Servant of God Don Dolindo Ruotolo (1882-1970)

“I was called Dolindo, which means sorrow”

Dolindo Ruotolo was born in Naples on 6 October 1882, the fifth of eleven children of Raffaele Ruotolo, an engineer and mathematician, and Silvia Valle, of Neapolitan and Spanish nobility.^[8] His father chose this unusual first name; Don Dolindo himself gives its meaning in the title of his autobiography, Fui chiamato Dolindo, che significa dolore (“I was called Dolindo, which means sorrow”).^[9][10] His childhood was harsh: fragile health, straitened means, a violent father who beat his children for trifles, then the separation of his parents.^[11][12] He bore them no grudge and saw in this the beginning of his vocation: “Thus began my life of sorrow, which was always to grow and take so great a part in the adored Passion of Jesus Christ.”^[13]

With the Priests of the Mission (1896-1905)

In 1896, his mother entrusted him, with his brother Elio, to the Apostolic School of the Priests of the Mission, the Lazarists, sons of Saint Vincent de Paul, in their house of the Vergini in Naples.^[14][15] He then entered the novitiate, pronounced his vows on 1 June 1901, asked in vain two years later to leave as a missionary for China, and was ordained priest on 24 June 1905.^[16] As a novice, each morning he asked Jesus for “love, sorrow, humility, faith, meekness, long-suffering, patience”.^[17] Appointed professor to the clerics of the Apostolic School and master of Gregorian chant, he was then sent to Taranto, and later to the seminary of Molfetta in Apulia, where he taught and worked to reform the establishment.^[18][19]

A visionary from Catania and a distorted report

In September 1907, Father Andrea Volpe, his superior, then stationed in Catania, asked Don Dolindo for his opinion on a young woman reputed to be a visionary, Serafina Gentile, whose good faith he himself believed in.^[20][21] Having come to Giovinazzo, near Molfetta, she confessed to Don Dolindo, who observed her for eight days and heard her speak in ecstasy. His assessment was favourable, although she said she witnessed the “manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the form of a child”.^[22]

The report reached the Visitor, the provincial superior of Naples, who distorted it: the “vision” became an “incarnation of the Holy Spirit” — that is, a heresy.^[23][24] Although Don Dolindo, who also defended the good faith of his superior, made clear that there had never been any question of an incarnation of the third Person of the Trinity and that the Church had not yet pronounced on these facts, he was not understood.^[25] They then wanted him to sign a statement presenting Serafina Gentile as a deceiver acting in bad faith. He refused, for he could not in conscience judge this woman’s intentions.^[26]

The Holy Office, the suspension and the expulsion (1907-1908)

On 29 October 1907, Don Dolindo was recalled to Naples, ordered to have nothing more to do with the affair, and forbidden to celebrate Mass.^[27][28] Accused of being a “formal, dogmatizing heretic”, he left for Rome on 4 December, where the Holy Office examined him for almost four months. He retracted nothing of what he had seen and heard, was deprived of the sacraments, then subjected to a psychiatric examination that declared him sane.^[29][30] He would later write:

“I came down from the Holy Office content at having done my duty, or what I then believed to be my duty. I understood why the martyrs had to exult in their torments, and I went to Saint Peter’s to thank Jesus for what had happened and for the strength He had given me.” — Don Dolindo Ruotolo, autobiography^[31]

On 13 April 1908, his superiors summoned him to Naples, expelled him from the Congregation of the Mission and subjected him to an exorcism.^[32] To the exorcist, Bishop Andrulli, he simply said: “Monsignor, the peace I feel in my soul is so great that, of two things one: either I do not have the devil in my body, or you do not know how to cast him out!”^[33]

Rossano and the first rehabilitation (1908-1912)

Back with his family, who took him for mad, he agreed to serve as a manservant for a cousin. Archbishop Orazio Mazzella of Rossano, in Calabria, who had known him in Taranto, then called him as his private secretary.^[34][35] On 9 June 1910, with his confessor’s agreement, Don Dolindo offered himself as a victim to Jesus.^[36] On 8 August 1910, the review of his case succeeded: he could celebrate Mass again, at the end of a suspension which he himself, in his autobiography, reckons at two years, six months and eleven days — counted from the formal suspension pronounced by the Holy Office, not from the ban on celebrating received as early as 29 October 1907.^[37][38] Summoned once more to Rome in December 1911 and struck with further restrictions on confession, preaching and spiritual direction, he was sent back to Naples in 1912, where Cardinal Rampolla restored his faculty to preach.^[39][40]

A calumny carried as far as Benedict XV (1918)

In Naples, from 1913 Don Dolindo preached in many churches, opened a “school of religion” for young women students, founded the Opera di Dio on 27 December 1914, a work of renewed Eucharistic life, then in 1915 the Apostolato Stampa, which spread his writings.^[41][42][43] One of his spiritual daughters, who believed herself neglected, then calumniated him to a former adversary, the Augustinian Domenico Fenocchio.^[44][45]

On 15 September 1918, the latter obtained a private audience with Benedict XV and accused Don Dolindo of spreading novelties contrary to the faith and of having formed a kind of sect. The accusation was false, but the pope at once had his preaching suspended and ordered an inquiry. Don Dolindo, who knew nothing of what was happening in Rome, stopped preaching that very instant.^[46]

Sixteen and a half years of suspension (1921-1937)

In January 1921, before leaving for Rome where the Holy Office was to question him again, Don Dolindo made a vow of abandonment to God’s will.^[47] On 4 March 1921, at the end of a new trial, he was suspended a divinis; his interior locutions with Jesus were judged as well.^[48][49] This second suspension would last sixteen and a half years. On hearing the sentence, he wrote: “I feel as though plunged into the Passion of Jesus. But I forgive and I bless!”^[50]

Throughout those years, he attended Mass each day among the ordinary faithful, usually in the back row, and went to Communion: he wanted everyone to know that he remained a humble son of the Church, which he called “holy, immaculate, indefectible”. To those who accused his judges, he replied: “Be silent, they are my benefactors.”^[51]

Forgiveness granted to Father Fenocchio (1923)

In 1923, Father Fenocchio, ill, confided his many remorse to Don Dolindo and asked his forgiveness. Don Dolindo made him understand that he had already forgiven him and had always loved him, then showed him the remedy for his turmoil:^[52]

“You must not be troubled, but hand everything over to Jesus. […] Say to Jesus, humbling yourself and with full trust: ‘My Jesus, I place in your hands all that I have not done well; find, you, the way to set it right.’ And you, Father, give yourself no thought for anything else.” — Don Dolindo Ruotolo to Father Domenico Fenocchio, 1923^[53]

Seventeen years before the Act of Abandonment, this counsel already contains all its logic: handing over to Jesus what one cannot repair oneself.

The definitive rehabilitation (17 July 1937)

The intervention of Blessed Armida Barelli, foundress of the Young Women’s branch of Italian Catholic Action, broke the deadlock: she obtained from Pius XI the creation of a commission to review the case.^[54] On 17 July 1937, at almost fifty-five, Don Dolindo was definitively rehabilitated.^[55][56] The two suspensions had deprived him of his ministry for almost twenty years, out of thirty-two years of priesthood.^[57]

Saint Joseph dei Nudi, then Saint Joseph dei Vecchi

A priest of the diocese of Naples, Don Dolindo ministered at the church of Saint Joseph dei Nudi, then, from 14 April 1942, as curate of the parish of Saint Joseph dei Vecchi, of which his brother Elio was the parish priest.^[58][59] After the war, he helped build there, as an ex-voto, a replica of the grotto of Lourdes, which gives the parish its present name of Saint Joseph dei Vecchi and Immaculate of Lourdes.^[60] His confessional drew crowds. He was also an exorcist, and he wrote on the back of holy pictures thousands of short thoughts, received in his interior locutions, which he distributed to all as a support in the faith.^[61]

Charisms reported by those close to him

The testimonies gathered by his niece Grazia Ruotolo, a direct witness of his life, and by the journalist Luciano Regolo describe a priest of uncommon charisms: he read hearts, obtained healings through his prayer, knew phenomena of bilocation and nocturnal assaults of the devil, and kept up since his youth an interior dialogue with Jesus, the Virgin, his guardian angel and Saint Gemma Galgani.^[62] These gifts were the fruit of the adoration, contemplative prayer and mortifications with which he prepared himself to receive the faithful.^[63]

A card for Poland (1965)

On 2 July 1965, on the back of a card for the Polish Count Witold Laskowski, Don Dolindo wrote that Poland would resist communism and that there would arise there “a new John”, heir to John III Sobieski, the king who saved Vienna from the Turks in 1683.^[64] Thirteen years later, on 16 October 1978, the Archbishop of Krakow Karol Wojtyła was elected pope under the name of John Paul II; this message explains Don Dolindo’s great influence in Poland.^[65][66]

“In Naples, you have Don Dolindo!”

Don Dolindo and Saint Padre Pio (1887-1968), five years his junior, shared many traits: broken health, nocturnal battles with the devil, mystical phenomena, and serene obedience to the Church in the time of the severest inquiries.^[67]

To the Neapolitans who came to see him, Padre Pio would say: “Why do you come to me? In Naples, you have Don Dolindo!”^[68] He called him “the holy apostle of Naples”^[69] and once wrote to him: “Nothing that has come from Don Dolindo’s pen must be lost. He is a holy priest!”^[70]

“All of Paradise is in your soul”

In the 1950s, Don Dolindo went to San Giovanni Rotondo, his soul still weighed down by his trials.^[71] In the account he wrote after the Capuchin’s death, he tells how Padre Pio embraced him before his confreres and said to him:^[72]

“Listen to me well! All of Paradise is in your soul; it has always been there, it is there, and it will be there for all eternity.” — Saint Padre Pio to Don Dolindo Ruotolo, San Giovanni Rotondo^[73]

For the priest who had been suspected, exorcised and taken for mad, the words came from a saint who had known the same suspicions.

A letter of 6 October 1940

Don Dolindo’s best-known prayer fits on a few sheets. His manuscript, kept in the archives of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate in Naples, was found by the Polish journalist and translator Joanna Bątkiewicz-Brożek, appointed in June 2020 vice-postulator of his cause.^[74] It bears the date of 6 October 1940, its author’s fifty-eighth birthday, and is glued inside a letter of support addressed to his spiritual daughter Elena Montella, a troubled young woman.^[75]

Written in tiny letters on cards smaller than a schoolboy’s exercise-book page, the text thus comes three years after his rehabilitation, and five weeks before his biblical commentary was placed on the Index.^[76][77]

“Leave your affairs to me”

The text is written in the first person: it is Jesus speaking to souls. It opens with a call to peace:^[78]

“Why do you trouble yourselves, fretting? Leave your affairs to me and all will grow calm. I tell you in truth: every act of true, blind, complete abandonment to me produces the effect you desire and resolves thorny situations.” — Act of Abandonment to Jesus, Don Dolindo Ruotolo, 1940^[79]

Abandonment here is not resignation, but childlike trust:

“To abandon oneself means peacefully closing the eyes of the soul, turning one’s thought away from tribulation, and giving oneself over to me, so that I alone may bring you, like children asleep in their mother’s arms, to the other shore.” — Act of Abandonment to Jesus^[80]

The text rereads the Our Father in the same sense: “thy will be done” means saying “take care of everything”.^[81] It ends with the formula that became famous:

“A thousand prayers are not worth a single act of trusting abandonment: remember this well. There is no novena more effective than this one: O Jesus, I abandon myself to you, take care of everything!” — Act of Abandonment to Jesus^[82]

A prayer that became worldwide

Prayed as a novena, the prayer made his name known far beyond Naples: in Poland, Slovakia, England and as far as America.^[83] The first complete biography, Gesù, pensaci tu, by Grazia Ruotolo and Luciano Regolo, appeared in 2020 from Ares in Milan, and simultaneously in Polish in Krakow.^[84]

Thirty-three volumes signed Dain Cohenel

Don Dolindo’s great work is a commentary on Sacred Scripture, La Sacra Scrittura. Psicologia, Commento, Meditazione, whose first volume he published in 1930 under the pseudonym Dain Cohenel — that is, “Dolindo, priest of God”.^[85][86] The work joins explanation of the text, a psychological reading and meditation; before 1940, thirteen volumes already covered the Old Testament, from Genesis to Sirach.^[87][88]

The whole would reach thirty-three volumes, alongside many works of theology, ascetics and mysticism, collections of letters and autobiographical writings.^[89] The Casa Mariana Editrice in Frigento, Campania, which took over the Apostolato Stampa, reprints his entire work today.^[90]

Placed on the Index, and submission (1940)

On 13 November 1940, the cardinals of the Holy Office condemned the work and had it entered on the Index of Forbidden Books “until it be corrected” (donec corrigatur); Pius XII approved the decision the next day, and the decree was published on 20 November.^[91] On 6 December, the Holy Office officially announced that “the priest Dolindo Ruotolo (Dain Cohenel) humbly submitted to the decree”.^[92] He would several times ask in what respect to correct his text, without receiving an answer; after his death, the Index having been abolished in 1966, the commentary could be published in full.^[93]

The 1941 booklet and the Biblical Commission

In 1941, an anonymous forty-eight-page booklet, Un gravissimo pericolo per la Chiesa e per le anime (“A most grave danger for the Church and for souls”), was sent to the cardinals, the bishops of Italy and general superiors; it denounced the “critico-scientific system” of interpreting Scripture.^[94] Its author was Don Dolindo. In the climate following the Modernist crisis, he defended his meditative reading of the Bible and the primacy of the spiritual sense, and called into question professors of the Pontifical Biblical Institute.^[95][96]

On 20 August 1941, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, chaired by Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, replied with a letter to the bishops of Italy, approved by Pius XII.^[97] It reproached the booklet for its lack of prudence and the violence of its attacks, then recalled four principles: the pursuit of the literal sense, the juridical rather than critical authority of the Vulgate, the legitimacy of textual criticism and the usefulness of Oriental languages. It also affirmed the reality of the spiritual sense, on condition that it rest on the literal sense:

“It is a proposition of faith, to be held as a fundamental principle, that Sacred Scripture contains, besides the literal sense, a spiritual or typical sense, as the practice of Our Lord and of the Apostles teaches us.” — Pontifical Biblical Commission, letter of 20 August 1941^[98]

Two years later, the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (30 September 1943) held the same balance: “the exegete, just as he must seek out and expound the literal sense of the words, as the sacred writer intended and expressed it, so must he expound the spiritual sense, provided it is certainly established that God intended it”.^[99][100]

Paralysis and death

In 1960, a cerebral thrombosis paralysed the left side of his body, without reducing him to inaction; in June 1965, he celebrated sixty years of priesthood.^[101][102] He died in Naples on 19 November 1970, aged eighty-eight, after three days of broncho-pneumonia. He died peacefully, he who had made his life an act of trusting abandonment to God.^[103]

The tomb at Saint Joseph dei Vecchi

Don Dolindo rests in the right aisle of the church of Saint Joseph dei Vecchi and Immaculate of Lourdes in Naples.^[104] Near his tomb, this epitaph can be read:^[105]

“You left me maimed in my priesthood, O holy Church of God. Pruned by tribulation, no one shall detach me from you. My priesthood blossomed precisely in humiliation. And like ivy with a hundred roots, it clung to your eternal priesthood, Jesus.” — Epitaph of Don Dolindo Ruotolo, Saint Joseph dei Vecchi, Naples^[106]

According to a Neapolitan custom, the faithful knock three times on the marble of his tomb, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to entrust their petitions to him, as he himself had suggested in his spiritual testament; every 19th of the month, the anniversary day of his death, the church fills up.^{[107][108][109]}

Attempts without sequel (1978-1997)

Don Dolindo’s reputation for holiness has kept growing since his death, but his cause has had a long journey.^[110] The first steps go back to 1978, on the initiative of the Conventual Franciscans, who in 1995 presented the formal request to open the diocesan process, the supplex libellus. In January 1997, the Archbishop of Naples sought from the Holy See the necessary nihil obstat, without obtaining an answer; the general postulation of the Franciscans of the Immaculate then took up the case, with no more success.^[111]

The 2021 decree

A decree of Archbishop Domenico Battaglia, Metropolitan Archbishop of Naples, made public on 20 May 2021, established that the parties to the cause of the “Servant of God Dolindo Ruotolo, diocesan priest” would be the Archdiocese of Naples and the parish of Saint Joseph dei Vecchi and Immaculate of Lourdes.^[112][113] This decree officially opened the cause at diocesan level. It does not pronounce on the heroicity of the virtues, which belongs to a later examination by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints: Don Dolindo thus bears the title of Servant of God, not that of Venerable.

This priest, deprived of his ministry for almost twenty years, left the Church a prayer of trust that millions of the faithful pray today.^[114] He described himself thus:

“I am not a saint, I am not a gentle soul, virtuous, full of good inclinations and choice virtues; I am on the contrary the synthesis of all human misery, a living monument of God’s mercy. The Lord worked much in me precisely to enlarge the hearts of others in boundless trust in His mercy.” — Don Dolindo Ruotolo^[115]

• Saint Padre Pio (1887-1968), who sent to Don Dolindo the pilgrims who came from Naples.
• How to grow in abandonment to God and What the saints say about abandonment to God.
• Venerable Marthe Robin (1902-1981) and Servant of God Marcel Van (1928-1959), two other souls of abandonment in the twentieth century.
• The spiritual sense of Scripture, to place the 1941 biblical debate.
• Read Don Dolindo: Fui chiamato Dolindo, che significa dolore. Pagine di autobiografia, Frigento, Casa Mariana Editrice, 2017; and his biography by Grazia Ruotolo and Luciano Regolo, Gesù, pensaci tu, Milan, Ares, 2020.