Necessary Transgressions: the Problem of Communicatio in Sacris in the East in a General Inquiry of the Propaganda Fide

During the Early Modern period, the process of formation of confessional identity went through a number of problematic issues: one of the most relevant was posed by the practice of communicatio in sacris or in divinis. This is the term by which the Roman Church has sought to define (and simultaneously restrict or forbid) any kind of participation of a Catholic to the liturgical celebrations and sacraments of a non-Catholic worship. Although also present in the European territories, the phenomenon reached its larger and longer lasting features in the Ottoman Levant and its nearby, as a direct result of the success of the Counter-Reformation missionaries in the conversion of Eastern Christians settled there. In their case, the communicatio became inevitable because of pre-existing personal and family ties, that would be too traumatic to interrupt, and mostly because of the juridical framework of the Ottoman Empire, which considered certain sacraments and rites of passage (baptism, marriage, funerals) as acts covered by social value, thus delegating their implementation to the only officially recognized religious authorities, i.e. the «schismatic» hierarchies. However, during the modern age, Rome came to prohibit the possibility of receiving sacraments from non-Catholic priests in an increasingly strong way: this put converts and even missionaries in serious difficulties, forcing them to find compromise solutions that could be adapted to local conditions, without triggering the persecutions of the Ottoman government, nor the blame or excommunication of Catholic authorities. Specific object of analysis will be the documentation collected between 1718 and 1723 by the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in the course of an inquiry without precedent, during which many religious Catholics active in the East (from Cairo to Georgia, from the Greek islands to Persia) were called to respond to a questionnaire. Such effort was carried out in order to verify the spread of the "communicatio" (especially among the Armenians) and to ponder its real inevitability in the cases mentioned above. A complex and fascinating picture emerges from the several letters of response received, the originals of which were transferred to the Holy Office and then ignored for a long time by scholars.