SANTA SEVERINA, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - City and archdiocese in the province of Catanzaro (Calabria). It has an area of 800 sq km, with a population of 60,000 inhabitants, all Catholics, distributed in 24 parishes served by 34 diocesan priests and 8 regulars; it has a seminary, 4 male religious communities and 6 female (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 364).
It is the ancient Seberene, Latinized as Severiana and finally Byzantinized as S. S. Following the victory of Nicephorus Phocas over the Saracens (886) it also briefly bore the name Nicopolis. But it is absurd to assign to it that "Andreas episcopus Nicopolitanus," mentioned by St. Gregory the Great, which refers to Nicopolis in Greece. The city of S. S. rises on the eastern spurs of the Sila in the Neto valley, a short distance from Crotone. Because of its strategic position it was fortified and enhanced by the Byzantines, who left many traces of their civilization there in the church of the Pozzolio and in the Baptistery. As a diocese it owes its existence to the Byzantines, who created it from scratch, raising it at the same time to metropolis of five tiny suffragan dioceses, all erected at the expense of the ancient see of Crotone, which was reduced to the city alone. Its existence cannot be admitted for a period earlier than the 9th century, because it does not appear, either as a metropolis or as a suffragan of Reggio, in the oldest Greek catalogues. The first mention occurs in Notitia III of the Diatiposi, which is from the time of Leo VI the Philosopher (886-911), where it appears as a metropolis. This, cut off from the great communication routes, has lost its ancient importance. Therefore the Holy See ended by leaving it in 1818 as the only suffragan of Cariati and finally suppressed it in 1952, while still leaving it the archiepiscopal dignity: Cariati was aggregated to the Metropolis of Reggio Calabria.
In the archdiocese of S. S. several Cistercian and Florensian monasteries had their life, among them S. Angelo in Fringillo at Mesuraca and S. Maria delle Terrate at Rocca di Neto. Among the Mendicant convents are to be remembered that of the Dominicans at S. S., that of the Ecce Homo at Mesuraca and that of the S. Spina at Petilia; both of these last are famous Franciscan sanctuaries.
Among the men who have honored this metropolis, worthy of remembrance are: the popes St. Anterus, St. Zosimus and St. Zachary, whom tradition assigns respectively to Petilia, to Mesuraca (Reace) and S. S.; Leonardo Caruso of S. S., friend of St. Philip and groom of Gregory XIII, who in Rome founded the hospice for abandoned children and the house of S. Eufemia for poor unmarried girls.
The first bishop whose name occurs is Ambrose, remembered in the Greek epigraph of the consecration of the old Cathedral, assigned to the 9th century. A Stephen, metropolitan of S. S., occurs in the life of St. Nilus before 985; Basil was at the Council of Constantinople of 997; Giulio Antonio Santoro of Caserta (1566-82), called the cardinal of S. S., who founded the Seminary and saved Greek monasticism from certain ruin; Fausto Caffarelli, nuncio in Savoy (1624-51). The archdiocese of S. S. is no longer a metropolis of an ecclesiastical province; its suffragan Cariati has passed to Reggio (AAS, 44 [1952], pp. 516-18).