Two Requests for Padre Pio

One of the first things I remember hearing about Don Dolindo was that Padre Pio said “all of paradise” was in his soul.

Since I had a great devotion to Padre Pio, I immediately wanted to know more about this priest from Naples about whom Padre Pio had said these amazing words. Over the next few years, I went on to learn more about Don Dolindo—much more—but it wasn’t until recently that I finally learned the circumstances surrounding this famous quote: where these two saints were when Padre Pio said it, and what else he said along with it.

As it turns out, Padre Pio said these words to Don Dolindo on October 16, 1953, when the two met in person for the first time.

This meeting had been a long time coming. For decades, Don Dolindo had wanted to meet Padre Pio, “not out of vain curiosity,” he wrote, “but to draw from him at least some ray of that light that shone in his soul.” And Padre Pio had repeatedly expressed to Don Dolindo the desire to meet him in person.

The opportunity finally came when the bishop of Campagna, Msgr. Giuseppe Palatucci, personally arranged for a trip to San Giovanni Rotondo so that Don Dolindo could meet Padre Pio. Don Dolindo had been visiting the bishop when he was very sick in the hospital, and on one of these visits, they had discussed Padre Pio. Don Dolindo had told the bishop of his desire to meet the holy Capuchin friar, and the bishop wanted to help make this happen.

At the time, Don Dolindo had a commitment to preach every evening at 6 p.m. in Naples, which made it hard for him to leave the city. In order to make it possible for Don Dolindo to get back to Naples by 6 p.m., the bishop arranged for them to leave for San Giovanni Rotondo at 4 a.m.

“I went there with two specific desires, of which I did not speak to anyone,” remembered Don Dolindo when he wrote about the events later. The first desire was to ask Padre Pio “for light on my priestly journey and on the consequent tribulations through which I had passed.” Don Dolindo had endured tremendous suffering throughout his life and priesthood, and he longed to know, from Padre Pio’s perspective, whether he was “a deluded or dreamy person” considering all the contradictions he had faced for so long. Was his work pleasing to the Lord, or had he offended Him unwittingly?

Don Dolindo’s second desire was to ask Padre Pio for something blessed by him, that Don Dolindo could take to the sick people he visited and cared for.

When Don Dolindo and the bishop arrived in San Giovanni Rotondo that morning, Padre Pio was in the confessional. Don Dolindo celebrated Mass and then went with the father guardian of the monastery to have coffee in the dining area. The guardian reached into Padre Pio’s drawer, took two tarallini (an Italian snack) from it, and offered them to Don Dolindo, who immediately wanted to have them blessed to bring back for the sick.

Around noon, Don Dolindo and Padre Pio met at last. Seeing Don Dolindo’s head of white hair, Padre Pio joked, “You’ve turned white; snow has fallen on your head?” Then he added, “But the soul is always young.”

Then Don Dolindo asked to confess to Padre Pio, in order to have light.

“There is no need,” Padre Pio told him, “you are all blessed!”

At that point, Don Dolindo didn’t even have to ask the first question he had so fervently desired to ask, about whether Padre Pio would shed light on his painful path and the resistance he faced from all the people who had come up against him. Padre Pio answered the question by reading his mind.

“What can you hope for, my son?” Padre Pio said, with a meaningful gesture of his hand. Then, he added in dialect a phrase that means, “Those people have that head… .”

With that, Padre Pio embraced and blessed Don Dolindo, and they went to the hallway and talked more, surrounded by some of the other friars, including the father guardian from the dining hall.

“I have to accuse Father Dolindo,” the guardian joked to Padre Pio, “because he made me steal from your drawer.”

Don Dolindo, who had indeed asked the guardian to take one more tarallino from Padre Pio’s drawer to have it blessed for the sick, turned to Padre Pio.

“Allow me to go and make you other … thefts?” he asked, hoping to fulfill his second fervent desire for the meeting. But Padre Pio had already read his mind about this desire, too.

“Go ahead, and take what you find there!” Padre Pio replied.

“But I want you to bless them yourself,” Don Dolindo said.

“How come?” Padre Pio replied. “Didn’t you understand that from four o’clock, the time of your departure from Naples, I placed so many things for your sick people, and I placed chickpeas with tarallini, so that you could give a little to each? And I repeatedly blessed everything to make your desire fruitful.”

No one had told Padre Pio that Don Dolindo and the bishop had left Naples at 4 a.m., nor that Don Dolindo had wanted him to bless something for the sick.

Then it was time to say goodbye, so that Don Dolindo could get back to Naples to preach at 6 p.m. He knelt down and asked Padre Pio for his blessing.

“But you are greedy for blessings! You are never satisfied!” said Padre Pio, smiling at Don Dolindo.

Then, with his stigmatized hands, he embraced the Neapolitan priest and pressed him to his heart.

“Listen to me carefully!” Padre Pio said to Don Dolindo, in the presence of all the friars in the hallway. “All of Paradise is in your soul. It has always been there, it is there, and it will be there for all eternity.” Then he kissed him with deep affection.

The mystified friars didn’t know what to make of it. “But did you understand what Padre Pio told you?” they asked Don Dolindo in wonder. “It’s amazing, but what did he mean to tell you?”

The friars didn’t understand, but Don Dolindo did. Padre Pio was addressing the question, the first fervent desire that Don Dolindo had for this meeting, with the answer this poor, humble, long-suffering priest so desperately needed to hear.

“He was responding to the main purpose for which I had gone to him, reassuring me that what had taken place in my poor troubled life, yet so full of many events, was God’s will,” Don Dolindo later wrote as he recounted the events of that day. “So I was not deluded, my path was given by God, it was and it led me to eternal salvation. In my heart I did nothing but humble myself, since I see and saw in myself nothing but nullity and misery.”

That day, he left this inscription in the visitor’s book at San Giovanni Rotondo: “October 16, 1953. Today I visited Padre Pio, and so I thanked Jesus for letting me meet him. The Lord has lit this great light in the Church and may the Lord let it shine, to disillusion and save so many souls. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, O my Mother Mary! Poor priest, Dolindo Ruotolo (Fr. Dain Cohenel)*.”

When Padre Pio died on September 23, 1968, Don Dolindo again wrote of his blessed memories of that October day fifteen years earlier, recalling with deep gratitude the way Padre Pio had answered his two specific intentions without Don Dolindo even having to ask.

*Fr. Dain Cohenel was Don Dolindo’s pen name.

Most of the information from this account is drawn from the article «Tutto il Paradiso è nell’anima tua...»: l’incontro tra san Pio e don Dolindo by Aurora De Victoria; English translation by Elie G. Dib.

Additional information is drawn from the book Amore, Dolindo, Dolore (Casa Mariana Editrice “Apostolato Stampa”, 2001); English translation by Maria Palma Smith. Publication of the English translation is forthcoming from Academy of the Immaculate Publishing.

With gratitude to Elie and Maria for the use of their translations.