THE P
RTAL
Orthodoxy in Italy
An unusual account by Fr Mark Woodruff
May 2018 Page 6
If on a visit Rome you go up into the Alban Hills to the papal residence at Castel
Gandolfo , you may pass through Grottaferrata . A fortress watches the approach to Frascati , sitting on the platform of an old Roman villa – a cryptoporticus , or hidden arcade , of which the town ’ s name is a corruption . This is no mere castle , but a monastery founded in the old arches in 1004 .
The massive walls are from wars lasting from the 12 th to the 15 th century . Emperor Frederick II used it for an assault on Rome in the 13 th century ; in the end it looked more like barracks than a sacred retreat . Somehow , the monks maintained their life and their great reputation for conserving Greek learning throughout . For in the heart of Latin territory , this is a Greek monastery , still following the Byzantine rite from the time when East and West were not divided , a northern outpost of the Greek Christian civilisation that was once abundant across southern Italy .
Not for nothing was the foot of Italy known as Magna Græcia , or ‘ greater ’ Greece , as we might say . To this day , ethnic Greek communities continue in Calabria and Apulia , and the extent of eastern Christian culture is found across eastern and southern Italy – from the little icons of the Mother of God and some mosaics still in Roman basilicas , to the great Byzantine churches from Venice and Ravenna , from Anagni and Naples , to Sicily .
Emperor Leo II in the 8 th century transferred the south from the patriarchate of the West , governed by Rome , to that of his capital at Constantinople , stimulating a revival of Greek Christian society and civilisation .
Sicily and the Italian-Greek south under the Normans , however , returned to Rome ’ s governance in the 11 th century . The move of St Nilus ’ community to Grottaferrata , one of hundreds of Byzantine monasteries that once thrived along southern Italy ’ s coasts , was part of the story of displacement as the pressure grew for the Christians of Greek heritage to be absorbed into the Latin Church .
Nonetheless , the eastern Church persisted among its increasingly Roman Catholic neighbours .
Even after the break in communion between Rome and Constantinople in the 11 th century , Rome would call on the bishops of Orthodox Churches to provide for the isolated Byzantines in its southern territories . Thus the patriarchate of Bulgaria , a rival to Constantinople
until it fell in turn to Ottoman Muslim abolition in the 14 th century , and then the archdiocese of Ohrid in what is now Macedonia , would consecrate the chrism for confirmation and perform the ordinations .
This is but one instance of fluid and organised communion between Catholics and Orthodox around the Mediterranean that did not end with the Great Schism in 1054 ( as zealous partisans on both sides will have you believe ), but lasted into the 18 th century . It is the great irony of our supposedly ecumenical age that what was pragmatic and perfectly feasible for 700 years is now , relatively recently , argued as theologically problematic .
In the 15 th century , Albanian Orthodox settled in Sicily and southern Italy , fleeing Turkish conquests and the threat of the enslavement and forced conversion to Islam of their male children . In 1595 , with the services of an Orthodox bishop now seldom available , Pope Clement VIII provided them with their own bishop so that , like the Greeks , their distinctive history and patrimony were not simply lost to Latinisation .
Today this Eastern Christian community , with ethnic roots in the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily ( Archimedes was born in Syracuse ) and Albanians migrating across the Adriatic , and with religious roots in the monastic , cultural and theological tradition of the Byzantine east , forms the Italo-Albanian Greek Catholic Church , one of the two dozen Catholic Churches .
Apart from the monastery near Rome , it numbers 64,000 faithful in two dioceses : Lungro serving the Greek Catholics in Calabria and other provinces , and Piano degli Albanesi covering Sicily .
Yet this is not a Church of the Eastern Christian diaspora : far from exotic , it has always been part of the West . And its patrimony has been intrinsically Catholic before , during and beyond the experience of schism . Again , we see that the Anglican Patrimony represented by the Ordinariates stands in diverse and venerable company .