In 476 AD the powerful Roman empire failed, just for some time in progressive degeneration.
Three were the principal reasons for the collapse: the process of infiltration of Barbarians in the most elevated ranks of the administrative offices; the pressures on the borders and the following territorial infiltrations, in addition to the Arabs, of powerful North European tribes (Vandals, Visigoths, Alemannics, Erulos, Huns); the Christianity rising and prodigious spreading.
The Christian faith and doctrine, born in Palestina, soon spread in the Roman world, threatening with the religious, cultural and social scaffolding on which it was founded upon the empire from the foundations. The Romans reacted with determination, persecuting mercilessly the Christians. In spite of that, the strength of the faith and ideas of the Christianity forcefully imposed and the new religion soon arrived to Tauromenium too.
Pancras from Antioch was named Bishop by Peter Apostle and he was sent to Tauromenium with the mission of evangelizing Sicilians. He arrived in 40 AD, when the emperor was Caligola, and practiced the apostolate for 60 years.
In the island the diffusion of the Christianity was slow and difficult, because hindered by the persisting of pagan cults and by the continuous rising up of heretical and schismatic movements. But Sicily too counts many martyrdoms for faith, above all in the humblest classes. Among these ones the bishop Pancras who, in 100 AD, was pierced through and stoned by the Gentiles. For the martyrdom immediately he was glorified and today S. Pancras is the protector of the town.
In the fourth and in the fifth century After Christ, when the island was invaded first from the Vandals (followers of the arianism) and then from the Goths, the Christians continued in being persecuted and oppressed.
Tauromenium has been an Episcopalian center up to 1082, till this one came abolished from the Roger Count of Altavilla, first Norman conqueror in Sicily.