NOCERA UMBRA, DIOCESE OF. - Ancient diocese in northeastern Umbria. It is immediately subject to the Holy See. It has an area of 1,500 sq km with 60,320 inhabitants, all Catholic. It has 82 parishes, served by 98 diocesan priests and 40 regulars, a seminary, 8 male religious communities and 17 female (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 290). The present name - N. and Gualdo - dates from 2 January 1915, when the abbey church of St. Benedict of Gualdo Tadino was elevated to cathedral honoris tantum causa.
The present ecclesiastical jurisdiction goes back to the year
1006, when the see of N., the cities of Plestia, Tadino, Rosella and Usenti having been destroyed, absorbed the entire extreme north of the Duchy of Spoleto. This is documented by local historical sources written between the 13th and 14th centuries, among them the Lozionario of St. Facondino of Gualdo (cod. Vat. 7853), the Chronicon Gualdense (cod. Vat. Ottob. lat. 2666) and the ancient connotassi of the bishops of N., to be found, among other places, together with the Legenda maior B. Raynaldi, in cod. Vat. lat. 3921. Although there are no other sources concerning the episcopates in Usenti (surroundings of N.) and in Rosella (present-day Sassoferrato), the existence of bishops in Plestia, Tadino and N. before the year 1000 is established.
Plestia, on the present plain of Colfiorito (Municipality of Serravalle di Chienti), recalled in various inscriptions of the imperial era and in two diplomas of Otto III, dated one 23 and the other 26 June 996, is among the certain Umbrian episcopal sees at the end of the 5th century (L. Duchesne, Les ecèches d'Italie et l'invasion lombarde, in Mélanges d'arch. et hist., 23 [1903], p. 94). Also in Tadino, a Roman city on the plain south of present-day Gualdo Tadino, there was a bishop in the 5th and 6th centuries, as attested by the letter of Pope St. Gregory the Great, in July 599, to Bishop Gaudiosus of Gubbio, asking him to visit Tadino, whose episcopal see had been vacant for many years, and to arrange the election of a new bishop.
N., a Roman statio on the Via Flaminia, was an episcopal see from the earliest Christian centuries. While it is not possible to assign with certainty to it the bishop Felix Episcopus Nucerianus to whom Pope Innocent I (401-17) wrote a celebrated letter, historians, on the other hand, attribute to N. in Umbria that Aprilis Nucerinus who took part in the Roman Synods of 23 October 501 and 6 November 502. The critical study of the sources on the Laurentian schism and the Synods under Pope Symmachus, such as the Liber Pontificalis, the Fragmentum Laurentianum of the same, etc., leads to this conclusion.
In the 9th century there is a Luitardus Episcopus Nucerense subscribed in the Roman Council of 15 November 826 among the 62 bishops who all belong to the Ravennate Exarchate or to the Pentapolis, or to the Roman Duchy or to Tuscia or to the Duchy of Spoleto. And among the 66 bishops, likewise all belonging to the same territories, who subscribed at the Roman Synod of 8 December 853, there is a Racipertus Episcopus Nuceriensis (cf. MGH, Concilia Aevi Karolini, edited by A. Werminghoff, Hannover-Berlin 1904, see index).
The see had bishops illustrious for holiness and learning; to be remembered are St. Raynald, bishop and patron of the diocese (1218-22), Varino Favorino, celebrated humanist (1514-38). Other major saints of the diocese: Bl. Angelo of Gualdo Tadino, Camaldolese hermit, and St. Hugh of Sassoferrato, Silvestrine monk.
Bibliography7 works
Gino Sigismondi