Isa Almisry, please give a reliable source that demonstrates that the Italo-Albanians were not always in communion with Rome. Thanks!
God bless you and yours!
I don’t know about reliable, but I don’t think you will argue with this source:
newadvent.org/cathen/08206a.htm
The last part is interesting:
The Italo-Greeks are subject **to the jurisdiction of the diocesan ** * bishops;
several times, but in vain, they have sought exemption… Naturally, the position of a people whose rite and discipline differed in many points from those of the surrounding population, required special legislation. Benedict XIV, in the Bull “Etsi pastoralis” (1742), collected, co-ordinated, and completed the various enactments of his predecessors, and this Bull is still the law. The Holy See has always endeavoured to respect the rite of the Italo-Greeks, on the other hand, it was only proper to maintain the position of the Latin Rite. No member of the clergy may pass from the Greek to the Latin Rite without the consent of the pope; and no layman without the permission of the bishop.
The offspring of mixed marriages belong to the Latin Rite.
A Greek wife may pass to the Latin Rite but not a Latin husband to the Greek Rite. Much less would a Latin be allowed to become a priest of the Greek Rite, thus evading the law of celibacy [this how much the rite was "evading the law of celibacy I question]. As regards the Eucharist, any promiscuity of Greeks and Latins is forbidden, except in case of grave necessity, e.g. if in a given locality there should be no Greek church.
Where custom has abolished communion under both kinds, a contrary usage must not be introduced.
So much for sui juris.
As the article points out, the Albanians showed up after the Ottoman conquest from the Balkans, where, I trust the outcome of the council of Florence shows, no one was in communion with Rome until the Latin empire forced it.
When they came there, the last remnants of the Greeks of Souther Italy were being rubbed out. On them:
The restoration of the Latin Rite began with the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, especially in the first period of the conquest, when Norman ecclesiastics were appointed bishops. Another potent factor was the reform of Gregory VII, who in his efforts to repress marriage among the Latin clergy found no small obstacle in the example of the Greek priests. However, he and his successors recognized the Greek Rite and discipline wherever it was in legitimate possession. Moreover, the Latin bishops ordained the Greek as well as the Latin clergy. In the course of time the Norman princes gained the affection of their Greek subjects by respecting their rite, which had a strong support in the numerous Basilian monasteries (in the fifteenth century there were still seven of them in the Archdiocese of Rossano alone). The latinization of the dioceses was complete in the sixteenth century. Among those which held out longest for the Greek Rite were Acerenza (and perhaps Gravina), 1302; Gerace, 1467; Oppido, 1472 (when it was temporarily united to Gerace); Rossano, 1460; Gallipoli, 1513; Bova (to the time of Gregory XIII), etc. But even after that time many Greek priests remained in some dioceses. In that of Otranto, in 1583, there were still two hundred Greek priests, nearly all native. At Reggio, Calabria, Count Ruggiero in 1092 had given the Greeks the church of S. Maria della Cattolica, whose clergy had a protopapa, exempt from the jurisdiction of the bishop; this was the ease until 1611. In 1695 there were in the same dioceses fifty-nine Greek priests; after thirty years there was only one. Rossano still had a Greek clergy in the seventeenth century. The few native Greek priests were afterwards absorbed in the tide of immigration (see below). Of the Basilian monasteries the only one left is that of Grottaferrata, near Rome. In Sicily the latinization was, for two reasons, accomplished more easily and radically. First, during the rule of the Saracens most of the dioceses were left without bishops, so that the installation of Latin bishops encountered no difficulty; secondly, the Normans had come as liberators, and not as conquerors.
The troubles of 1054 began with the Greeks of the area appealing to Constantinople, both emperor and patriarch, to protect them from the Norman “liberators.” Btw, the articles talk of “hellenization” of the South is nonsense: the south had been Magna Graecia “Greater Greece” in antinquity, and settled by Greeks since then (Italy is a Greek word, btw). (a similar thing applies to talk of a Latin mass in Romania: when the Romans pulled out of Dacia, the Latin mass wasn’t even said yet in Rome). As it states, Southern Italy was united to Constantinople, and no, that they didn’t side with Rome in 1054 should be obvious, as they appealed to Celarius.
Barlaam of Calabria was among the last of the native Greeks of the region: in his younger days he wrote tracts against the supremacy of the Vatican (which the Church still used after he was condemned otherwise at Constantinople V), before submitting and being rewarded with a bishopric. After him the links with Constantinople were severed and the extinction by Latinization that the article mentions took place, but the “unions” that the Latin empire enforced were already at work before Barlaam. All the Italo-Greeks are actually the Albanians mentioned above.*
