Greeks then had five priests. The bishop was cordially received by the people. On May 3, 1674, he called them together in their church and spoke to them at length on the Catholic faith and the necessity of union with the Holy See. The five priests made a public profession of faith in the form of Florence, and all the people declared their hatred of schism. Then the bishop solemnly kept the Hesperinon office according to the Byzantine rite. The next morning he conceived a pretty way of symbolizing their union with the Latins. He brought from the neighbouring Latin church holy water blessed in our rite, sprinkled the people with it, and celebrated the holy Liturgy according to theirs. He then held a service for the repose of the souls of their dead, gave them further instructions in the Catholic faith, and told them how to be on good terms with their Latin neighbours. Altogether this visit of the Bishop of Samos seems to have been the ideal of such a visitation to people of one rite in a land of another.
But the Greeks of Bibbona still had some taint of schismatical infection. In 1675 there were complaints that they allowed divorce on the terms of the Orthodox. So the Pope sent a Benedictine, Dom Oderisio Maria Pieri, who had been missionary in the island of Chios. Rodotà says: "He made them conceive a horror of solution of matrimony, and prevented them from contracting it in the forbidden degrees. He abolished the cult of certain schismatics whom they had honoured as saints, and persuaded them to conform to the Gregorian Calendar."[1] So this visitation, too, seems to have been eminently satisfactory. There are now no Byzantine Uniates at Bibbona. They kept their rite till 1693, then they all turned Latin, "yielding to the insinuations of a certain missionary Gregorii."[2]
There was a Uniate Byzantine church at Naples from 1518 till the Italian Revolution. Thomas Asan Palælogos, of the House of the Despots of Mistra, fleeing to Italy from the Turk, arrived in Naples, with many other Greeks, at the end of the fifteenth century. Here, in 1518, he built a chapel in honour of St Peter and St Paul for the use of his rite. Then a larger church was built in 1544. It was always Uniate, the chaplain being nominated by the Archbishop of Naples. Later, many of the Albanians from Korone joined this congregation (p. 118). But here, too, a schismatical party appeared. When the Italian Government was set up in Naples (1860) this party obtained its permission to keep the church
