Byzantine Church there are no distinctions of religious orders. A monk is a monk, just as a deacon is a deacon. No further qualification is needed or is used in the East.[1] But it was natural that a special name should be given to the Byzantine monks in Italy. Here people were accustomed to distinguish various religious orders. As they spoke of Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, so they spoke of Basilians. Moreover, there were monks of this rule who were Latins; they at least would need a special name. Since, then, the name Basilian became official in Italy, we need have no hesitation in using it.
Undoubtedly the Basilian monks were the chief factor in preserving the Byzantine rite in Italy. During the later Middle Ages, before the Albanians arrived, while the rite was dying out in the parish churches, it was kept alive in the Basilian monasteries. There was much less danger of its extinction here. The parish clergy, under a Latin bishop, easily forsook the foreign rite for his; but the monasteries were closed corporations, much less liable to such influence. The Byzantine rite was, as it were, part of their rule. It was easier for the monks to get recruits for their rite than for the Byzantine diocesan clergy. Among secular priests there were great difficulties in ordaining a man born of Latin parents as a Byzantine priest; but anyone might join a Basilian monastery as easily as he might go to the Benedictines. If he did so, he became a user of the Byzantine rite, as part of the institution of his order.
Already in the thirteenth century we hear of decadence of the Basilian monks in Italy. This decadence went on, in spite of repeated attempts by Popes to reform the monks, all through the later Middle Ages, and so on, till we come to the all but extinction of Byzantine monasticism in our own time. The reason of the decadence was always the same; it is indeed the same reason which brought about the gradual disappearance of the rite (except for the Albanians). The Greek element was dying out; the descendants of the original Italo-Greeks were becoming italianized. This applied to the monks, too. They were becoming practically Italians, to whom, if Latin offered no great difficulty, Greek did. So the constant complaint is of the ignorance of the monks, which means that they
- ↑ See "Orth. Eastern Church," 354-355.
document, "Cyprian Archimandrite of the monastery of St John Theristes, of the Order of St Basil" (Rodotà quotes the whole text, ii, 38-39).
