During Lent of 1921, Don Dolindo was in Rome. Falsely accused of heresy, insanity, and a host of other absurdities, he’d been brought to the Vatican for a trial, and was staying at the nearby Passionist House.
He’d spent Holy week in an agony of calumny, betrayal, and deprivation. He was declared mentally ill and possessed, and was suspended from saying Mass. Excruciatingly, one of his beloved spiritual daughters had betrayed him with false accusations. Dolindo was truly one with Jesus in ignominy, experiencing the sufferings of Calvary as Christ lived His Passion in him.
“Every page of the volume of accusations against me is chock full of calumnies,” he writes in his autobiography from that time. “I feel as if all the evil that desecrates the Church and obstructs the Kingdom of God has been unloaded on me.”
Yet he remained faithful and resigned, as always, to the Will of God, and was filled with forgiveness and love for his persecutors.
“If the Church … wishes to immolate me entirely by pronouncing a wrongful judgment on me, I will obey with serenity, confident of doing God’s Will,” he writes.
When accusations were hurled upon him like an avalanche, he prayed, “My God, may this suffering be reparation for the many offenses against You, especially from unfaithful priests.”
And when he saw the signature of his spiritual daughter beneath the false charges, he requited her betrayal with an increase in love.
“Never have I felt such a fatherly love for this dear child as I did this morning,” he writes. “She seemed to want to present everything as evil, and yet I love her as a father loves a dearest daughter. I would like her to know one day how, even in the depths of the extreme agony she caused me, I prayed emphatically for her, before Blessed Jesus.”
On Holy Saturday of that week, while he was in the throes of this agony of darkness, Don Dolindo experienced a glimpse of heaven’s light in a surprising way.
He was at the Passionist House that day, and during the midday meal, one of the priests began reading aloud an account of Jesus’ Resurrection from a book. Don Dolindo was deeply moved by what he heard.
“Upon hearing the passages read, I felt myself interiorly aflame and wondered within myself what kind of help from God the author must have received, so as to be able to transmit such ardor and zeal to those listening!” he writes.
When the meal was finished, Dolindo raised his eyes and saw that the book, to his astonishment, was his own Life of Jesus Christ!
“Can you guess whose book we were listening to during lunch?” the Passionist Father asked Don Dolindo shortly afterward. Dolindo replied that it was only at the end of the meal that he had realized it was his own work.
“This simple fact, along with the intense emotions I had felt at hearing the words come alive, made me understand what the words of the Good Jesus are for souls,” he writes in his autobiography. “With deep gratitude, I thanked Him for having given me His words!”
There in the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Jesus consoled Don Dolindo with the very words He’d asked the Servant of God to write for Him in an earlier time and place. Dolindo had forgotten those words, but the Divine Author hadn’t. Jesus used the work Dolindo had done in the past to bring the grace he needed in the present moment. In doing so, He offers hope for the rest of us, too: hope that He will use what we’ve done for Him in the past—or rather, what He does through us when we surrender to His Will—to bring the grace we need in the present moment. Grace that extends from the past into the present, and from the present into eternity.
And that gift of grace is not contingent upon whether what we’ve done in the past seemed successful in our own estimation.
“Does the past seem to you like one big failure?” Dolindo writes in Jesus, You Take Over. “It is not so, the devil tempts you and makes you think: ‘I prayed and the opposite happened … I pray and I strive to do it with faith and I have the impression of invoking an even greater disaster … ’
“Does it seem to you that God has abandoned you and has never granted your prayers? It is not so, it has not been so: in Heaven you will know how everything has been a merciful embroidery of God on your loved ones, on your life.
“Do not analyze every painful situation in minute detail anymore: embrace everything in the synthesis of a filial abandonment, full of trust in the Lord who loves you so much, in the Virgin Mary who is your one true Mother and always listens to you, even when you do not believe it.”
Through Don Dolindo, and through everyone who likewise shares in Christ’s Passion, Jesus speaks into the silence of Holy Saturday with His words of consolation, assuring us that He will weave the past, present, and future into a tapestry of grace for those who surrender to His Will, and that no matter how dark the tomb feels, it will always, always be overcome by the light of the Resurrection.
With gratitude to Maria Palma Smith for the use of her English translation of the book Amore, Dolindo, Dolore (Casa Mariana Editrice “Apostolato Stampa”, 2001). Publication of the English translation is forthcoming from Academy of the Immaculate Publishing.
Thanks also to Elie Dib for his translation of Grazia Ruotolo’s book, Jesus, You Take Over.