History
It is difficult to say whether the Byzantine (Greek) Rite was followed in any diocese of Southern Italy or Sicily before the eighth century. But the gradual hellenization of those regions, as well as the founding of numerous Greek monasteries, must have affected liturgical life. The spread of Greek monasticism in Italy received a strong impulse from the Rashidun Caliphate invasion of Levant and Egypt, and later from the ban on religious images or icons. The monks naturally retained their rite, and as the bishops were not infrequently chosen from their number, the diocesan liturgy, under favourable conditions, could easily be changed, especially since the Lombard occupation of the inland regions of Southern Italy cut off the Greeks in the South from communication with the Latin Church.
Read more about this topic: Italo-Albanian Catholic Church
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)