ITALO-GREEKS. - These are the Greeks or Byzantines — merchants, ecclesiastics, soldiers, public officials — who moved to southern Italy and Sicily after their conquest by Belisarius (535) and Narses (553), into the exarchate of Ravenna (568-752) and into Rome itself, where they had churches and monasteries in such numbers as to prevail for several centuries in the councils and in the election of the Popes, who in 110 years out of 19 were 12 Greek-Oriental. The Greek rite also spread among the populations that spoke Greek and conformed to Byzantine religious and civil customs, still recognizable today in Calabrian-Sicilian folklore.
It is calculated that over 50,000 faithful, religious and lay, took refuge in Italy at the time of the iconoclast persecution that flourished in the East for more than half a century (725-87). The Arabs (9th and 10th centuries), the Lombards, Otto I and II, and finally the Normans brought about the decline of Byzantine domination in Italy. The populations of Calabria and Apulia for many years still preserved the Greek rite, resisting the Normans who, although out of prudent policy they favored for a certain time the Basilian clergy and monasteries, went on replacing the Latin rite wherever Greek priests came to be lacking. Vain were the attempts of Card. Bessarion and of other learned men to revive Catholic Greekism in Calabria and Sicily through the founding of schools and of the famous Academy of Messina, where Bessarion himself and Constantine Lascaris went from 1462 to 1493, attracting a host of disciples among the best-known humanists, without accomplishing anything for the religious ends aimed at by the founders and patrons, among whom were Callistus III, Pius II and King Alfonso of Aragon. Just as Urban V in 1370 and Martin V and other popes had accomplished nothing when they attempted to revive religious life and studies in the Basilian monasteries, which were already on the ruinous slope of Byzantine civilization in Italy, where from the 14th to the 18th century the Greek rite disappeared entirely, whereas the work of an educated and Catholic Greek clergy would have been of great utility for the reunion of the Church of the East. The only survivor of so much ruin remains the exarchic monastery of Grottaferrata (v. S. MARIA DI GROTTAFERRATA), a distinguished monument of the Greek rite in Italy.
Italo-Greeks are also improperly called 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 the time when the Greek-Byzantine rite was ending with the passage to the Latin rite of the most important Italo-Greek centers (Gerace 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 all the other dioceses), these new emigrants flowed into Italy, in groups or isolated, 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 Oriental clergy, enjoying the privileges granted by the Council of Florence (1439) to those who declared themselves Catholics.
Very soon juridical and disciplinary divergences arose, whereby the Latins, ignorant of the Oriental rites and discipline, sometimes provoked inopportune measures, such as to embitter the minds of the emigrants, among whom there was no lack of elements full of prejudices against the Roman Church, so that the Greek-Latin dissension became ever more aggravated.
The Congregation of Propaganda Fide, some years after its institution (1622), thought to remedy so many ills with the erection of two seminaries for the Italo-Greeks at Reggio and at Messina; but the times were not yet ripe. A century later the two institutes and the two bishoprics for the Italo-Albanians (v.) arose, and only in our own days has their juridical arrangement been achieved with their own Ordinaries, from which the hoped-for fruits are to be expected for the revival of the Greek rite for the purposes of the apostolate for Union, since it is no longer the case to speak of Italo-Greeks, and such are not the Greek College of St. Athanasius and the other institutes founded in Rome for the Orientals.
For the Italo-Greek rite, v. above.
Bibliography6 works
Gaetano Petrotta