BRESCIA, Diocese of. - A city of the Cenomani, later a Roman colony (Brixia), it has notable monuments and inscriptions from the first centuries. After declining through the barbarian invasions, it became the seat of a duchy that gave the Lombards their last kings, Astolf, Desiderius, Adelchis. Governed by counts (9th century), then by bishops (10th century), it constituted itself as a commune (12th-13th centuries) of the Guelph party, passed under the lordships of the Visconti and the Scaligeri (14th century), of P. Malatesta and of Venice (1426-1796), then into the Cisalpine Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia (1815-59) and the Kingdom of Italy, with noble patriotic traditions.
The diocese is among the most extensive and ancient in Italy, already constituted at the beginning of the 4th century. The very late tradition (12th-13th centuries) of its apostolic origins through the preaching of St. Barnabas, and the obscure legends concerning its first bishops and martyrs cannot cast doubt on the existence of the diocese already in the 3rd century, after a long period of missionary activity. Christianity must have been imported there either by Jewish merchants, since there was a synagogue in B., or by occasional missionaries. The cult of the two local martyrs Faustinus and Jovita, even setting aside the negative value of their late legend (BHL, 2836-38), is certainly very ancient, and iconography always presented them, down to the 16th century, as priest and deacon, indicating in them the first heads of a local ecclesia, subject to Milan. The legend places the two Brescian martyrs in relation with the emperor Hadrian (2nd century) and with many other bishops and martyrs of northern Italy (St. Apollonius of B., St. Marcian of Tortona, St. Secundus of Asti, St. Calocerus of Albenga, etc.), demonstrating a very late hagiographic syncretism of no historical value (8th or 9th centuries).
The Brescian ecclesia received its autonomy after the last persecution of Diocletian or in the early years of the Constantinian age. St. Anatalon sent there as its first bishop his disciple St. Clateus, the first name in the Brescian diptychs. It was the first diocese to detach itself from Milan; therefore the bishop of B. had the first place at the right of the archbishop in the synods of the Milanese province, and the honor passed to the bishop of Vercelli only in the 11th century during the troubles of the investiture struggle. The list of bishops, besides from the liturgical diptychs, was given in the 9th century by a sermon of bishop Rampert, who enumerates his predecessors from St. Clateus. The fourth is St. Apollonius, the fifth is St. Ursicinus, or Ursacius, who took part in the Council of Sardica (343), the seventh St. Philastrius, who came from Rome to Milan and from Milan to Brescia for the struggle against Arianism, and who held the see from 379 to 387. On these chronological indications the beginning of the episcopate of Clateus can be fixed at the end of the 3rd century or the early years of the 4th, applying the relative dates also to the following bishops St. Viator, St. Flavius Latinus, St. Apollonius. Clateus, perhaps a Brescian citizen, would have been the last priest who governed the Brescian Church still united and subject to Milan, and it is not improbable that he had other predecessors in the same office in the 3rd century, when the hierarchical organization of Christianity in northern Italy was still in gestation. The two great bishops of the 4th century are St. Philastrius (v.) and St. Gaudentius (v.), who left notable works and memorials. After St. Gaudentius the series of bishops proceeds regularly, except for the introduction of a Berticanus between Dominator and Paul III made by Ughelli, confusing a Bertramus bishop of Mans in France (586-616) falsely attributed to the Cenomani of B. From the 4th century, all the bishops down to St. Deusdedit or Diodatus (680) are venerated as saints in the local liturgy. In the 8th century the Lombard dukes, later kings, Astolf and Desiderius erected new churches and monasteries in the city and in the diocese. It is perhaps as a reflection of the work of the Brescian Petronax at Monte Cassino (717-50) that the two important monasteries of St. Julia (753) and of Leno (758) were founded, the first for women in Brescia, the second for men in the plain toward the Po. Rampert was the greatest bishop of the Carolingian era; he renewed the monastery of St. Faustinus Maggiore with Frankish elements, reawakening popular cult around the relics of the two martyrs Faustinus and Jovita; he built a new crypt in the cathedral of St. Mary and transferred there the body of St. Philastrius, reactivating in it the common life of the urban clergy. The bishops of the 9th and 10th centuries occupied high civil offices and came from powerful families of the local feudalism. Ardingus was archchancellor of king Berengar (901-922); Godfrey of Canossa, son of the marquis of Tuscany Adalbert Azzo (975-77), donated to the basilica of Canossa some relics of the bishop St. Apollonius; his successors Attone, Adalberto, Landolfo and Olderico were imperial vicars of the Brescian county. Bishop Adelman of Liège, a disciple of St. Fulbert in the schools of Chartres, certainly owed his election (1059) to imperial interference. Against the Eucharistic heresy of his fellow-disciple Berengar of Tours he wrote the treatise De Veritate corporis et sanguinis Christi (PL 143, 1290 ff.). Much troubled by the struggle between Church and Empire in the times of Gregory VII was the episcopate of Arimanno (1087-1116), cardinal of the SS. Quattro Coronati. He was probably the founder of the Vallombrosan monastery of S. Gervaso del Mella, where he was buried. During the episcopate of his successors Villano (1116-32) and Manfredo (1132-53) the struggle between the two opposing political and religious currents was championed by the vehement preaching of the cleric, or monk, Arnaldo (v.), whom St. Bernard opposed. After the wars of Barbarossa and the Peace of Constance the city expanded, numerous houses of the Humiliati were founded, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic with their Friars Minor and Friars Preacher were welcomed in new popular quarters, and the craft guilds and the disciplines flourished anew. The bishop, Bl. Guala of Bergamo, a Dominican (1229-44), tried in vain to restore order and peace between Guelphs and Ghibellines and to re-establish episcopal authority, but political discords forced him to withdraw to Bergamo, where he died on 3 September 1244 in the Vallombrosan monastery of Astino. The last great bishop of the Middle Ages was Berardo Maggi (1275-1308), son of the Roman senator Emanuele Maggi and the last elected by the diocesan clergy. A man of high intelligence, of iron will, of most refined diplomatic skill, he gathered into his hands, by mandate of trust from the parties, both powers, and was princeps of the diocese until his death.
In the 14th century there followed one another eighteen foreign bishops, almost always absent, who governed the diocese through vicars, likewise foreign; the diocese was in complete decline.
The new government of Venice, with the humanist and diplomat Pietro del Monte (1442-47), began the long series of bishops taken from the Venetian patriciate down to Msgr. Giovanni Nani (1773-1804); the only exception was the contested appointment of the Brescian Cardinal Duranti (1551-57).
Many bishops received the cardinal's purple, such as the Roman Agapito Colonna (1369), Francesco and Andrea Cornaro (1532-50), Duranti, Morosini (1585-96), nuncio in France, Pietro Ottoboni (1654-1664), who became Pope Alexander VIII, Marco Dolfin (1698-1704), Giovanni Badoaro (1706-14), Gianfrancesco Barbarigo (1714-23), the Benedictine A. M. Quirini (1725-55), munificent founder of the Queriniana library, Giovanni Molin (1755-73). The Brescians Arimanno and Ottone (11th century), Uberto and Gianfrancesco Gambara (16th century), Giovanni Andrea Archetti and Michelangelo Luchi (18th century) also received the purple.
The diocese does not coincide with the boundaries of the province; it includes Lovere, Costa-Volpino and Palosco in the Bergamasque territory, while the Valtenesi, from Lonato and S. Felice to Sirmione and Pozzolengo, although within the province of B., is subject to the diocese of Verona. Until the 18th century it included the territory of the former diocese of Asola and of the marquisate of Castiglione delle Stiviere, from 1785 united to the diocese of Mantua.
At present the diocese has 421 parishes divided into 78 vicariates, with 985 priests and 720,400 souls; it has 4 diocesan seminaries, numerous male convents (Carmelites, Franciscans, Conventuals, Capuchins, Jesuits, Salesians, Marists, Comboni Missionaries, Pavonians, Artigianelli, Josephites) with their own seminaries and many female religious houses, Catholic publishing houses, a weekly newspaper and numerous periodical publications of a religious character. The oldest monasteries were those of S. Benedetto di Leno, of the Salvatore and of S. Giulia, of the SS. Cosma and Damiano or monasterium Honorii, of S. Pietro in Monte Orsino at Serle, of S. Eufemia, of S. Faustino maggiore, of S. Tommaso di Acquanegra, of S. Gervaso al Mella, of S. Maria della Colomba at Manerbio, of S. Maria di Pace, of S. Donnino di Verola, of S. Pietro di Fiumicello, of S. Vigilio di Masserata, all of the Benedictine Rule; numerous were the Cluniac priories erected in the 11th century, which had their central house at Rodengo; numerous too were the Augustinian canonries and the priories of Augustinian hermits, founded in the 11th century, the houses of the Humiliati erected in the 12th century, the convents of Franciscans and Dominicans that flourished in the 13th-16th centuries, just as in the two centuries 17th-18th there flourished houses and colleges of Jesuits, Somaschi and Theatines, all dispersed in 1797 by the Jacobin revolution.
The principal archives of the diocese are the archive of the episcopal mensa, the archive of the curia, the capitular archive, but they have suffered very serious losses, especially of medieval documents, which are almost completely lacking; ecclesiastical documents are preserved in the State archive and the municipal historical archive. The archives of the religious corporations suppressed in 1797 were dispersed, and the surviving documents have been arbitrarily divided among the State archive of Milan, the State archive of B. and the Queriniana civic library. In the archives of the Civil Hospital and of the Luoghi Pii are partly collected the documents of the monasteries of S. Eufemia and of Rodengo, of the convent of S. Domenico and of the Inquisition. Copious bibliographical indications on many archives and unpublished sources of diocesan history were given by P. Kehr, Italia pontificia, VI, part 1, Berlin 1913, pp. 307-55. B. has two museums, that of the Roman age in the basilica of Vespasian, and that of the Christian age in the church of S. Giulia. Both are rich in notable monuments and precious relics. Famous is the bronze statue of Victory, unearthed in 1826; in the Christian museum are preserved the diptychs, the lipsanotheca, the so-called cross of Galla Placidia, goldsmiths' work and medieval sculptures, a rich coin collection, etc. The municipality also has a picture gallery, a notable collection of ancient and modern art. Among the numerous and sumptuous churches, decorated with precious paintings by the greatest artists Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Romanino, Foppa, Moretto, etc., mention should be made of the Lombard basilica of S. Salvatore (8th century) and S. Maria in Solario (11th century), the Old Cathedral or Rotunda of S. Maria, the winter cathedral (11th century), modelled on the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, the church of S. Francesco (13th century), the facade of the sanctuary of S. Maria dei Miracoli with most refined Renaissance sculptures (15th century), the New Cathedral (17th-19th century), by the Brescian architect Lantana. - See Pl. IV.
Bibliography18 works
Paolo Guerrini
