Nicotera, Diocese of

NICOTERA, Diocese of. - City and diocese in the province of Catanzaro.

Together with the diocese of Tropea it has a population of 85,000 inhabitants, of whom 84,905 are Catholics. It has 74 parishes, with 122 secular priests and 15 regulars, a seminary, 3 male religious communities and 14 female ones (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 288).

It already appears as a statio and under the name of "Medma" in the Itinerary of Antoninus (4th century). Christianity was introduced there from the earliest centuries and must have felt the influence of the proximity of Tropea and of Taurianum, two Christian centers of great importance. In an inscription from Tropea of the 4th-5th century there is mention of a conductrix massae Tropeas, in which there is evidently an allusion to the patrimony of the Roman Church in Bruttium. In the time of St. Gregory the Great a massa nicoterana also comes to light; which suggests that the two massae, very close together and bordering on each other, had their origin in the same period, that is, in the 4th-5th century. Nevertheless, as an episcopal see N. appears for the first time in the Register of St. Gregory the Great, who found himself compelled to punish Bishop Proclus for the negligence with which he administered his church. He then rehabilitated him and even made him arbiter of the disputes between the bishop and the clergy of Reggio. There are then known a Sergius, who took part in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and a Caesarius, whom local tradition considers a martyr, because he was killed by the Saracens in 884 or 941. There follows a period of deep obscurity, in which it seems that the city, destroyed by the Saracens, no longer had its bishop. Its reconstitution is due to the Normans at the end of the 11th century. However, the name of the first bishop, called Pellegrino, appears in 1173 in a Greek diploma published by Trinchera; but Ughelli even begins the series of bishops with 1392. In this year, however, the diocese of N. was reconstituted for a second time by Boniface IX, through the efforts of the feudal lord Enrico Sanseverino, after an interruption of 90 years, following a sacrilegious attack on its bishop in 1304. For that time its territory remained first aggregated to Mileto (bull of Clement V [27 May 1308] which authorizes the erection of a Franciscan convent), and then to Reggio (bull of Boniface IX of 1392). But the reconstituted diocese always had a rather struggling existence, because of its too restricted territory and almost suffocated by the neighboring dioceses of Mileto and of Tropea, to the last of which it ended up being united aequae principaliter following the Concordat of 1818.

Francesco Russo