NAXOS. – Greek island, whose bishopric was probably erected in the 5th century; its bishop George participated in the Sixth Ecumenical Council. Under the emperor Leo VI (886–911), the bishopric of N. was subject to the metropolitan see of Rhodes. In May 1803 it was united with Paros into a single metropolitan see, Paronaxia. Under Latin domination from the 13th century, the Latin bishopric was erected, which after the fall of Rhodes became a metropolitan see in the 16th century, maintained under Turkish domination (1537–1829) and in the new Greece to the present day; only in 1919, because of the small number of Catholics, was it united with the bishopric of Tinos-Mykonos under the title of the archbishopric of Naxos-Tinos (and Mykonos).
Catholicism experienced its final flowering in N. in the 17th century; at that time the separated Greeks showed a strong inclination toward the Catholic Church, and the work of the new religious who came to this island, Jesuits and Capuchins, met with a favorable reception. From the 19th century to the present day, the French Ursulines have continued the apostolate of educating young women through the indigenous “house” Ursulines (or Ursulines in the world), with such zeal and scope that their college at Tinos became a center for the formation of girls from the best families of Greece, very largely “Orthodox.” In N. the memory has been preserved of the sojourn of Pope St. Martin I in the summer of 635, during his journey as a prisoner of the Byzantine emperor Constans II, a supporter of Monothelitism.