OUR ITALIAN GREEK CATHOLICS 109 



whom we shall speak later more at length. Both were Greek 

 Italian saints, and earnest lovers of the Greek Rite. The first 

 founded in 1002 that noble Greek monastery, just outside 

 of Rome on the Alban hills, which now for nearly a thousand 

 years has kept up the praises of God in the Hellenic tongue 

 and Eastern Rite, and which Pope after Pope has praised and 

 bidden go its way, unchanging, as a witness of the union of 

 the East and the West. And St. Bartholomew, the pupil of 

 St. Nilus, labored equally hard to make that monastery the 

 exponent of Greek monastic thought and art, which at last it 

 became. Yet in the days of St. Nilus, a Calabrian Greek 

 bishop, by the name of Philagathus, had managed to secure 

 some votes as Pope, declared himself elected and assumed the 

 name of John XVI, Pope of Rome. One would have supposed 

 that with the Photian controversy not yet died away, that he 

 would have supported the Greek prelate in his assumption of 

 the Pontifical Throne, but instead of that he espoused the 

 cause of the Latin Gregory V, the Pope legitimately elected, 

 though perhaps by an exceedingly slender majority. It was 

 the espousal of Gregory's cause and the honor paid the Roman 

 See which afterwards led to St. Nilus going to Rome and 

 there founding the celebrated monastery, as related in his life 

 by Saint Bartholomew. 



Although the Italian Greeks held both to their faith and 

 their rite, as it was before the schism of 860, being Greeks 

 continuously and uninterruptedly in communion with Rome, 

 nevertheless, the mere fact that they ceased to be in harmony 

 with their Eastern brethren caused them to dwindle. And, 

 after the schism, there grew up among the Italians of the 

 Roman Rite the idea that the Greek language and the Greek 

 ritual was in some way identified with and indicative of schism. 

 It took two or three hundred years or more for this idea to 

 take firm hold, but, after the various attempts at reunion, 

 and finally after the Council of Florence, the failure of the 

 Greeks to adhere to the Union there proclaimed made the 

 Greek Rite and the schism almost identical in the uneducated 

 mind. These causes operated strongly to diminish the use of 

 the Greek Rite in Italy, and gradually the ItaHan Greeks, as 

 they lost their Greek mother-tongue, ceased to practise their 

 Greek ritual and assumed the Roman Rite instead. In this 

 manner they ceased to be Greeks and became Italians, so that 



