them. In connection with this there is a point to notice. Of late years, with the spread of liturgical study, there is a movement among the Byzantines of Italy in favour of purity of rite. This means conforming to the pure Greek Typika. Grottaferrata, now full of enthusiasts for the Byzantine rite, sets the standard of this movement; from Grottaferrata it is spreading to the Albanian colonies of Calabria and Sicily; so that now it is looked upon almost as a disgrace to practise any Latin infiltration at all. The student might think that the pure rite he will see at Grottaferrata itself, and in a lesser degree at Piana and other places, is the old tradition, that the Latin influence that he will notice in some of the churches is a later corruption. Really the opposite is true. This pure use is the latest development of all; those despised latinizations have many centuries of use behind them. And so, if one cares for local customs in rite too, one may perhaps ask whether this zeal for theoretic purity is entirely an advantage. It is rather like the zeal for doing everything exactly as is done at Rome among Latins of different countries. I should rather be inclined to say that local variety in a rite also has its interest, that it is most natural that during the long centuries of Roman neighbourhood the Italo-Greeks have gradually acquired some latinization, that liturgically this is harmless and historically it is interesting, that it is, on the whole, rather a pity to destroy so old a tradition. If specific identity is so important, why not recognize a special Italo-Greek use, and maintain that according to its own tradition?
In general the Italo-Greeks use the Byzantine rite in Greek. The great authority for them is the Typikon of Grottaferrata[1] used as the basis of the books printed at Propaganda. They use these books, of which the first was the Liturgikon,[2] printed at Rome in 1738 by order of Benedict XIV and Clement XII. The first Roman edition of the complete Euchologion was issued in 1754. Benedict XIV accompanied it with the Bull Ex quo primum.[3] There is, then, nothing much to say about the rite of the Italo-Greeks in general. It is simply the
- ↑ Compiled by St Bartholomew, the fourth Archimandrite († c. 1050), revised by Blasius II, twenty-fifth Archimandrite, in 1300.
- ↑ The book containing the celebrant's part of the liturgies, really an extract from the "Euchologion." In 1683 Card. Nerli, Protector of the O. S. Bas., edited a book of the liturgy for them, on the lines of the Roman missal.
- ↑ "Bullarium Ben. XIV" (ed. Prati), iii, pars ii, pp. 299-329 (March 1, 1756).
