# Territorial Abbacy of Saint Mary of Grottaferrata

The Territorial Abbacy of Santa Maria of Grottaferrata is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction which administers the Byzantine Rite Abbey of Saint Mary in Grottaferrata located in Grottaferrata, Rome, Lazio, Italy. The Abbacy and its territory are stauropegic, that is, directly subordinate to a primate or synod, rather than to a local bishop. It is the only remnant of the once-flourishing traditions of Italo-Greek and Italo-Albanian Eastern Christian monasticism. It is also the only monastery of the Italian Basilian Order of Grottaferrata, (abbreviated O.S.B.I.), a religious order of the Italo-Albanian Greek Catholic Church which has played a major role in Albanian history, Albanian literature, and in the Albanian diaspora. The abbot ordinary is also the superior general of the Italian Basilian Order of Grottaferrata. Though normally led by an abbot, the Abbacy has been under the authority of Bishop (now Cardinal) Marcello Semeraro since Pope Francis named him Apostolic Administrator of the Abbacy on 4 November 2013.

## History

The abbey was founded in 1004 by St. Nilus of Rossano, a Calabrian Greek monk of the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church, on what was believed to be the site where Cicero owned a villa and wrote his Quaestiones tusculanae. When Nilus was once asked by a Latin Rite monk about the criticisms of the Cluniac Reforms and the Roman Rite emanating from adherents of the Photian schism in Constantinople, Nilus replied, "However we differ, both do all things for the glory of God. Don't allow yourselves to be disturbed by these criticisms."
The monastery has remained in continuous operation since then, but, particularly following the defeat of the uprising led by Skanderbeg and the conquest of the Albanian people by the Ottoman Empire, vocations were sought less and less from local Italian people of the Latin rite, but increasingly among the growing number of Italo-Albanian refugee communities in southern Italy.
On 1 November 1571, the Italian Basilian Order of Grottaferrata was formally organized and established as part of the Counter-Reformation strengthening of the Eastern Catholic Churches by Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio. Among the Albanian refugee communities and Greek villages of the Mezzogiorno, the monks of Grottaferrata set up many daughter foundations, particularly throughout Sicily and Calabria.
It is, however, the only one of these many Italo-Greek Byzantine Catholic monasteries that survives. Throughout the Medieval period and well into the Baroque era and it's aftermath, the Italo-Greek people of the Mezzogiorno increasingly switched from the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church to the Latin Rite under pressure from the local hierarchy, who often forcibly closed Byzantine Rite Monasteries and convents. Even though their speakers are now overwhelmingly Roman Rite, several distinct dialects of the Modern Greek language are still widely spoken throughout southern Italy.
Beginning under Bernardo Tanucci in the 18th-century Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and continuing under the newly constituted Kingdom of Italy during the Risorgimento in 1866, all others that had survived were closed down and their lands seized and sold when, influenced by the anti-religious currents of The Englightenment, local governments banned religious orders and expelled their members. Only Grottaferrata monastery, which was considered a national monument, was allowed to keep resident monks as its guardians. In the course of time, the Italian secular authorities allowed these monks increasing independence.
In the 1880s, the Holy See, seeking the peaceful transformation of the Orthodox Churches into Eastern Catholic Churches, ordered the Divine Liturgy offered at Grottaferrata purged of all Latin Rite borrowings that had been introduced over the centuries. As the one Byzantine Catholic monastery in Italy not closed down, the monks of Grottaferrata prevented the death of their monastic traditions and have contributed to its rebirth and expansion. As Italo-Albanian refugee monks arrived from the other closed down religious houses replaced the old pro-Latinisation guard in Grottaferrata, they contributed to the rebirth of the Abbey and became notable as palaeographers, liturgists, and musicologists, as well as the main Albanologists and Byzantinists of the period. One regular visitor to Grottaferrata during the early 20th-century was Leonid Feodorov, who went on in 1917 to become the first Exarch of the Russian Greek Catholic Church.
These same monks were active promoters of reunion between West and East, with missionary evangelization of ethnicities in the Balkans that had converted to Islam under Ottoman Turkish rule, particularly after 1912 in newly Independent Albania. The effects of this mission, generally welcomed in a positive way before communism in Albania, quickly created a very close religious and cultural bridge between the Albanian-speaking refugee communities of southern Italy and the Catholic Church in Albania, resulting in the resurrection of the Albanian Greek-Catholic Church and the ordination of various missionary priests.
Among these stands out the martyr and saint of Albania, who graduated from the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius in Rome and deeply loved the Abbey and the culture of the Italo-Albanian people, Blessed Josif Papamihali (1912-1948). Papamihali went to become a confessor and apostle of Eastern Catholicism, who was persecuted, arrested, sentenced to a labour camp, where he was buried alive by his guards after falling from exhaustion in a marsh. After the fall of communism in Albania, he was beatified in Shkodër along with thirty-seven other fellow Albanian Catholic Martyrs on 5 November 2016.
On 26 September 1937, the abbey was made a territorial abbacy.
The Territorial Abbey also operates a rectory church in central Rome, Saint Basil at the Gardens of Sallust. Abbot Apolemone Agreste, whose coat of arms appears on the arches within, had a church dedicated to Saint Basil built on St. Basil Street in Rome, not far from the Piazza Grimana, now the Piazza Barberini. Attached to it was a hospice. The monks of the Order of St. Basil had it restored in 1682, as an inscription on the doorway testifies.