in the Church of St Athanasius there were occasional Byzantine functions. The only precaution against this latinization was that the students had to take an oath to keep the Byzantine rite as soon as they returned to their own country.[1] In 1592 the Jesuit rector made a great pretence of introducing the Byzantine rite "to be observed exactly in all things possible by all the Greek students."[2] Yet they still had to attend his Latin Mass every morning, and were bound to receive Holy Communion from him at least once a month "in azyme, according to the Latin manner."[3] This is, of course, the cardinal matter of all. It is absurd to say that a man observes the Byzantine rite when he receives Communion in one species and in azyme.
There were always many Latins at the college, Jesuits and others who, naturally, kept their own rite;[4] this, too, helped to prevent a whole-hearted use of that of Constantinople. Again, I wonder why they did not employ Italo-Greeks as servants. Then, gradually, there was some feeling about the disadvantage of bringing up these boys in ignorance of the rite they were afterwards to practise all their lives. Urban VIII (1623-1644) made a rule that three times a year, at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, they were to make their Communion in their own rite.[5] This really only made things worse liturgically; in opposition to the normal principles of the Holy See (p. 34) it introduced promiscuity of rite. Meanwhile, although they were not allowed to use their rite, these wretched boys had to keep all its fasts, and the Roman ones too. They had not only the enormously sterner Byzantine fasting, with its four Lents and innumerable days of fasting and abstinence;[6] but when the Romans had a fast, not kept in the East, they had to keep this as well. Thus they had to fast on Saturday; though it had long been a great principle in the East not to do so.[7] So the students were brought up in the strangest mixture of rites, with the inconveniences of both and the advantages of neither. Small wonder that liturgical study made little progress among them. Small wonder either that their rivals in the East were never tired of mocking them as hybrids, semi-latinized Greeks.
- ↑ De Meester, 30-31; Rodotà, iii, 156.
- ↑ Diary of the college published by C. Karalevsky, "Documenti inediti per servire alla storia delle chiese italo-greche" (Rome, 1911), fasc. i, p. 27.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 30.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 28.
- ↑ De Meester, 31-32.
- ↑ College diary, op. cit., p. 27.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 29; De Meester, 32-33.
