Blessed Dominic Barberi (1792-1849)

Key dates

An orphaned childhood in the hills of Viterbo

Domenico Giovanni Barberi was born on 22 June 1792 at Pallanzana, a modest farming hamlet near Viterbo, in the Papal States, into a family of peasants from Latium with neither schooling nor means.^[41][42] Misfortune struck him early: his father died when he was only three, in 1795; his mother followed him to the grave when he was eleven, around 1803.^[43] A complete orphan, the child was taken in by his maternal uncle, Bartolomeo Pacelli, who raised him in the neighbouring hamlet of Merlano.^[44][45]

He then abandoned all schooling to become a shepherd and farm boy, labour that occupied his adolescence until he was about twenty-one.^[46] An old Capuchin priest nevertheless taught him the rudiments of reading — a late apprenticeship which the young Domenico used with an eagerness he would later regret, confessing that he had overloaded his adolescent imagination with chivalric romances, notably Ariosto's Orlando furioso, before turning to sterner reading.^[47]

The providential encounter with the outlawed Passionists

Under the French occupation, Napoleon suppressed the religious congregations of the Papal States and dispersed their members.^[48] Several Passionists, driven from their convents, took refuge near Viterbo: the young Domenico befriended them and served their Mass daily, absorbing their spirituality centred on the Passion of Christ.^[49] One episode decided his vocation, according to biographical tradition: alone among the young men of his village, he escaped Napoleonic military conscription — a sign he interpreted as an explicit divine call.^[50]

On 4 September 1813, in the square at Viterbo, the young man made the definitive choice of religious life over worldly attachments.^[51] His vocation, from the outset, turned toward a precise goal, singular for an Italian peasant of the early nineteenth century: the evangelisation of England, in line with the wish formed, as early as the eighteenth century, by the founder of the Passionists, Saint Paul of the Cross, for the conversion of that kingdom separated from Rome since Henry VIII's rupture.^[52][53]

Entering religion and the name Dominic of the Mother of God

Dominic entered the Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ in 1814, as soon as the reopening of the convents of the Papal States allowed it after Napoleon's fall.^[54][55] There he received, according to the usage of the order, a religious name: Dominic of the Mother of God (Domenico della Madre di Dio), under which he is still officially listed in the Roman Martyrology.^[56] Unusually for the congregation, he was first admitted as a lay brother before being raised, by exception, to the clerical novitiate — an early sign of a judgement passed on his intellectual dispositions, which he strove all his life to minimise out of humility.^[57]

He was ordained priest on 1 March 1818.^[58][59][60]

A brilliant teacher and a prolific theologian

His studies completed, the young Passionist priest taught philosophy and theology for some ten years, first at the convent of Sant'Angelo, then at Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill in Rome — one of the order's historic mother houses.^[61][62] From this teaching came a considerable written output: by the most generous estimates, Dominic Barberi wrote in his lifetime more than one hundred and eighty works, between treatises, sermons and controversial writings — including at least fifteen substantial treatises of philosophy and theology already completed before his definitive departure for England in 1840.^[63][64]

Among these writings are complete courses of philosophy and moral theology, a work on the Passion of Christ, a Divina Paraninfa devoted to the sorrows of the Virgin for the use of nuns, and a refutation of the theses of Félicité de Lamennais, then in full controversy with Rome.^[65] In 1841, in the final stretch before his passage to England, he wrote a Letter to the Professors of Oxford in Latin, of which much more will be said below.^[66][67]

Paul VI, in his 1963 beatification address, retained one point in particular: Barberi had, in one of his theological treatises devoted to pontifical infallibility, “anticipated with a sure vision of doctrine” the definition that the First Vatican Council would formulate decades later.^[68] On that occasion the Pope described him as a theologian, a philosopher — and, more broadly, a mind ahead of his time.^[69]

Administrative offices and first links with England

Without ever interrupting the missions and retreats he preached across Italy, Barberi successively held the offices of rector, provincial consultor and then provincial of his congregation.^[70] In 1830, at thirty-eight, he was charged with founding a new convent at Lucca.^[71]

It was also in 1830 that, according to the account reported by Paul VI himself, a decisive episode took place: praying one day, toward the end of September or the beginning of October, before the altar of the Virgin, Dominic received the intimate and irrevocable conviction of an apostolic call destining him for England and northern Europe — territories where the Passionists had never yet set foot.^[72] The same year, he assisted an English converted gentleman, Sir Henry Trelawney, on questions of liturgical rubrics, and befriended two major figures of the reborn English Catholicism: Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, a converted aristocrat and fervent partisan of Christian reunion, and George Spencer (the future Father Ignatius of the Mother of God), an Anglican priest turned convert then staying in Rome (1830-1832).^[73] From this meeting came a sustained correspondence which kept alive, in Barberi, the hope of an English mission.^[74]

“Toward the end of September or the beginning of October, about noon, as he was praying before the altar of the Virgin, [his apostolic mission to England] was revealed to him...” — Pope Paul VI, address for the beatification of Dominic of the Mother of God, 27 October 1963^[75]

Twenty-eight years of waiting

The longing for England did not immediately translate into a concrete foundation: the superiors of the congregation, prudently, deferred the project several times.^[76] Barberi, in his correspondence of those years, let his growing impatience show through: according to the testimony preserved, he wrote then that “it seems to me that each hour lasts a thousand years before I see my dear England”.^[77] It was not until 1840 — twenty-six years after his entry among the Passionists in 1814 — that the project finally became reality, at the age of forty-eight.^[78]

In June 1840, Dominic Barberi founded, near Tournai, at Ere, the very first Passionist house established outside Italy — a milestone in the history of the congregation founded a century earlier by Saint Paul of the Cross.^[79][80] He became its superior.^[81]

The beginnings were harsh: material poverty, illnesses among the brothers of the fledgling community, and a limited mastery of French which complicated the settling-in.^[82] But the community eventually took root, and Barberi himself recovered his health there after a period of physical trial.^[83] In its founder's mind, however, Ere was only a staging post: the true objective, for more than twenty-five years, remained England itself.^[84]

Landing at Folkestone

In October 1841, Dominic Barberi landed at Folkestone, on the English coast.^[85][86] A witness of the time, quoted by English Passionist tradition, would later sum up the scene in words that became classic: “the second spring began neither at Newman's conversion nor at the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy; it began on a bleak October day in 1841, when a funny-looking little Italian priest stumbled down the gangway of a ship.”^[87]

The welcome was far from warm: the English Catholics of the time, a prudent minority chastened by centuries of legal penalisation, feared that so conspicuous a religious presence might revive persecutions.^[88] Barberi himself met with mockery and incomprehension from his very first steps on English soil.^[89]

Aston Hall, first Passionist house in England

After twenty-eight years of effort and waiting since entering religion, Dominic Barberi established the Passionists in February 1842 at Aston Hall, in Staffordshire, renamed Saint Michael's Retreat — the congregation's very first house on English soil.^[90][91] The small community grew rapidly, soon numbering some fifteen religious.^[92]

Hostility, stones and conversions at Stone

From his residence at Aston Hall, Barberi walked, three times a week and for nearly two years, to the neighbouring town of Stone, where he celebrated Mass in a modest inn, the Crown Inn.^[93] The journey did not pass without trial: insults, threats and stones regularly accompanied his movements — he even kept a scar on his face from them.^[94]

His reaction to this hostility itself became an instrument of evangelisation. According to the account preserved by Passionist tradition, when young men of the town threw stones at him, Barberi picked up each one, kissed it, and slipped it into his pocket rather than answering with anger.^[95] Two of these young men, witnessing this unexpected gentleness, converted to Catholicism after observing the priest's patience under the blows.^[96]

It was at Stone, precisely, that a twenty-year-old Englishwoman, Elizabeth Prout, witnessed the same scene: she saw Barberi “treated like a criminal, stoned, insulted and covered in mud” as he went to say Mass, and was overwhelmed by the gentleness and humility with which he bore this treatment.^[97] This encounter decided her conversion, then, years later, the foundation of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion, now present on five continents.^[98]

“Have confidence, my Sisters. You are all far too old and far too ugly.” — Dominic Barberi, replying humorously to nuns worried to see him instructing young converts^[99]

The first procession of the Blessed Sacrament since the Reformation

In 1844, Aston Hall organised a public procession of the Blessed Sacrament (Corpus Christi) through the streets of the neighbourhood, gathering thousands of faithful and onlookers — regarded as the first public procession of its kind in modern England.^[100][101] The event, unthinkable a few years earlier in a country where Catholicism remained legally and socially marginalised, symbolically marked the rooting of the Catholic presence willed by Barberi.^[102]

Since the early 1830s, a group of Anglican theologians gathered around Oxford — the Oxford Movement, of which John Henry Newman was one of the most prominent figures — had been publishing a series of Tracts for the Times rediscovering, against the ambient liberal Protestantism, the patristic, sacramental and episcopal heritage of the early Church.^[103] Barberi followed this development with growing interest from Italy, corresponding with Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle and George Spencer on the movement's developments.^[104]

In 1841, shortly before his definitive departure for England, he wrote a Letter to the Professors of Oxford, in Latin, in which he set out his conviction that the men of the Oxford Movement would be the providential instrument of England's return to Rome.^[105][106] The text met with notable circulation: it was published in French translation in the Catholic newspaper L'Univers.^[107] According to several biographers, Newman and his circle studied this letter with particular attention — a first, indirect contact through writing, before the personal meeting that would take place four years later.^[108]

This confidence placed in the Oxford Movement by an Italian missionary still unknown in England testifies to a remarkable spiritual discernment: at the time Barberi wrote his letter, nothing yet allowed anyone to foresee that the most committed wing of the movement — Newman foremost — would take the step toward Rome.

A man on the road for years

In autumn 1845, John Henry Newman, retired for several years at Littlemore, near Oxford, had completed his slow and painful intellectual and spiritual migration from Anglicanism to the conviction that the Roman Catholic Church alone bears the fullness of the apostolic Tradition.^[109] He was then finishing his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the work meant to justify theologically the step he was about to take.^[110]

A friend of Newman at Littlemore, John Dobree Dalgairns, had already been received by Barberi at Aston, on Michaelmas Day (29 September) 1845 — an immediate precedent which brought Newman still closer to his own decision.^[111]

Newman's letter of 8 October 1845

Newman himself left a written testimony, dated that very day, of his waiting for Father Dominic. In a letter sent to several friends on the evening of 8 October 1845, as he finished writing his Essay on Development, he wrote:

“Littlemore, October 8th, 1845. I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist, who, from his youth, has been led to have distinct and direct thoughts, first of the countries of the North, then of England. After thirty years' (almost) waiting, he was, without his own act, sent here. But he has had little to do with conversions. I saw him here for a few minutes on St. John Baptist's day last year. He is a simple, holy man; and withal gifted with remarkable powers. He does not know of my intention; but I mean to ask of him admission into the one Fold of Christ…” — John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865), letter of 8 October 1845^[112]

This letter, incorporated as it stands by Newman twenty years later into his spiritual autobiography, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, is the surest primary source for dating and understanding Newman's state of mind on the eve of his reception into the Church.^[113]

The general confession and reception into the Church

Father Dominic, then travelling from Aston toward Belgium via London, stopped at Littlemore on the evening of 8 October 1845, under driving rain.^[114][115] Newman himself relates, in the Apologia, that scarcely had the religious begun to dry himself before the fireplace than he, Newman, knelt at his feet and asked him to hear his general confession.^[116] It lasted a good part of the night.^[117]

The next morning, 9 October 1845, Newman, aged forty-four, was received into the Catholic Church by Dominic Barberi.^[118][119] Father Dominic celebrated Mass the following morning for Newman and two companions likewise received on that occasion.^[120] The news, immediately known, shook religious and intellectual England: the most admired man of Oxford, at the height of his reputation, renounced his university career, his Anglican friendships and his social standing to join a Church then poor and socially despised in the kingdom.^[121]

Newman's testimony about Father Dominic

Years later, in a letter addressed to Cardinal Lucido Maria Parocchi, in Rome, Newman returned to this decisive meeting in words that have remained famous and are widely reported by his biographers:

“Father Dominic was an admirable missionary and a most zealous preacher. He had a great part in my own conversion and in that of others. There was something holy in his very look. When his figure came into sight, I was moved to the depths of my soul in a strange way. The cheerfulness and affability of his manners, even amid all his holiness, were in themselves a holy sermon. It is no wonder that I became his convert and his penitent.” — John Henry Newman, letter to Cardinal Parocchi, quoted by Alexander Lucie-Smith, The Catholic Herald, 28 August 2017^[122]

Newman explained elsewhere that he had needed, before taking the step, to see embodied in a Catholic a concrete, austere holiness, lived “poor and barefoot among the most forsaken members of society” — and that he found precisely this embodiment in the little Italian religious who received him at Littlemore.^[123] Archbishop Bernard Longley would later sum up this intuition: Newman “recognised in Blessed Dominic something he had been seeking — a moving example of goodness and holiness confirming his intellectual conviction that the claims of the Catholic Church were true”.^[124]

The account would not be complete without a detail that says everything about the man's character: at the very moment of receiving Newman, still dripping with rain before the hearth, Barberi could not help, according to Passionist tradition, slipping in one of his most questionable puns — “let us wait a little more and a little more will be done for the glory of God” — his own way of defusing the solemnity of the moment without ever diminishing its spiritual gravity.^[125]

Newman was neither the first nor the only notable convert of Father Dominic. In seven years of English mission, Barberi received into the Church several hundred people, clerics and lay alike, and founded three churches and several chapels.^[126][127] The following table presents the conversions most significant for the history of English Catholicism:

These conversions are not isolated episodes: they trace, around Barberi, a whole network of figures who would durably structure English Catholicism of the second nineteenth century — clergy, women's and men's religious life, intellectuals.^[132]

The last years of Barberi's life were marked by a continuous expansion of the Passionist presence on English soil. In 1846, a new foundation was born at Woodchester, in Gloucestershire.^[133] In 1848, the Passionists settled at Hampstead, in London.^[134] At the time of his death, Barberi was still negotiating the establishment of a retreat at Sutton, in Lancashire — the very place where his own remains would one day rest.^[135]

Appointed provincial of the English mission of his congregation, Barberi tirelessly extended his field of action: missions and retreats preached across the industrial towns of northern England — Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bilston — but also in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.^[136][137] His weakened voice and pronounced Italian accent in no way prevented crowds from flocking: several contemporary witnesses attributed the effectiveness of his preaching to the sheer evidence of his personal holiness alone, regardless even of his imperfect mastery of English.^[138]

A life of austerity and charity

Despite chronic health troubles — hernia, rheumatism, heart palpitations — Barberi allowed himself no rest after his missions, avoided the fire even in the depths of winter, and would at times go a whole day without eating.^[139] He showed, by contrast, an almost maternal tenderness toward the sick religious of his community and the victims of the typhus and cholera striking England in the late 1840s.^[140] That same decade saw the great cholera epidemics ravage English towns — a scourge which would play, as we shall see, a macabre part in the very circumstances of his death.^[141]

The last journey to Woodchester

On 27 August 1849, Dominic Barberi travelled from London's Paddington station toward Woodchester, where he was to dedicate a new church.^[142][143] Near Pangbourne, in Berkshire, he was seized by a violent heart attack.^[144]

The cholera that closed the inn doors

In the midst of the cholera epidemic then striking England, no hotel agreed to take in a visibly ill man: fear of contagion outweighed all compassion.^[145] He was finally carried to Reading, to an inn then named the Railway Tavern — later renamed the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel — at 57 Caversham Road.^[146] The original building, hit by an arson attack in 2001, has since been demolished; a commemorative plaque, smaller than the usual format of English blue plaques, still marks the spot.^[147]

“Thy will be done”

Barberi waited more than an hour for a doctor to arrive, in an intense yet peaceful agony, repeating tirelessly a single sentence: “Thy will be done.”^[148] According to another biographical tradition, his last articulated words were: “O Jesus, I now know what torments Thou didst endure on the Cross.”^[149] He died in the afternoon, at the age of fifty-seven, before the longed-for doctor could arrive in time.^[150]

“Thy will be done” — last repeated words of Blessed Dominic Barberi, dying at Reading, 27 August 1849^[151]

Funeral and burial

The same inhabitants of Stone who had once mocked and stoned him lined the streets as his body passed, in a sign of late but sincere veneration.^[152] He was finally buried in the church of Saint Anne and Blessed Dominic, at Sutton (Merseyside) — the very shrine whose establishment he was negotiating at the time of his death — where the remains of Father Ignatius Spencer and Mother Elizabeth Prout also rest today.^[153][154]

Opening of the cause and decree on heroic virtue

Dominic Barberi's spiritual writings were approved in two stages, on 12 April 1905 and then on 20 November 1940.^[155] His cause for beatification officially opened on 14 June 1911, under the title Servant of God.^[156] On 16 May 1937, Pope Pius XI signed the decree recognising that he had practised the virtues “to a heroic degree”, and Barberi officially became Venerable.^[157]

The miracle accepted

For the beatification, the Church accepted the instantaneous healing of a young Italian Passionist student, suffering for more than a year from a tumour of the knee resistant to all treatment: on the eve of a particularly painful remedy, the patient prayed to Fr Dominic, placing on his knee a picture torn from a biography — and the examination then found the complete disappearance of the tumour.^[158] The Holy See ruled on the basis of the statements of the two doctors who had treated the knee in vain and the sworn depositions of two specialists appointed to investigate the facts.^[159]

Beatification by Paul VI, during the Second Vatican Council

On 27 October 1963, during a session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI beatified Dominic Barberi in Saint Peter's Square, in the course of a pontifical Mass celebrated in the chapel of the Chair of Saint Peter in the morning, followed in the afternoon by the veneration of the new blessed's relics.^[160][161] The context was not indifferent: beatifying, in the midst of a council devoted notably to Christian unity, a religious who had devoted his life to England's reconciliation with Rome, carried a symbolic weight which Paul VI did not fail to underline by hailing him as an “apostle of unity”.^[162]

Paul VI's words

In his address, Paul VI stressed three traits of the new blessed: the theologian who had “more than one claim to outstanding merit”; the philosopher whose thought on pontifical infallibility had preceded the First Vatican Council's definition; and the missionary whose example of holiness, more than argument, had decided Newman to take the step toward Rome.^[163] His liturgical feast was fixed on 27 August, the anniversary of his death — the Passionist family traditionally celebrates it on 26 August.^[164][165]

A shared shrine with his own converts

The shrine of Saint Anne and Blessed Dominic, at Sutton (Merseyside), remains today the principal place of veneration of Dominic Barberi.^[166] He rests there alongside Father Ignatius Spencer and Mother Elizabeth Prout — two of the souls whom his preaching had led, directly or indirectly, to Catholic sainthood.^[167] A relic of the blessed was moreover given, in 2013, to the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, the structure created by Benedict XVI to welcome entire Anglican communities into the Catholic Church — the fulfilment, in a sense, of Barberi's very dream.^[168]

Newman and Barberi, two linked causes

The canonisation of John Henry Newman, in 2019, revived the attention paid to the man who had received him into the Church. As early as 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of Barberi's beatification, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Archbishop Bernard Longley, expressed the wish to see the Church one day recognise together the sainthood of Newman and of his blessed Passionist.^[169] Blessed Dominic Barberi thus remains, for now, on the threshold of canonisation — precisely where Newman himself stood for more than a century.

An intercession for Christian unity

What Catholic memory retains first of Dominic Barberi is neither the scale of his theological output — considerable though it was — nor the number of his foundations, but the way in which a simple man, ill-prepared by human standards, became the instrument of a rapprochement between two Christian traditions separated for three centuries. The Roman Martyrology sums it up in one sentence: he “worked to restore Christian unity and received many people into the Catholic Church”.^[170] Preaching, silently receiving blows from stones, kissing the stone that wounds: it was through these concrete gestures, even more than through his learned treatises, that the orphaned shepherd of Pallanzana became the Apostle of England.

• Saint John Henry Newman — Dominic Barberi's most famous convert, received into the Church on 9 October 1845
• Saint Paul of the Cross — founder of the Congregation of the Passion, whose missionary dream for England Barberi fulfilled
• Anglicanism — the religious tradition from which Newman came, and the context of the Oxford Movement in which Barberi intervened
• Elizabeth Prout — converted by Barberi at Stone, foundress of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion
• George (Ignatius) Spencer — Anglican priest turned convert, who became a Passionist