Bohemia and more or less everywhere in Europe; they also spread to South America. Toward the middle of the 1700s the Congregation was in decline, and it began a struggling existence that led to its suppression, which took place, also owing to the persecutory mania of the time, at the hands of the Bavarian government in 1801.

The principal constitutional and disciplinary characteristics of the B. may be summarized as follows: they had no vows, but bound themselves by oath not to abandon the Congregation, to live in common and to hold goods in common; ecclesiastical revenues were withdrawn from individual ownership, which caused the B. to be given the name of "communists"; each house was governed by a local superior, several houses had a dean at their head, and a diocesan superior was placed over all the houses of one and the same diocese; above them all was a superior general.

The "Apostolic Union" (v.) founded in 1862 by Vittore Lebeurier may currently be considered a partial heir to the aims of the B.; among other things, it also sets itself the goal of introducing the cause of canonization of B. Holzhauser.

Ambrogio Mancone