ITALO-GREEKS. — These are the Greek or Byzantine merchants, ecclesiastics, soldiers, and public officials who settled in southern Italy and Sicily after these regions were conquered by Belisario (535) and Narsete (553), in the army of Ravenna (568–752), and even in Rome itself, where they established so many churches and monasteries that for several centuries they predominated in councils and in the election of popes—12 out of 19 popes in 110 years were of Greek origin. The Greek rite also spread among the populations that spoke Greek and adopted Byzantine religious and civil customs, traces of which are still recognizable today in Calabrian-Sicilian folklore.
It is estimated that over 50,000 faithful—both religious and laypeople—fled to Italy during the period of the iconoclastic persecution in the East, which lasted more than half a century (725–87). The Arabs (9th–10th centuries), the Lombards, Otto I and II, and finally the Normans brought about the decline of Byzantine rule in Italy. The populations of Calabria and Apulia continued to preserve the Greek rite for many years, resisting the Normans, who, while prudently favoring for a time the Basilian clergy and monasteries, gradually replaced the Greek rite with the Latin rite wherever Greek priests were lacking. The efforts of Cardinal Bessarione and other learned men to revive Catholic Hellenism in Calabria and Sicily through the founding of schools and the famous Academy of Messina (attended by Bessarione himself and Constantine Lascaris from 1462 to 1493), which attracted a host of disciples among the most renowned humanists, ultimately failed to achieve the religious aims of their founders and patrons, including Callistus III, Pius II, and King Alfonso of Aragon. Nor did the efforts of Urban V in 1370, Martin V, and other popes succeed in reviving religious life and studies in the Basilian monasteries, which were already on the downward path of Byzantine civilization in Italy, where the Greek rite disappeared entirely between the 14th and 18th centuries. Yet the work of an educated and Catholic Greek clergy would have been of great utility for the reunion of the Eastern Church. The only survivor of this great decline is the exarchal monastery of Grottaferrata (v. GROTTAFERRATA), a notable monument of the Greek rite in Italy.
The term Italo-Greeks is also improperly applied to the Greeks who came to Italy from the East when the Turks invaded the Balkan peninsula, and in greater numbers after the fall of Constantinople (1453). At a time when the Byzantine Greek rite was ending with the conversion of the most important Italo-Greek centers to the Latin rite (Gracie in 1467, Oppido in 1472, Gallipoli in 1550, Benevento in 1567, Policastro in 1572, Bova in 1573, Reggio in 1611, Taranto in 1622, Melfi in 1697, and so on for all other dioceses), these new emigrants arrived in Italy, in groups or individually, settling in the principal coastal cities: Venice, Ancona, Barletta, Bari, Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, Reggio, Messina, Naples, Livorno, etc., where they formed more or less numerous communities around churches or parishes with their own Eastern clergy, enjoying the privileges granted by the Council of Florence (1439) to those who declared themselves Catholics.
Soon, however, legal and disciplinary disputes arose, as the Latins, ignorant of Eastern rites and discipline, sometimes issued ill-considered measures that exacerbated the feelings of the emigrants, among whom there were no lack of those prejudiced against the Roman Church. Thus, the Greek-Latin schism grew ever more severe.
The Congregation of Propaganda Fide, a few years after its establishment (1622), sought to remedy these evils by erecting two seminaries for Italo-Greeks in Reggio and Messina, but the times were not yet ripe. A century later, the two institutes and the two bishoprics for Italo-Albanians (v.) were established, and only in our own time has their legal status been regularized with their own Ordinaries, from which the desired fruits for the revival of the Greek rite may now be hoped for in the service of the apostolate for Union, since there is no longer any question of Italo-Greeks. Such are not the Greek College of S. Atanasio or the other institutions founded in Rome for Orientals.
For the Italo-Greek rite, see above.