Bienheureux Dominique de la Mère de Dieu
Prêtre passioniste (+ 1848)
Dominique Barberi était prêtre religieux passioniste. Originaire de Palazano, près de Viterbe au nord de Rome, il fut nommé provincial de la mission anglaise de sa congrégation. Il travailla à restaurer l'unité des chrétiens et en reçut un assez grand nombre dans l'Église catholique. C'est par lui que John Henry Newman (1801-1890) voulut être reçu dans l'Église romaine en 1845. Il mourut à Reading en Angleterre.
Martyrologe romain
SOURCE : https://nominis.cef.fr/contenus/saint/10312/Bienheureux-Dominique-de-la-Mere-de-Dieu.html
Bx Dominique Barberi
Dominique de la Mère de Dieu est né dans une modeste
famille de paysans à Palazano, près de Viterbe (Italie) en 1792. A 22 ans, il
abandonne les travaux des champs, pour entrer chez les passionistes, où il
manifeste des dons exceptionnels aux plans intellectuel et spirituel. En 1814
il est reçu chez les Passionistes, sous le nom de Dominique de la Mère de
Dieu. Il est ordonné prêtre en 1818.Il s'adonne intensément à
l'enseignement, au ministère de la parole, à la direction spirituelle, et à la
rédaction de nombreux écrits philosophiques, théologiques et pastoraux. De
Rome, il est envoyé en Belgique en 1840, où il fonde à Ere près de Tournai la
première maison passioniste hors d'Italie Il ira ensuite en Angleterre,.
où Il s'intéresse de près au Mouvement d'Oxford, et entretient un dialogue avec
ses membres. En 1841, il rédige sa fameuse Lettre aux professeurs d'Oxford,
que John Henry Newman étudia avec beaucoup de soin. C'est lui qui accompagne
Newman dans sa démarche de conversion, qui le conduira de l'anglicanisme jusque
dans l'église catholique.)
Voici ce que l’on trouve à ce sujet :
Le 8 octobre 1845. Logé sur l'impériale de la
diligence, le P. Dominique Barberi, religieux passioniste italien, a voyagé
toute la journée sous une pluie battante. Ce soir-là, il arrive trempé à
Littlemore, à cinq kilomètres d'Oxford, dans la cure du prêtre anglican John
Henry Newman.Depuis trois ans, ce dernier y mène avec quelques amis une vie
quasi monastique. À peine le P. Barberi a-t-il commencé à se sécher devant le
feu de cheminée que son hôte s'agenouille à ses pieds et lui demande d'entendre
sa confession générale. Elle dure une partie de la nuit et le lendemain matin,
Newman est reçu dans l'Église catholique, à l'âge de 44 ans, avec deux autres
membres de sa communauté.
Dominique meurt d'épuisement dans la gare de
Reading en 1849, à Sutton, où sa tombe devient un lieu de pèlerinage pour les
catholiques anglais.
SOURCE : http://passionistedepolynesie.e-monsite.com/pages/passionistes/bienheureux/bx-dominique-barberi.html
John Henry Newman, un intellectuel converti, fidèle à
lui-même et à la vérité
De l'Église anglicane à l'Église catholique,
l'itinéraire intellectuel et spirituel du cardinal Newman témoigne d'une grande
continuité spirituelle
Céline HOYEAU,
le 17/09/2010 à 15:00
Modifié le 16/09/2010 à 15:20
Le 8 octobre 1845. Logé sur l'impériale de la
diligence, le P. Dominique Barberi, religieux passioniste italien, a voyagé
toute la journée sous une pluie battante. Ce soir-là, il arrive trempé à
Littlemore, à cinq kilomètres d'Oxford, dans la cure du prêtre anglican John
Henry Newman.
Depuis trois ans, ce dernier y mène avec quelques amis
une vie quasi monastique. À peine le P. Barberi a-t-il commencé à se sécher
devant le feu de cheminée que son hôte s'agenouille à ses pieds et lui demande
d'entendre sa confession générale. Elle dure une partie de la nuit et le
lendemain matin, Newman est reçu dans l'Église catholique, à l'âge de 44 ans,
avec deux autres membres de sa communauté.
Cette conversion est pour lui une rupture personnelle
terrible. Cet homme timide, mais qui aime s'entourer d'amitiés solides, perd
ses compagnons et se voit rejeter par sa famille. Il doit aussi renoncer aux
honneurs et aux revenus de son poste prestigieux d'enseignant-chercheur d'Oriel
College, à Oxford, où il a passé vingt-huit ans.
Renouveler l'Église anglicane en l'enracinant dans la
tradition apostolique
Et pourtant, ce 9 octobre 1845 s'inscrit pour lui dans
une continuité, la fidélité à tout ce qu'il a vécu jusque-là. Il a
l'impression, comme il l'écrira par la suite, de « rentrer au port après une
violente tempête ». « Vivre c'est changer ; être parfait, c'est avoir changé
souvent », résume-t-il aussi dans son Essai sur le développement de la doctrine
chrétienne, ajoutant aussitôt que si « l'idée » du christianisme change, c'est
« afin de rester fidèle à elle-même ».
Une première expérience de Dieu vécue à l'âge de 15
ans (« moi-même et mon Créateur ») a été décisive dans cette évolution
personnelle. Ordonné prêtre en 1825, célibataire par vocation, il devient
bientôt le chef de file du Mouvement d'Oxford : les « Tractariens » veulent
renouveler l'Église anglicane en l'enracinant de nouveau dans la tradition
apostolique, la liturgie, la prière et les sacrements.
Très soucieux de ses paroissiens de l'Oratoire de
Birmingham
Leur source privilégiée : les Pères de l'Église.
Newman retire de leur lecture la conviction que la tradition n'est pas un dépôt
figé et répétitif, mais se déploie dans une fidélité créatrice à l'enseignement
des apôtres. Reste à discerner où cette fidélité est la plus grande Newman est
alors l'un des prédicateurs anglais les plus renommés. On vient de loin pour
écouter ses sermons paroissiaux prêchés le dimanche à Oxford. Ses pamphlets
polémiques, où il manie volontiers l'ironie, sont diffusés dans toute l'Angleterre.
Mais après des années d'efforts et de débats
intérieurs, désespérant de parvenir à réformer l'Église anglicane, cet anglican
viscéralement anti-papiste en vient à estimer que l'Église catholique est le
véritable successeur de l'Église des apôtres.
Entré dans l'Église catholique, il est ordonné prêtre
en 1847 et retrouve dans l'Oratoire de saint Philippe Néri la vie communautaire
fraternelle qu'il avait recherchée à Littlemore. Comme dans sa paroisse
anglicane, il se montre très soucieux de ses paroissiens de l'Oratoire de
Birmingham.
«Les saints ne sont pas des intellectuels»
D'une grande sensibilité, il souffre vivement des
attaques injustifiées dont il est l'objet, dans le monde anglican, mais aussi
au sein de l'Église catholique : si la puissance de ses intuitions théologiques
a fait de lui aujourd'hui le « penseur invisible de Vatican II », selon la
formule de Jean Guitton, ce converti trop brillant est à son époque incompris,
parfois même soupçonné d'hérésie
Son autobiographie spirituelle, l' Apologia pro
vita sua (1864), ne suffit pas alors à dissiper les malentendus, mais
achève de consacrer son immense talent littéraire. La reconnaissance viendra du
pape Léon XIII qui le crée cardinal en 1879.
Lorsqu'il s'éteint en 1890 à Birmingham, il laisse en
héritage au moins 40 ouvrages, 20 000 lettres, douze volumes de sermons, des
journaux intimes, et même deux romans « Les saints ne sont pas des
intellectuels, ils n'aiment pas les auteurs classiques, ils n'écrivent pas des
romans » : ainsi John Henry Newman pensait-il faire taire ceux qui, de son
vivant déjà, voulaient le canoniser.
Also known as
Dominic of the Mother
of God
Apostle to England
Profile
Born to a poor farm family, orphaned by
age eight, and raised by an aunt and uncle on a farm in Merlano, Italy.
An uneducated shepherd boy,
he spent his time with the flocks in prayer.
Met many Passionist priests exiled from France during
the repressions of Napoleon. During prayers with
them he received a divine message that he would work in northern Europe and England.
One day in 1814,
just before he entered into an arranged marriage,
he slipped away from his family and joined the Passionists,
taking the name Dominic of the Mother of God.
Though he had no education,
Dominic proved to be an excellent student,
quick to grasp philosophy and theology. Ordained in Rome on 1 March 1821. Teacher and
spiritual director, writer on theology and
homiletics. One of his works was based on the idea of bringing modern science
to philosphical studies;
condemned in its day, it’s now seen as preparing the way for some of the reforms
of Pope Leo
XIII. Feeling always drawn to England,
he worked to learn English, and met with any English visitors
to Rome that
he could find.
Delegate to the general chapter of
his Order in 1833.
With Father Peter
Magagnotto, Father Seraphim
Giammaria, and Brother Crispin Cotta, he established the first Passionist presence
at Ere, Belgium in 1840,
the first Passionist monastery outside Italy.
Dominic, however, continued to press the need for work in England,
and he was finally assigned to work there, establishing the first residence
during Holy Week of 1842.
Tireless preacher and
home missioner, working for the return of anti–Catholic England to
unity with Rome. Received many to the faith including
John Henry Cardinal Newman’s conversion to Catholicism and Father George
Spencer’s entrance to the Passionists;
both their Causes for beatification are
being investigated.
Born
22 June 1792 at Viterbo, Italy
3pm 27 August 1849 at
Reading, Berkshire, England of
a heart
attack
buried in
the Passionist church
in Saint Helen’s, Lancashire, England
27
October 1963 by Pope Paul
VI at Rome, Italy
Additional Information
Apostle of the Second Spring, by Kenan Carey, CP
Dominic
Barberi, An Apostle to England, by Father Edmund Osmund Thorpe, C.P.
Padre
Domenico Comes to England, by J. Brodrick, SJ
The
Holiness of the Church in the 19th Century
books
Book of Saints, by the Monks of
Ramsgate
Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints
sitios en español
Martirologio Romano, 2001 edición
fonti in italiano
nettsteder i norsk
Readings
O God, who so lovingly raised Blessed Dominic
to the heights of holiness, learning and apostolic zeal and made him a powerful
minister of Thy mercy for the return of many of our separated brethren to
the Catholic
Church, grant to us here below, an abundant share of his virtues and deign,
through his intercession, to grant us this particular grace…… May we too,
according to our state, contribute to the realisation of his desire for the
union of all Christians in
the one True Fold under the one Shepherd, Amen. – novena prayer to Blessed Dominic
Barberi CP, Apostle of England
MLA Citation
“Blessed Dominic Barberi“. CatholicSaints.Info. 3
February 2019. Web. 27 August 2021.
<https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-dominic-barberi/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-dominic-barberi/
Dominic of the Mother of God
(Called in secular life DOMENICO BARBERI)
A member of the Passionist Congregation and theologian, b.
near Viterbo, Italy, 22 June, 1792; d.
near Reading, England,
27 August, 1849. His parents were
peasants and died while Dominic was still a small boy. There were six children,
and Dominic, the youngest child, was adopted by his maternal uncle, Bartolomeo
Pacelli. As a boy he was employed to take care of sheep, and when he grew older
he did farm work. He was taught his letters by a kind Capuchin priest, and learned to
read from a country lad of his own age; although he read all the books he could
obtain, he had no regular education until he
entered the Congregation of the Passion. He was deeply religious from
childhood, felt himself distinctly called to join the institute he entered, and
believed that God,
by a special manifestation, had told him that he was destined to announce the
Gospel truth and
to bring back stray sheep to the way of salvation.
He was received into the Congregation of the Passion
in 1814, and ordained priest, 1 March, 1818.
After completing the regular course of studies, he taught philosophy and theology to the
students of the congregation as lector for a period
of ten years. He then held in Italy the offices
of rector,
provincial consultor, and provincial, and fulfilled the duties of these
positions with ability. At the same time he constantly gave missions and
retreats. He founded the first Passionist Retreat
in Belgium at
Ere near Tournai in 1840; in 1842, after twenty-eight years of effort, he
established the Passionists in England, at Aston Hall,
Staffordshire. During the seven years of his missionary life in England he
established three houses of the congregation. He died at a small railway
station near Reading and was buried under the high altar of St.
Anne's Retreat, Sutton, St. Helen's. Among the remarkable converts whom he
received into the Church may
be mentioned John
Dobree Dalgairns, John
Henry Newman, and Newman's two
companions, E. S. Bowles and Richard Stanton, all of whom were afterwards
distinguished Oratorians.
The reception in 1845 of Newman and his
friends must have been the greatest happiness of his
life. In 1846 Father Dominic received the Hon. George Spencer, in
religion Father Ignatius of St. Paul, into the Congregation of the Passion.
Among Father Dominic's works are: courses of philosophy and moral theology; a volume
on the Passion of
Our Lord; a work for nuns on the Sorrows
of the Blessed
Virgin, "Divina Paraninfa"; a refutation of de Lamennais; three
series of sermons; various controversial and ascetical works. In
1841 he addressed a Latin letter to the professors of Oxford in which he
answered the objections and explained the difficulties of Anglicans. An English
translation of the letter is given in the appendix to the life of Father
Dominic by Father Pius Devine.
Sources
Lives of Father Dominic: Italian, by PADRE FELIPPO
(1807); LUCCA DE SAN GIUSEPPE (Genoa, 1877); English, by PIUS DEVINE (London,
1898); CAMM, Father Dominic and the Conversion of England in Catholic
Truth Society publications (1900); Father Dominic's letters and correspondence
concerning his mission to England are published as a supplement to the 3rd vol.
of the Oratorian life of St. Paul of the Cross (London, 1853).
Devine, Arthur. "Dominic of the Mother of
God." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. New York: Robert
Appleton Company, 1909. 27 Aug.
2021 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05113a.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for
New Advent by WGKofron. With thanks to Fr. John Hilkert, Akron, Ohio.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. May
1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop
of New York.
Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
SOURCE : https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05113a.htm
Dominique meurt d'épuisement dans la gare de Reading
en 1849, à Sutton, où sa tombe devient un lieu de pèlerinage pour les
Catholiques anglais.
The
Holiness of the Church in the Nineteenth Century – Venerable Dominic of the
Mother of God
Pope Gregory the
Great sent monks to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons to the Church. Among
recent Popes another Gregory sent messengers of the Faith from Italy to England
to win back our separated brethren to the Church by word and example. Saint
Augustine of Canterbury, the envoy of Gregory I, received King Edelbert into
the Church. The envoy of Gregory XVI, who received into the Church a prince of
the spiritual kingdom, John H. Newman, was a modest Passionist, the Venerable
Dominic of the Mother of God (a matre Dei). Providence chose a worthy
instrument and the Church has already undertaken his beatification. The family
name of the Venerable Servant of God was Dominic Barberi. He was born of poor
country people on 22 June 1792, near Viterbo. But he lost both parents at an
early age, had scarcely any elementary training, and had to work for an uncle,
tending cattle and laboring in the field. A companion taught him to read and a
friendly Capuchin took an interest in him. Dominic devoured all the books he
could lay his hands on. Fortunately there were only good ones which tended to
nourish his sense of the ideal and his deep piety. When twenty-two years old he
joined the Congregation of the Passion and took the name of Dominic of the
Mother of God. After ordination to the priesthood he was placed in the most
important offices of the Order and also labored as a missionary preacher. In
1840, Father Dominic established the first Passionist residence in Belgium and
in 1842 did the same in England, at Aston Hall, Staffordshire. He labored only
seven years in England and died on 27 August 1849, at a Httk railroad station
near Reading. But his brief time of activity produced the most consoling
results. Many distinguished converts made their confession of faith to him,
among them, besides John Henry Newman, were two of the latter’s companions, E.
S. Bowles and R. Stanton, John Dalgairns, and others. In 1846 he had the
happiness of receiving into his own Congregation the convert George Spencer,
who, under the name of Father Ignatius of Saint Paul, was most successful in
his labors.
– this text is taken from The
Holiness of the Church in the Nineteenth Century: Saintly Men and Women of Our
Own Times, by Father Constantine Kempf, SJ; translated from the
German by Father Francis Breymann, SJ; Impimatur by + Cardinal John Farley,
Archbishop of New York, 25 September 1916
Once upon a time
in old Latium, on the lovely slopes of Palanzana under the Cimini Hills, there
lived a little orphan boy whose head was full of dreams. . . . Maybe,
that is how the story ought to begin, for it is altogether like a fairystory,
startling, unaccountable, and beautiful. No pigeon-hole ever devised will hold
this hero. He would seem to have walked into Victorian England straight out of
the Fioretti where Soldans of Babylon are converted and Big Bad Wolves conclude
treaties with Saint Francis. From the hat on his head, reputed “the meanest and
most wretched hat that could be seen in England,” to the shoes on his feet,
“which might have done service in the Ark of Noah,” he was like nobody else in
the world, unique, absurd, impossible, glorious, Don Quixote turned missioner,
Ramon Lull in the Potteries. But he also truly belonged to the company of
Aquinas and San Carlo, had written complete courses of philosophy and theology,
composed poetry, governed with wisdom an entire province of a religious order.
Perhaps the secret of him is that his soul was the quintessence of Italy.
Italy and England were never meant by nature to
guarrel, and the evil, sterile dream of a belated condottiere, with the
undigested history of the Roman Empire heavy on his weak stomach, ought not to
make us forget the fair and fruitful dream of Saint Gregory, the authentic
Roman, which was realized and defeated, and lived on to lodge in the great
heart of Saint Paul of the Cross. England, we know, which he never saw, was
Saint Paul’s perpetual obsession. In fifty years, he said, he had never been
able to pray without the thought of England at once intruding. During the last
Mass of his long life he fell into an ecstasy, and afterwards exclaimed, his
face transfigured with joy: “Oh, what have I seen? My children in England! My
religious in England!” Sixty-five years later, on a day when the effigy of the
Pope was being merrily burnt in every English village, the first of his
children came.
For twenty-five years and more Padre Domenico had been
consciously, eagerly moving towards that day. By the age of eight he had lost
both father and mother. He was never sent to any school. On his uncle’s little
farm near Viterbo where he minded the few sheep and afterwards followed the
plough, his dearest ambition was to learn to read, but for long he could find
nobody to teach him. To write legibly he never succeeded in learning. At
eighteen, the grim shadow of Napoleon fell upon his life, but he drew a high
number in the conscripts’ ballot and so escaped marching with the Grande Armee
to Moscow. About this time, he felt drawn mysteriously to the nearer service of
God, and wondered whether some religious order might not be bold and kind
enough to accept him as a lay-brother. But the orders were all suppressed, and,
besides, God seemed in ways he could not understand to be beckoning him towards
the priesthood, towards labours in some strange, undefined harvest-field. Ah,
but there was only one kind of harvest-field for which he had then the
slightest competence! Well, he would do his best not to be wanting to
Providence, and so, late into the night, after returning from the fields, he
began to wrestle with an old Latin Bible and a dictionary. In 1814, at
twenty-two, the Passionists, newly reconstituted, accepted him as a lay-brother
novice, a very gawky, ungainly novice, but eager as a spaniel. It was then that
in prayer, the only science he knew, he identified his strange land as England.
One day, the novicemaster who had noticed in him an odd ability, bade him try
his hand at translating the first Psalm from Latin into Italian. All the Latin
he knew had come out of that old dictionary, a perfectly grammarless Latin, yet
within fifteen minutes he produced a version which astonished the good Fathers
of the house by its correctness. That effort of scholarship acquired in an
attic by the light of a candle, though written in a pathetic childish scrawl,
won him his priesthood. Next, we meet this astonishing ploughboy teaching the
Passionist students metaphysics, and himself learning wonderfully well ancient
and modern Greek, French, and many other things. At this time, when De
Lamennais was still the idol of the whole Catholic world, he assumed the role
of Dominicus contra mundum, and composed a brilliant destructive criticism of
the great man’s theories. In 1829, he was called to Rome as professor of
theology at the mother-house of the Passionists on Monte Caelio, the very spot
from which, more than twelve centuries earlier, Saint Augustine and his monks
had set out to convert the English. His first letter from Rome to a
fellowreligious in Lucca begins with the words: “Does your Reverence ever
remember England?” Himself, dear enthusiast, could hardly remember anything
else. Even more than with his Father, Saint Paul, was England the bride of his
soul by day, the dream of his heart by night. He thrilled at the sight of the
English converts who came to Rome, made friends with them, and plotted with
them how he himself might get to England. After two years as professor, years
of hectic study of Protestantism, he was appointed rector of a new Passionist
foundation near Lucca. From there, swamped to his eyes in pioneering
difficulties, he wrote to his friend Ambrose Lisle Phillips in July, 1831: “I
should like to hear frequently about your health, and about the progress of our
holy religion in that island which is never absent from my poor heart. Ah, who
will give me the wings of a dove to fly thither? I go on hoping . . . 0 dear
England! 0 beloved nation! When shall I behold thee restored to the loving
bosom of our holy mother the Church?”
It is surely an extraordinary thing, deserving,
especially now, to be remembered with gratitude, that one poor Italian priest
who had never seen England was unable to speak of her except, as his biographer
truly says, in the broken accents of a lover. To a charming, unconvertible
parson named Ford with whom he had made friends, he wrote in 1832: “Our friend,
Mr. George Spencer, is to depart for England, whither he will bear with him the
half of my heart . . . Ah, my God, would that I might go myself where my letters
go!” The years passed, and, instead of following his letters, he was twice
elected Provincial of Italy and consultor ofhis Order’s General. Twice in 1834
he was brought to the doors of death by cholera, caught while devotedly
attending its victims. “At the first attack,” he told Mr. Phillips, “I lost
about eight pounds of blood, which I was all the time offering, in union with
the most precious Blood of Jesus, for the conversion of England.” When, in
1837, there was question of a foundation at Boulogne, his hopes revived again
and he promptly wrote to Phillips: “If I cannot actually come to England, I
will get as near it as possible, that I may behold, at least at a distance,
that island which for twenty-three years I have carried engraven on my heart.”
Early in 1840, the Passionists were offered the
tenancy of an empty castle in Belgium where, so far, they had made no
foundations. Again the hopes of Padre Domenico went soaring, for the Château d
‘Ere was near Toumai, on the route to England! But he was prostrate at the
time, half-dead with his incredible missionary exertions. And now there
happened to him exactly what happened to Saint Francis Xavier, whose letters
are so like his own. The man chosen to guide the new expedition fell out and he
was given the vacant post. Though he had to be lifted bodily on to the mule
that took him on the first stages of his journey, he went off, happy as a king,
to a life of such privation as might have daunted a Desert Father. “God who
feeds the sparrows will not let us die of hunger,” he wrote from Ere in July,
1840, and again, “We are ready to suffer all things and, if need, to live on a
few potatoes and water.” It nearly came to that, for he would not beg and the
alms which he received in the first months amounted to forty-seven francs. They
had nothing at first but an empty castle, no funds, no furniture, no chalice,
no ciborium, no faculties even. With this grand soul poverty was an absolute
passion, so he welcomed the privations as evidence of God’s benediction on their
undertaking. And indeed it was richly blessed, until it became one of the
finest monasteries in the whole Passionist Order.
But another blessing, too, his blessing of all
blessings, awaited the humble apostle of the Belgian countryside. His devoted Roman
friend, Nicholas Wiseman, had been working in his interest. He had a house to
offer now, so would dear Padre Domenico come and inspect it in England? Would
he indeed! In a flash he was at his table, half-paralysed with excitement,
scrawling the glorious news to the General in Rome. The General bade him go,
and a few days later he is on the top of a church in Boulogne staring excitedly
across the Channel. “A few moments ago,” he writes to a friend, “I saw for the
first time that Island. . . . If I die now, it will be the death of Moses!”
That first visit on Guy Fawkes Day, 1840, held many disappointments for him,
but disheartened him not at all. He must have looked a bit of a guy himself, to
judge by the description of the youth who was detailed to help him with “the
terrible English language” at Oscott. “He was not handsome, nor was he tall. He
was short and rather stout of body, and his voice was squeaky, but he had an
eagle eye, picked up English wonderfully, and could blend sarcasm and irony in
the most simple and apparently harmless observation. In secular clothes he was
a holy show. His coat was not made in any style known to English tailors; it
was neither clerical nor secular; it fitted nowhere; and where it might fit it
was wrongly buttoned. He carried a watch when he travelled which might well
have served for a town clock amongst the Lilliputians. His waistcoat seemed the
cast-off garment of some itinerant hawker, and his pantaloons . . . His gait
was shuffling . . . The comical twinkle in his eye when he told a good story,
and his grave demeanour when he spoke of Heaven, made him seem a compound of
all that was humble and sublime in human nature . . . Altogether, his
appearance was so far from elegant that the students called him ‘Paddy Whack’ amongst
themselves. He possessed marvellous sway over us all, and could do what he
liked with us.”
The visit of the odd-looking Padre to Oscott was due
to his friend Wiseman being Rector there, but he could not go to view his
proffered home, Aston Hall, Staffordshire, because there was a dog temporarily
in that particular manger. He had to be content with Wiseman’s description of
it and then return whence he came. His fare from Tournai to Birmingham and back
amounted to £7; his personal expenses to exactly threepence, twopence for a
pork-pie in London and a penw for bread. Beyond that, he ate nothing on the
journey. Back in Ere, he busied himself with huge letters to the General on the
condition of England, pointing out with childlike enthusiasm what a magnificent
harvest for the Faith awaited the reaping. One day, in April, 1841, he read in
the Univers a letter which made the blood sing in his veins. It was from an
Oxford student, one of the Tractarians, who appealed for the sympathy and
understanding of Catholics.
Immediately, Don Quixote of the Mother of God seized
his long suffering pen and dashed off a Latin answer that requires forty octavo
pages of English to render it. It begins with words which might serve for their
writer’s epitaph: “There is nothing too daring for love to venture.” Love
breathes in every line of this marvellous document, love for those hesitant
English souls whom the Italian priest, the former shepherd-boy, so passionately
longed to lead into the only satisfying pastures. He posted the letter to
Father George Spencer to be delivered at the right address, which was found to
be that of Mr. John B. Dalgaims, Littlemore, Oxford. Therewith began a great
friendship and long correspondence which had the happiest ending. Meantime,
waiting with his hand tightly holding the hand of God, Padre Domenico resumed
his labours in Belgium, preaching regularly and even giving retreats in French
and finding that people understood him, which, he said, was “a miracle of the
first order.” Then in August, 1841, came the summons which, with his soul taut
as a bowstring, he awaited. He reached England at the beginning of October,
this time to stay for ever.
Padre Domenico was a saint, not only, like nearly all
saints, in a hurry, but in a fever of divine impatience. He would soon be
fifty, and the aches in his poor bones warned him that time was short. So now,
in his Promised Land, he yearned with all his soul to sound the trumpet that
would bring down the walls of Jericho. But it was a terrible trumpet, that English
language, and he could only get from it the queerest tunes. For months at
Oscott he sweated and groaned over English grammar and English pronunciation,
until it seemed to him that seven dumb devils possessed the tongue. His baffled
zeal caused him the intensest suffering, such suffering, he said, as he had not
dreamt of in all the years of waiting. He was like a wild bird beating its
wings against the bars of’ a cage. But there were good moments, too, as when he
first saw Aston Hall, the cradle of the Passionists in England. He fell in love
with the place immediately. “I assure you,” he wrote to his Father General,
“that it surpasses all my expectations. 1 do not believe that in the whole of
England there is a more suitable place for us. The house is in complete
solitude . . . Here and there you see a few country houses, just as in
Tuscany.”
The Hall, an old Catholic property, had a small
mission attached which served a few hundred local farm labourers and villagers.
Among these poor people, our crusader, armoured in habit and sandals which the
laws forbade, started his campaign to conquer the soul of England. He had but
one lieutenant, a sick priest named Padre Amadeo, carefully conveyed out of
Italy because he had been born in Kerry and so was reputed among the brethren
to be a master of the fearsome English language. But Amadeo ‘s untamable Kerry
brogue, mated uneasily for fifteen years to Italian syntax, produced an English
offspring even more incomprehensible than the fruit of Domenico ‘s own linguistic
exertions. At the start, the sermons of the two men and their unfamiliar garb
caused nothing but wonderment and laughter. That stage soon ended, however, and
on Good Friday, 1842, Domenico had the satisfaction of receiving his first
Protestant into the Church. At once, he grew ambitious, “If only we could
succeed in converting some minister here!” he sighed in his next letter to the
General. He was then already £200 in debt, and his entire assets consisted of
four precious novices, three of them lay-brothers. “This foundation,” he told
the General, “was made on the Feast of the Lance and Nails, and there will
always be nails. Up to now, they have never been wanting – and long, hard ones,
too! At times they have seemed to me more than could be borne.” Minute as was
his community, he carried out the austere Passionist rule in its every detail,
including the singing of the Divine Office at midnight. In all England then,
the four men were the only ones maintaining the Church’s grand liturgical
tradition. In fact, strictly speaking, they were the only religious community
in England, for Emancipation had not legalized the corporate existence of other
religious. Domenico simply took the law into his own hands, and by his very
daring made it a dead letter. A profoundly Pauline soul, he knew in Whom he
believed and made no reservations in his trust of Divine Providence. Even in
his penury, when he had to think twice about writing a letter on account of the
postage, he began to plan for the building of a new and spacious church at
Aston. He was ever like that, content with nothing for himself, content with
nothing but the best for God.
Very soon, his Kerry coadjutor tired of the mission
work and turned himself into a hermit. “I am alone, alone,” cried Domenico to
the General three months after taking possession of Aston. “Ah, if I had many
companions who would live for and seek only the glory of God! . . . Meanwhile,
if your Paternity can send me one good, solid man, resolved to sacrifice
everything for the Divine glory, it will be an immense help in the work of
bringing back these northern countries into the bosom of the Catholic Church.
What I have already suffered and what I shall suffer in days to come, is known
to God. But all is little where God’s glory is concerned. Surely God, Our Lord,
deserves that we should suffer for Him.” That letter, with its calm reference
to the northern countries, its burning appeal for more men, its triple mention
in a few lines of God’s glory as paramount, is exactly what Saint Francis Xavier
might have written. Domenico was the Francis Xavier of England. Always
pioneering, he went to reconnoitre the neighbouring town of Stone, and found
that Catholics there were more numerous than at Aston, but utterly neglected.
Straightway he hired for Sunday use a large room in a tavern called the Crown
Inn, at Stone, which is still thriving, and contracted to pay a rent of £12 a
year, though at the time he had not so much as twelve pence. He fortified
himself with his favourite tag – Deus providebit! At the tavern in Advent,
1842, he said the first Mass that had been offered in Stone since the
Reformation, and in his funny, halting English inaugurated courses of
controversial lectures and doctrinal instructions. Eight months later he was
able to report that his tally of converts had gone up to seventy-five, and that
he had numerous others under instruction. He used to walk from Aston to Stone
in his heavy habit and sandals, and he liked to think that it was the sight of
his bare feet rather than his preaching which effected conversions. Those bare
feet frightened timid Catholics, whose eyes, so long used to the tapers of the
Catacombs, had not become accustomed to the daylight of emancipation. Their
opposition left him undismayed, just as the meagre harvest of his preaching
left him undejected. “Oremus and coraggio – let us fear nothing!” he writes to
his General. And, indeed, what had a man to fear whose dearest longing was to
shed the last drop of his blood for the conversion of England? When his larder was
empty and he scarely knew where to turn for the next meal of his men, he still
kept his serenity: “I have every hope that God will provide and will not let us
die of hunger . . . God knows what He is doing, and I know nothing . . . All
the difficulties encountered so far, and all those that await us, do not cause
me to lose one single iota of the hope which is mine.”
On Passion Sunday, 1843, the dauntless Passionist
attempted his first set mission in England, which initiated all our modern
parochial missions? It was at Lane End, Staffordshire, and started very
inauspiciously. But on the second evening of the week, when the poor priest was
almost in despair, a big burly Irish labourer, not illustrious thereabout for
sanctity, clumped into the sacristy and threw himself in tears at his feet.
Before he died six years later, Domenico had given, up and down England and in
Dublin, a hundred retreats and missions. Between times, he acted as
novice-master and professor of philosophy and theology to his own students,
built a little church in Stone which cost him £600, and there organized the
first public procession of the Blessed Sacrament seen in England since the days
of Mary Tudor, opened a new house and mission in Gloucestershire, carried the
Château d ‘Ere foundation to prosperity, and started a little community in
London which grew into that great power-house of Catholicism, Saint Joseph’s
Retreat, Highgate. And all this wonderful work was built, one might say, on the
half of a broken hope, but such a tenacious hope! “Good wishes. kind words – et
praeterea nihil!” That was how he summed up his resources in July, 1843. In
November of the same year he writes to the General: “Of course, there is much
to do and much to suffer, but – never mind! All will be well yet.” We can
almost see him write that “Never mind!”, a favourite expression, with a little
toss of his gallant head. Shortly afterwards, in another letter, he reported:
“Insults and mockery of every description are our lot, and conversions are few.
Never mind!”
The year 1845 was the Padre’s annus mirabilis. In
September, John B. Dalgairns, who loved and venerated him, came to Aston to be
received into the Church, the first-fruits of the Oxford Movement. At the
beginning of October, Dalgairns invited him to Littlemore. “In view of this
invitation,” he tells the General, “I left Aston on the 8th and reached Oxford
at ten o’clock that night, soaked with rain . . . where I found Mr. Dalgairns
waiting to take me out to Littlemore . . . we reached Littlemore about an hour
before midnight, and I took up my position before the fire to dry myself. The
door opened – and what a spectacle it was for me to see at my feet John Henry
Newman, begging me to hear his confession and admit him into the bosom of the
Catholic Church! And there by the fire he began his general confession with
extraordinary humility and devotion . . ” That scene – the midnight hour, the
rain, and the two absorbed figures by the fire – is etched for ever in the
memory of Catholic England.
Strange to say, the conversion of Newman, instead of
stimulating, appears to have had a sobering effect on the buoyant hopes of
Domenico. Three months later he wrote: “God can do what he wills, but, humanly
speaking, I see no prospect of the total conversion of England. There are too
many passions, too many prejudices, too much egoism, too much indifference . .
. But we must never lose courage.” He was learning, dear optimist, in the
hardest of schools. Ten days more, and these revealing lines are wrung from
him: “At times lately I have cried out: O God, my Lord, I can no more! If You
will increase my cross, give me increase of strength.”
There followed the Irish Famine which cast its sad
wreckage even into the backwater of Stone. The poor emigrants, seeking for work
and bread in the Potteries, fell in their tracks, stricken down by cholera and
dysentery. At once, the Aston Passionists, including the great-hearted George
Spencer, who was then a novice, flew to their assistance, until each and every
member of the heroic band was himself a victim. Domenico started a begging
campaign among his little flock and on January 6, 1847, sent £21 7s. Od. to the
relief fund opened by The Tablet.
During his last years, Padre Domenico was never out of
pain and had to be swathed in bandages to enable him to go about at all. “I am
ill,” he told the General in 1848, “from the crown of my head to the soles of
my feet.” But he relaxed nothing of his austerities and activities. In July
1849, while on visitation of his Castle in Belgium, he had a presentiment that
he had reached the end of his course. After returning to England, he set off
cheerfully by the 7.30 morning train from Paddington on Monday, August 27th, to
help his struggling community in Gloucestershire. When close to Pangbourne station,
he collapsed in the train and was carried to an inn.
But, as had happened on another occasion, there was no
room in the inn, and kind people removed him to a cottage and laid him on some
straw on the brick floor. An hour later the up train arrived, and he was
brought to the Railway Tavern at Reading, now “The Duke of Edinburgh” in
Caversham Road. There, at three o’clock in the afternoon, with only one friend
near him, death, his greatest friend, came for Padre Domenico.
The Second Spring of Catholicism in England did not
begin when Newman was converted nor when the Hierarchy was restored. It began
on a bleak October day in 1841 when a little Italian priest in comical attire
shuffled happily down a ship ‘s gangway at Folkestone.
– article from The Tablet,
29 November and 6 December 1941
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/padre-domenico-comes-to-england-by-j-brodrick-s-j/
Apostle
of the Second Spring, by Kenan Carey, C.P.
Foreword
This year of 1945 marks the centenary of the reception
of John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church. With his conversion came the
great resurgence of the English Church which Newman himself named the Second
Spring. Speaking before Cardinal Wiseman and the English bishops at the First
Provincial Synod of Westminster in 1852, Newman cried out:
The past has returned; the dead lives…. A restoration
in the political world has taken place such as that which happens normally only
in the physical. . . . Has the whole course of history a like miracle to show?
. . . According to my knowledge I recollect no parallel to it. . . . Thrones
are overturned, and are never restored; States live and die, and then are
matter only for history. Babylon was great, and Tyre, and Egypt, and Nineve,
and shall never be great again. The English Church was, and the English Church
was not, and the English Church is once again. This is the portent, worthy of a
cry. It is the coming in of a Second Spring.
The apostle of that Second Spring was the priest who
received Newman into the Church. He is known as Dominic of the Mother of God,
Passionist. It is most opportune now to recount the amazing story of his life.
Tableau
Just a hundred years ago, on 8 October 1845, a short,
stout, almost ugly Italian monk huddled in the pelting rain on the outside seat
of an English stagecoach as it jounced and rattled along the country roads from
Aston in Staffordshire to Oxford. He had been invited to Littlemore, where the
great John Henry Newman was living in retirement, after having resigned his
living in the Anglican Church. Had he but known of a letter that Newman had
penned the day before to his friend Henry Wilberforce, the miserable ride in
the cold October rain would have seemed more glamorous than Cinderella’s ride
to the Prince’s Ball. For Newman had written:
My dear H. W. Father Dominic the Passionist is passing
this way from Aston in Staffordshire to Belgium, where a Chapter of his Order
is to be held at this time. He is to come to Littlemore for the night as the
guest of one of us whom he has admitted at Aston. He does not know of my
intentions, but I shall ask of him admission into the One True Fold of the
Redeemer. . . . He is a simple, quaint man, an Italian. … It is an accident,
his coming here, and I had no thoughts of applying to him till quite lately,
nor should I, I suppose, but for this accident.
An hour before midnight Dominic arrived at Littlemore.
He went into the house where he was to make history, and proceeded to dry
himself before a blazing hearth-fire. The door opened, and Dominic rose. In a
moment Newman was at his feet, praying for admission into the Catholic Church.
Here we have one of the unforgettable scenes of
history. Standing before the fire a humble Italian monk whose squeaky voice
speaks only broken English, his misfit clothes still dripping rain; and
kneeling at his feet the peerless figure whom the English Church had so long
venerated, and whose conversion, in the words of Disraeli, was to rock
Anglicanism to its foundations.
“Outside,” says Oakeley, “the rain come down in
torrents, bringing with it the first heavy installment of autumn’s sere and
yellow leaves that beat against the windowpanes. The wind, like a spent giant,
howled forth the expiring notes of its equinoctial fury. The superstitious
might have said that the very elements were on the side of Anglicanism, so
copiously did they weep, so piteously bemoan the approaching departure of its
great representative.”
To the world the face of Newman, as he kneels there in
the firelight at Littlemore, is etched clearly and forever. But,the features of
the monk standing by the blazing hearth are indistinct. He appears merely as an
incidental detail in the picture. His coming to Littlemore on this historic
night seems, as Newman said, “an accident.” He is an unknown figure who goes as
mysteriously as he comes.
Yet Dominic’s wild ride through the storm and his
spectacular reception of Newman into the Church were the climax of a drama that
had been growing in intensity during thirty years. And the central figure of
that drama was not Newman, but Dominic himself. Dominic was neither incidental
nor accidental to the tableau at Littlemore. This was the high-point of his career,
a career which takes rank with some of the most dramatic biographies in all the
history of the saints. As we read his story, it is as if our eyes were growing
more accustomed to the firelight at Littlemore, and Dominic’s features begin to
emerge clearly and amazingly as a chosen messenger of God.
Any priest might have received Newman into
the Church. But Dominic was the one priest in the world who had been prepared
during thirty long years of trial to be the apostle of the Second Spring of the
English Church. It was only fitting that God should receive from his hands that
miraculous springtime’s rarest bloom — John Henry Newman.
What drama or even fairy tale can compare with the
lives of the saints? Aladdin and Jack the Giant Killer and The Flying Carpet
are tame beside these narratives that are so startling, so unaccountable, so
beautiful, from the time of the poor fishermen of Christ, setting out to
overcome proud Greece and Rome with nothing but the story of a Baby born in a
stable Who grew up to die upon a Cross. Do you want magic and adventure and
mystery? They are all here in abundance. Angels open dungeon doors for Peter to
make his escape at midnight; Paul is let down from his prison in a basket.
Anthony preaches to the attentive fishes; Francis has a conference with the big
bad wolf of Gubbio, who agrees thenceforth to become a respectable watchdog.
Raymond of Penafort rides the sea upon his magic cloak; Xavier raises the dead
to life. Peter Claver kisses the gangrenous sores of negroes in the stinking
holds of slave ships; Damien scales mountains to be one with his beloved
lepers. Vincent de Paul is captured by pirates, sold into slavery, converts his
renegade master, and escapes with him into France; Peter Chantal is martyred on
a cannibal island, whereupon all the cannibals become Catholic. Ignatius, the
soldier, hangs his sword before the altar of Our Lady, and forms an army whose
numbers and exploits eclipse those of the greatest military legions; Francis
Borgia, duke, warrior, bullfighter, viceroy, father of eight children, becomes
General of the Jesuits. Elizabeth picks red roses in the white snows of winter;
little Therese keeps her promise in heaven to scatter roses on the earth. Joan
of Arc leads armies into battle; Bernadette meets the loveliest of fairy godmothers.
Where are there such tragedies as those of the saints,
and withal such courage? Lawrence jokes as he roasts on his gridiron. Andrew
preaches from his Cross. Isaac Jogues runs eagerly to the Mohawks and their
tortures.
As for romance, here are men and women lifted off the
earth in ecstatic rapture with their tremendous and invisible Lover,
transformed into their Beloved so that they bear in their own bodies the wounds
of His crucifixion. What words of human love can compare with the Confessions
of Augustine, the Spiritual Canticle of John of the Cross, the dying cry of the
Little Flower? What deeds of love can rival the penances and martyrdoms of
those who fill up in their flesh what is wanting in the sufferings of their
Master?
Magic, mystery, tragedy, comedy, courage, and high
romance — they are all to be found, pressed down and running over, in the lives
of the saints. They can be found abundantly in the life of Dominic of the
Mother of God, Passionist. His whole life is sheer drama. It was planned that
way by God. And the prelude was written by Him, too. It began more than seventy
years before Dominic was born.
Prelude
In mid-winter of 1720 an Italian anchoret who called
himself Paul of the Cross lived for forty days in a cold cell adjoining the
sacristy of the church in Castellazzo. He had a straw sack for a bed, and bread
and water for sustenance. During those forty days he wrote a way of life for
religious that later became the Rule of the Congregation of the Passion. He
tells us that on the Feast of Saint Stephen the Protomartyr, when praying
before the Blessed Sacrament, he began to reflect on those men who deny the Real
Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist. England especially came to his mind with
vivid pleadings to be restored to its former self. From that day until his
death, fifty years later, Paul of the Cross never knelt in prayer without
petitioning for its conversion. Moreover, he ordained that in every monastery
of the Passionists special prayers should be recited daily for England’s return
to the old Faith. “Ah! England, England,” he used to say, “let us pray for
England. I cannot help praying for it myself, for whenever I begin to pray,
this kingdom presents itself to my mind.” Just before his death, after being in
an ecstasy, he exclaimed, “What have I seen? My children — my religious in
England!”
How can we explain this overpowering desire of Paul of
the Cross for the conversion of England? At the time of his retreat in
Castellazzo he could not have had any great knowledge of its history nor of its
miserable state of heresy. Up to that time he does not seem ever to have met an
Englishman, nor did he afterwards seek out English visitors to inform himself
concerning the manners or customs of their countrymen.
It is the same sort of mysterious yearning we find so
often in the lives of the saints, to work among people they have never seen and
about whom they know practically nothing. In France Father Isaac Jogues longs
to spend himself among the Mohawks of Canada; Peter Chantal yearns to bring the
faith to the savages and cannibals of the Pacific Islands; Theophane Venard
wishes to be a martyr among the Tongkinese; Charles Foucauld buries himself in
the desert among the Arabs; in Spain Peter Claver is on fire to labor among in
the West Indies; in Belgium Damien looks across the world to Molokai; and in
cloistered convents thousands like the Little Flower sacrifice themselves for
those who have never even heard of Christ. How can we understand these
supernatural longings of the saints in all the ages of the Church unless we
understand that she is the Body of Christ; unless we see living in her the same
Master saying to those in whom He lives, “Other sheep I have that are not of
this fold. Them also must I bring. And there shall be one fold, and one
shepherd.”
When we perceive this fact, it does not seem strange
to us that an Italian saint should have been inspired to pray especially for
England. That country from the beginning had been an Italian mission. From
Italy had come Augustine, from a monastery on the Celian Hill in Rome, where
Paul of the Cross was one day to have his own monastic home. Augustine had
borne in solemn procession on his landing in England that Cross which was to be
in a special way the banner of the Passionists. And, finally, England had
always been known as the Dowry of that Mary who had appeared to Paul, clothed
in the sort of religious habit he was to wear himself. Yes, there was ample
reason why Paul of the Cross should be specially inspired to pray for England
and to have the reward of seeing in vision his own religious there.
Yet not long after his death it seemed that his vision
had been only a dream. His Passionists were dispersed along with the other
Religious Orders of the Church; Pope Pius VI died in exile at Valence, a
prisoner of the Revolution; and the Church herself appeared about to perish.
“The Pope is dead,” wrote the Administrator of the Department of Drome to
Paris; “we have seen the last of them.”
It was the beginning of that nineteenth century in
which, as Peter Wust remarks:
The mind of Europe is secularized; the world stripped
of its sacred meaning; the Church ruled out of public affairs; God is dethroned
in the soul of man.
Father Corrigan, S.J. writes of the same time:
The Church in France lies helpless under the
Revolution; Cardinal Pacca writes to Rome that in Germany the Church can be
preserved only by a miracle; Italy is uncertain; the Spanish peninsula seems
hopelessly decadent; the dark shadow of Russia rests on Poland; the Church can
no longer look to Austria for aid; the American Church is in its infancy;
Ireland is under the heel of England; and in England itself the Church is in
the Catacombs.
In fine, one hundred and fifty years ago the Church
was much more sorely straitened than it is today. Looking back on those days
now should brighten for us the gloom of our own times when the Church in Europe
is shadowed by the growing darkness of Communism. We can be heartened by the
realization that Christ always repeats His life in His Mystical Body. We can
understand that there is always a crucifixion before any resurrection of the
Church. Thus the persecutions and martyrdoms of the early Church preceded the
Edict of Constantine. The Dark Ages led up to the glorious noontide of the
Thirteenth Century. The crucifixion of the Reformation ushered in the Council
of Trent and the tremendous missionary triumphs of the Religious Orders. And
the apparent death throes of the Church at the beginning of the nineteenth
century were only to precede an Easter rising for her all over Europe,
particularly in that England which was to witness the miracle of a Second
Spring, that England for which Paul of the Cross had prayed so ardently, and
for which his children had been praying for more than one hundred years.
It was fitting that an outstanding part in this
reawakening of the Church in England should fall to a son of Paul of the Cross.
He is known to the world as Dominic of the Mother of God, Passionist.
The Shepherd Boy
Dominic Barberi was born near Viterbo on 22 June 1792,
the youngest of six children. His father, Joseph, was a small farmer who died
when Dominic was three years old. His mother, Maria Antonia Pacelli, died when
he was eight, but Dominic was her favorite child and cherished always a deep
love for her. Virtue passes easily from the heart of a good mother to her
child, and Maria taught her son a particularly ardent devotion to Our Lady.
There has never been a saint in the Catholic Church without this devotion to
Mary. As members of the “Body of Christ,” how can they have anything but a deep
love for her who is at the same time His Mother and their own?
After his mother’s death, Dominic went to the home of
an uncle. Here he lived as a shepherd boy and peasant farmer. Nobody ever
thought of sending him to school. simply because schooling was considered
unnecessary for the life he was to lead. An old priest, however, taught him to
read, and the boy devoured every book he could find, particularly the Holy
Scriptures. Later on, like his Master, he was to confound the doctors of the Law
with his wisdom and his answers.
Dominic’s first thought of being a religious came when
he saw the Passionist Sign on the habit of a monk exiled from his monastery and
living in Viterbo. About this time, too, he began to experience the strange
longing we have remarked before in the souls of the saints, to spend himself
for unbelievers. Indeed in his boyish fervor he made a vow to become a
Passionist, just like another Italian boy after him, known now to the world as
Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Virgin. And, like Gabriel, he was to forget his
vow—for a time. After all, his life was well mapped out. His uncle had made him
his heir. There was a lovely girl in the neighboring town who wanted to marry
him. And so, against the advice of his confessors, he decided to wed. But on
the very day set for the ceremony he became violently ill. He remembered his
broken vow. He seemed to see a place prepared for him in hell. Then Mary
appeared, pleading with God for him. And suddenly he was well again. Only now,
as with Gabriel after a similar illness, there was no more hesitation. His mind
was made up. And when the Religious Orders were restored in 1813, he entered a
Passionist monastery at the age of twenty-one to become a laybrother. He
intended to work in the kitchen and in the fields for the rest of his life. He
did not dream of becoming a priest. He had had no education.
The Vision
But now the great drama of Dominic’s life was about to
begin. It began with the echoing in the depths of his soul of that mysterious
voice which, the saints have told us, can neither be explained nor
misunderstood.
Saul had heard it on his way to Damascus, to persecute
the Mystical Body of the Church. “Saul, Saul,” it had cried, “why persecutest
thou Me?” Augustine had heard it counseling him to read the Scriptures, “Tolle!
Lege!” “Take! Read!” Thomas of Aquin had heard it asking him what he wanted in
return for his sublime writings about his Lord, and he had answered, “Naught
save Thee.” Joan of Arc, Theresa of Avila, Paul of the Cross, and innumerable
others had heard it, and through obedience to its commands had become saints.
Felicite de Lamennais was to hear it, too, during his first Mass, telling him,
“I call upon you to carry My Cross; nothing but the Cross—remember!” But he was
to disobey, and so to die with his face pressed to the wall, away from the
crucifix upraised in the hand of a friend.
Dominic heard that voice twice, both times while
praying before an altar of Our Lady. The first time it told him he was to work
for souls in far-off places. The next time it told him he was to labor as a
missionary in northwestern Europe, and particularly in England.
How was this to happen, when apparently he was not
destined to be a priest? The young lay-brother did not know. But he was
absolutely certain that it would happen. “I was so convinced of this being a
divine command,” he writes, “that I would sooner have doubted my existence than
its truth and its eventual fulfillment at the hands of His Divine Majesty.” To
that certainty he clung through twenty-six years of trial and darkness, with
one obstacle after another appearing to make impossible the realization of his
commission.
Did Dominic, working now as a plough-boy, run to his
religious superior, tell him about the vision, and insist that he must become a
priest? Not at all. He had already made a resolution that he was never to
break. “I shall do the best I can in whatever position I am placed, and leave
the rest to God.” So he simply continued to do his best as a lay-brother. God
would arrange for his mission career.
One night, after working in the fields, Dominic sat
talking with the young men who were preparing to become priests. The Novice
Director jokingly asked him a question concerning a passage in the Bible. The
Director did not expect an answer. He did not know how often the former
shepherd boy had read the Scriptures. So he was amazed when his question was
answered brilliantly. He determined to learn more about this uneducated young
man, and the more he learned, the more he wondered, for the lad remembered
almost everything he had ever read. Finally the Director realized that the
lay-brother should be allowed to study for the missions.
Thus once more Dominic was with the books he loved so
dearly. He made such good use of them that his teacher soon remarked that he
could teach his classmates, himself. During the four years of preparation for
the priesthood and the three succeeding years of study he led his class as a
student and especially as a religious. Always he was seeking within his soul
that Christ Whose voice once heard can never be forgotten. He made one more
resolution — that he would never waste a minute in the service of God. That
resolve, too, he tried to keep all his life.
England, My Beloved
At the age of twenty-six Dominic of the Mother of God,
Passionist, was ordained to the priesthood in Rome. He lived now on the Celian
Hill in the monastery of Saints John and Paul where Paul of the Cross had seen
in ecstasy his sons in England. And soon it became evident that the mantle of
Paul in his love for England had fallen in double strength upon his disciple.
Indeed I doubt if in all the history of the saints we shall find a more flaming
passion for any mission country than Dominic had for his beloved England. I
must speak cautiously and according to my knowledge, but I recollect no
parallel to it. Whenever he speaks of this land he can talk “only in the broken
accents of a lover.” And he was continually speaking or writing about it all
during his thirty years of missionary life. Over and over in his letters we
read such sentiments as these:
O, that I could give my blood and my life for my
beloved England. . . . For England’s conversion I am willing to be condemned to
death, to lose the light of reason, to be deprived of God’s sensible aid, and
left without the slightest relish for prayer. . . . would willingly undergo the
pains that the English would suffer if they were eternally lost, that all
should return to the bosom of the Church.
Every day at Mass he offered to the Father the people
of England. He pestered others to pray for the English. He had a bloodletting
during a serious illness, and was delighted that he was able to offer “pounds
of blood” in union with the Precious Blood of Christ for England. England was
his “bride by day and his dream by night.” Never, I repeat, have I met in the
lives of the saints such an overpowering, passionate, flaming love for a
country and a people as Dominic had for England and the English. And he had
never set foot out of Italy.
Ten years of his priestly life passed by — years
filled with prayer and penance and the labors of preaching, teaching, and the
direction of students. During all this time there was not the smallest ray of
hope that he might some day work in England. Yet for us, who can see his life
in retrospect, there was one astonishing portent to show how he was inevitably
drawing nearer to his goal.
In 1823 the ill-fated De Lamennais had finished
his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion. It was greeted on all
sides with wild enthusiasm. Its author was hailed as a new Father of the
Church. But amid the universal chorus of praise two discordant voices were
heard — and two only. One came from the Protestant Vicarage of Saint Mary of
the Virgin, Oxford; the other came from a Passionist cell in Italy. The two
voices were those of John Henry Newman and Dominic of the Mother of God,
Passionist. At that time they did not even know of each other’s existence.
At the age of thirty-six Dominic was teaching theology
in the monastery of Saints John and Paul. Monsignor Wiseman was Rector of a
reawakened English College in Rome, and many Englishmen were coming to visit
him. Among them were Gladstone and Macaulay, Froude and Ambrose de Lisle
Phillips. George Spencer, a convert minister, son of the former First Lord of
the English Admiralty, had come to study for the priesthood. Newman came and
went without knowing Dominic. But other Englishmen were beginning to remark
this strange Italian monk whose heart was aflame with love for their native
land. From the beginning Wiseman and many other Englishmen were powerfully
drawn toward the Passionists who had been praying so long for their country.
Wiseman asked for a Passionist to teach an old convert minister. Sir Harry
Trelawney, how to celebrate Mass, and Dominic received the appointment. Neither
he nor Trelawney could understand the other’s speech, but friendships were
formed through the association. Soon Dominic was walking with Spencer and
Phillips and other Englishmen in the garden of Saints John and Paul, talking
with them in a mixture of French and Italian. He was always to have trouble
with the modern languages, excepting his own and Greek. But he was a master of
the Latin classics, of ancient and modern Greek, and author of more than
fifteen distinguished volumes on . philosophy and theology.
All too soon the inspiring walks and talks in the
garden on the Celian Hill were abruptly ended. In 1830, when he was
thirty-eight, Dominic was chosen to found a new monastery at Lucca, where many
years later the virgin Saint Gemma Galgani was to bear in her body the wounds
of her Crucified Lover.
Disappointment
The change undoubtedly was a wrench for Dominic. It
meant no more talks with his English friends for at least three years. But he
had one consolation. As a Superior now he could hope for a voice in the
Chapters of his Congregation. Thus he might plead for a new foundation in
England. Three years later, at the Passionist General Chapter, he did propose
such a foundation. But of course God was not disposed to let him win so easily.
The proposal was summarily dismissed. Moreover there would be no chance to
bring the subject up again until the next General Chapter, six years away. He
would then be forty-seven years old.
And here we must remark that while Dominic was always
convinced that he would go to England eventually, and ever burned with desire
to go, he never asked to be sent there. Once a priest advised him to petition
the Pope for permission to work in the country engraven on his heart. He smiled
and said, “I am a child of obedience. I go only where I am told to go.” God had
arranged for his priesthood. God would take care of his commission to England.
So he left Rome again, this time to be a Provincial in
southern Italy. And now he wrote, “Ah, England! England! How long, how long!”
Spencer returned to Britain as a priest, and Dominic wrote, “He takes my heart
with him.” But he continued to pray and to beg others to pray for England. He
kept up endless correspondence with his English friends. And he never lost hope
that he would go to Britain in the end. Cholera came to Ceprano, and he worked
heroically and fearlessly among the plague-stricken Italians. “Death cannot
come too close to me,” he said. “I must die in England.”
Another General Chapter opened in 1839. Another plea
for an English foundation was offered, this time by Father Spencer. De Lisle
Phillips offered a house. And at last it was decided that the sons of Paul of
the Cross would go to England. And Dominic? Poor Dominic was elected again to
serve as a Provincial in Italy for another three year term.
Worse than that, the whole project collapsed suddenly
and completely, probably because there were many English Catholics who felt
that the Passionists had no place in their country. Thus Lord Shrewsbury wrote
to Phillips:
I have seen Lord Clifford and Father Glover and the
Passionists. The former agree with me that it is an impracticable scheme to
think of working with them in England. . . . Father Glover said, “You will
never get an Englishman into that Order, so what good can you do with them?” .
. . Father Dominic and another came to see me. They were ready to go and take
possession of the house you were so good as to offer them. I said that they
could not eat the house, and I did not know who was to feed them otherwise.
Father Dominic spoke a little broken English, but did not understand a word I
said to him. You will only bring yourself and others into trouble with these
good people, and do no good.
What were Dominic’s thoughts as he left Rome again to
take up his duties as Provincial? Twenty-five years had passed since his
“vision.” Now at last it must have appeared impossible of realization. Even if
an English foundation were eventually accepted, how could he hope to go there?
He was almost fifty years old. His new appointment would keep him in Italy for
three more years at least. And already his health was shockingly bad. A serious
hernia, rheumatism, and palpitation of the heart were but part of his ailments.
His eyesight was so poor that he could distinguish people a few paces away only
by the sound of their voices. He had to be continually swathed in bandages, and
the least exertion caused him pain from head to foot. Moreover, he was quite
unattractive physically, he had a squeaky, rasping voice, and he knew scarcely
a word of English.
To settle any doubts about the matter, a message from
his General in Rome came to him one day as he was giving a mission. It said
that while the Superiors realized that the time had not yet come for the
Passionists to enter into England directly, a foundation had been accepted in
Belgium, with a view to passing over into Britain later on. Four men had been
chosen for the mission. . . . Dominic had not even been mentioned.
We have remarked that there is no drama to compare
with the lives of the saints. The melodramas of the stage and screen, with all
their nervewracking suspense, are but pale similitudes of the startling and
unaccountable adventures of the men and women of God. In our cinemas the hero
in a burning cabin is surrounded by hordes of bloodthirsty villains. All
apparently is lost. Suddenly a bugle blares. We hear the shouts of men, the
galloping of horses. The U. S. Cavalry thunders up, pennants flying. Our hero
is saved.
Ah, but in the lives of the saints there are not
merely villains who can kill bodies to be considered, but enemies who can
destroy souls, adversaries with supernatural intelligence and cunning and
hatred. “For our fighting is not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities and powers, against the spirits of wickedness in high places,
against the rulers of this world of darkness.” There are the allurements of the
world to be overcome; the enticements of the flesh; there is the serpent of
self-love entwining itself in the uttermost depths of the soul, the serpent
which must be hacked to pieces and torn out piecemeal, still always twining and
clinging until seemingly, to disengage it, the soul itself must be uprooted.
And, worst of all to the saints, there is the apparent abandonment of them by
God to their enemies, so that they seem to walk terrifyingly alone in what they
call “The Dark Night of the Soul.”
Dominic tells us that for more than thirty years he
suffered this tormenting darkness of spirit. And now, with the heart-breaking
news from Rome, there was good reason for him to feel utterly abandoned by that
God Who had once made him believe that he would some day go to England. Now, if
ever, we should expect him to believe that his vision had been a mockery, that
his priestly life had been built upon a delusion.
But the saints never do what we expect them to do.
When the crushing news came from his General, Dominic turned to a friend and
said, “You will see. They will not go without me.” The friend must have smiled
at him understandingly. All the Passionists had known for years of this
“obsession” about his mission to England. Often they must have laughed about it
among themselves. “Poor Dominic!” they must have said to each other. And “Poor
Dominic!” they must have said with emphasis and finality, that day the word
arrived that his hopes had gone forever.
Why did this middle-aged priest, half-blind, and
crippled with ailments, still cling to his conviction that he would go to
England, in spite of all? Did he “feel” that he would go? The saints don’t
bother overmuch about feelings. They “will” things. They don’t “feel” even
faith at times. They “will” it, like Saint Vincent de Paul, who had no feeling
of faith for many years, and could only will to believe in the Credo that he
vrore over his heart. I don’t believe that Dominic “felt” he was to go with the
chosen men to Britain. But he “willed” to believe it. God had promised that he
would go. This was his last chance. He had kept his own promise to do the best
he could. God would never fail to do His part.
A Reprieve
And suddenly God did His part, unaccountably,
astoundingly. Heavenly bugles were already blaring afar off; angelic cavalry
were galloping to the rescue. For even while Dominic had been insisting,
against all hope, that he would go to England with the little band of chosen
men, the appointed leader of the band was begging off from his assignment. All
that men knew was that soon a very earthly messenger rode up to Dominic’s
monastery and gave him a message from his General. It told him simply that he
was to go to Rome to act as substitute leader of the mission to Belgium and
England. Just so had Xavier been substituted at the last minute for his mission
to the Far East. So, too, would Damien of Molokai be supplied for his brother,
suddenly stricken ill the night before he was to leave for the islands of the
South Pacific.
What did Dominic do when he received his miraculous
summons? Did he shout with joy? Did he turn handsprings, as Don Bosco used to
do? Did he call his monks to rejoice with him? Surely, strict as he always was
with himself and others, he must have announced a Gaudeamus for his community.
I doubt, however, that he waited to enjoy it with them. I’m sure it didn’t take
him long to set off for Rome. He had no clothes to pack. Passionists in Italy
wore only the religious habit, as they wear it today. A few necessities he
took, perhaps an extra old habit. Then, almost helpless with pain, he was
boosted onto the back of a plough-horse to begin his journey to Rome.
I’d like to write about our hero galloping along the
road to the Eternal City, but we read that for part of the way he had to be
supported, on either side, because of weakness. I’d like to describe him as a
gallant figure dashing off to battle in Britain. In reality he resembled
nothing so much as poor Don Quixote setting off on his ancient Rosinante to
joust against the windmills. Those against which Dominic was to enter the lists
had been turning ponderously and crushingly during three centuries, fanned by
the winds of hatred and prejudice, grinding the Catholic Church in England to
powder. The modern Don Quixote’s lance was to be a crucifix.
Arrived in Rome, Dominic delayed no longer than was
necessary. He and his little band, two priests and a lay-brother, went to Saint
Peter’s to be blessed by the Pope. A Gregory had blessed Augustine. Another
Gregory blessed the new apostle. This later Gregory had once been a monk too,
on the same Celian Hill from which Augustine had come, and now Dominic. He
spent his last few moments in Rome in prayer and tears at the tomb of his
father, Paul of the Cross. He must have wondered then if he were the one that
Paul had seen in vision in England. At last he left Italy. He was never to see
it again. It was May the Feast of Our Lady of Victories, 1840. And the General
who was sending him on his mission was the old Director of Novices who had
asked him the Scripture question when he was a lay-brother, and had petitioned
to have him educated for the priesthood.
Belgium
Why did God ordain that Dominic should spend more than
a year in Belgium, before going to an English foundation? Perhaps to prepare
him for the hardships that lay ahead. Even after his trials in Belgium, he was
to find his sufferings in England almost unbearable. Without the Belgium
preparation, they might have been too much, even for his resolute spirit.
The house to which he came at Ere was little better
than the cell of Paul of the Cross at Castellazzo. There were sacks of straw on
the ground for beds, the only furniture in the house was a table in the
kitchen, and there was not much more than bread and water for sustenance. Worse
still, calumnies and hatreds began to be directed against the little band. They
were accused of being expelled in disgrace from Italy, and of trying only to
make money from the poor Belgians. Finally Brother Crispin, the only
lay-brother among the four, became mortally ill. Through it all their leader
was serene and happy. “Contradictions and calumnies,” he writes, “are the most
stable foundations of religious houses.” The saints know that God permits the
devil to stir up tempests when they are about to do something for His glory.
Thus the Founder of the Marist Fathers used to say, when things went particularly
badly. “Today we have taken a step forward.” This is the humor of the saints
which the world doesn’t understand, because it is based upon the Wisdom of the
Cross that to them is foolishness.
“The Demon,” writes Dominic, “has put forth all his
strength to ruin us. I do not lose courage on account of that. I recognize all
this trouble as a clear sign that our work will succeed. I should fear much
more if we were successful in all things at the start and if all went well
according to our plans and ideas.”
In this wise the Belgium foundation began to grow,
even though trials multiplied so rapidly that there was a time when the
Superiors in Rome thought of giving it up. But Dominic had come too far along
the way to England to retreat now; and at his pleadings the foundation was
saved. It has been a great glory to the Passionists ever since.
As always, Dominic was keeping to his resolution of
not wasting a minute of time in the service of God. He was running the house,
looking about already for new foundations, keeping the strict Passionist
observance, even to midnight Matins, and giving unforgettable retreats to
seminarians, priests and religious. During his first days in Belgium, according
to custom, he was summoned by the Vicar-General of the Diocese to be examined
for faculties. Before the examination had gone far, the Vicar-General closed
his books and said: “This priest should be examining us.”
In the midst of all his work and prayer, of course his
heart was always in Britain, and he kept up a steady flow of correspondence
with his English friends. Wiseman, now a bishop, came to Oscott College in
September. Before having been made a bishop in Rome, he had made a retreat at
Saints John and Paul, during which he had made a vow to bring the Passionists
to England and to his diocese. Dominic tells us that Wiseman, on several
occasions, confided to him that his secret desire was to be a Passionist,
himself. Wiseman had not yet received a diocese, but he had already picked out
a house for the sons of Paul of the Cross. He wrote to his old friend in
Belgium, offering him a place at Aston in Staffordshire.
Dominic, half-paralyzed with joy, rushed off a letter
to the General in Rome, and was told to make a visit to England. When he
reached the coast at Boulogne, he could not wait to see the Promised Land. He
climbed to the top of a church to view the English coastline. . . . And on the
way across the Channel, he prayed to God to let him be drowned, if it might
help in any way toward the conversion of the English.
A Charge and A Retreat
It is dangerous to try to ascribe human
characteristics to God. But it would seem that He has as an infinite
perfection, something corresponding to our sense of humor. Otherwise, how could
He have created myriads of things that appear so comical to us—puppies and
kittens, penguins and porcupines, huge elephants and the tiny mice that terrify
them, cows that make milk from grass, pigs that transform refuse into
pork-chops? And, after all, aren’t we funny enough, ourselves?
The life of Our Divine Lord is filled with paradox,
from the wise kings adoring Him in the stable, to the good thief worshiping Him
on the Cross. And in its narrating there lies many a hidden chuckle, from the
story of the woman of Canaan, to the episodes following the Resurrection.
There is many a chuckle to be found in the life of
Dominic, too. Theresa of Avila once complained to Our Lord that the reason He
had so few intimates was that He treated them too roughly. Dominic might have
made the same complaint more than once. For more than twenty-six years the poor
man had burned with desire to enter England. When God finally arranged for him
to enter, it was the one day of the year when, naturally speaking, he should
have stayed away. It was Guy Fawkes Day; and as he stepped off the boat into
the land of his dreams, it must have seemed to him like a nightmare. Everywhere
in the streets were great signs bearing the words, “NO POPERY!” Everywhere in
his path the effigy of the Pope was being consigned to roaring bonfires amid
the shrieking of fifes, the beating of drums, and the exulting shouts of the
dearly beloved English.
Yet, from the scenes he witnessed on Guy Fawkes Day,
Dominic might have learned at least two lessons. The bonfires pictured how
fiercely the flames of hatred burned against the Church in England. And the
drear coldness of the November afternoon was a portent of the reception he was
to receive from. most of the English Catholics.
Bishop Wiseman and Father Spencer, of course, welcomed
him warmly at Oscott College. But, apart from these, his reception was cold.
That coldness must have been a shock to poor Dominic, but it is quite
understandable to us. Englishmen, as a rule, are undemonstrative, anyway; and
it was but natural that even the Catholics should have resented this ungainly
Italian in his religious garb and sandaled feet, sputtering his broken English
and burning to convert England all at once. After all, they must have thought,
what did he know about their country? What did he understand about their
centuries in the catacombs and how they had had to fight to win a few
privileges for themselves? Did he want to spoil everything now, with his
imprudent zeal?
What chilled Dominic even more than the coldness
toward him personally, however, was the lack of enthusiasm for his cause among
the Catholic professors at Oscott. As someone has said, the English Catholics
had not yet learned to walk upon the emancipated legs they had received only a
few years before. The rust of ostracism, social and political, had eaten into
their souls during the centuries of persecution in Britain, and they could
hardly believe that they were free, much less try to win other Englishmen over
to the Church.
But what forced Dominic to retreat back to Belgium,
after a month, was the simple fact that the priest living in the house offered
to him by Bishop Wiseman would not get out. Dominic had said that he would be
willing to live in a cave, if he might come to England, but there wasn’t even a
cave for him just now. So back to Belgium he went with a promise that he would
be invited soon again. Beside the reception given him by Wiseman and Spencer,
there was a letter from Phillips to cheer him. It read:
I have heard this moment that you are at Oscott. What
delightful news. At length an apostle, a man of God, is come into England. We
have seen at last accomplished the prophecies of your venerable founder, Father
Paul of the Cross, regarding the foundation of your Institute in England. We
see at length the effect of so many prayers offered to God by your Institute
for the conversion of this kingdom. . . .
But Dominic knew that the prophecy of Paul of the
Cross would not be fulfilled until he had a foundation in Britain. So he
watched across the channel more closely than ever, like a hound that has
sighted his quarry. Particularly he was watching the leaders of the Oxford
Movement who had now reached the crossroads with the publication of Newman’s
Tract 90. Herein Newman strove to prove that the Thirty-nine Articles of the
Established Church were not necessarily opposed to the Decrees of the Council
of Trent. The Anglican Church was up in arms. Newman resigned his living at
Oxford, and retired to Littlemore. Another of the English group, John
Dalgairns, wrote an article about Anglican Church Parties for the Univers. That
was the opportunity for which Dominic had been waiting. He had vanquished De
Lamennais. Now he was to try to vanquish Newman.
Dominic’s letter to the Gentlemen at Oxford was a
masterpiece. Written in elegant Latin, in the words of Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B. it
“answered the difficulties and objections of Anglicans in the most masterly
way.” It proved that Newman’s attempts to reconcile the tenets of Anglicanism
and Catholicism were “a snare in the path to Rome.” Newman remarked that the
author of the letter was “a sharp, clever man.” And Dalgairns began a
controversy with Dominic that was to bring him to Littlemore and to Newman.
The Promised Land
Most important just now, however, was the final call
from Bishop Wiseman to come to England and settle at last in a Passionist
foundation there. The General commissioned Dominic to be Superior of both the
Belgian and English Provinces. Again he set off across the Channel, with one
companion, an Irish Passionist named Father Amadeus. This time he was really to
fulfill the prophecy of Paul of the Cross. He arrived in Oscott on 7 October
1841.
As Father Pius Devine, C.P. has written:
Dominic comes to a new country, whose language he
cannot well speak, whose customs he is ignorant of, among a people who despise
the garb he wears as deeply as they detest the religion he professes. … He has
no money, and few friends. … If the busy world around him had known of this
ungainly monk in his rude sackcloth and sandals, who was intent upon turning them
away from heresy, they verily would have laughed him to scorn.
In Belgium he had said that he expected all kinds of
sufferings. “I have not come here to enjoy myself,” he wrote, “or to receive
applause. Contradictions, poverty, and calumny do not terrify us. For
twenty-six years I have been preparing for this. And I hope we ‘shall go on to
England, where the cross will be heavier than ever.” It was to become far
heavier than he could imagine. And his suffering began at once with what was
always hardest for his impetuous soul to bear—waiting. For almost five months
he had to wait at Oscott College because of delay in Rome which threatened to
bring to a quick and inglorious end the entire project. Rome seemed to be
against him. The English professors at Oxford rebuffed him. But finally in
February he entered his own house at Aston. He celebrated his first public Mass
on a Sunday morning. When he tried to say the prayers in English after Mass,
his congregation began to snicker and then to howl at his broken speech. Poor
Dominic, in tears, had to be helped into the sacristy.
Yet from the start there was something about this
physically unattractive Italian monk that influenced people in spite of
themselves. Newman himself once said that he was moved to the depths of his
soul, every time he saw Dominic. Thus, slowly but surely, the poor stuttering
foreigner began to win the hearts of his little congregation. In March he dared
to give a mission—in English. It was the beginning of all the modern parish
missions in England. On Good Friday he received his first convert into the
Church. By Advent he was ready to work in the town of Stone, three miles away.
Here he hired a room in an inn, to say Mass there for the first time since
Reformation days. And in this village, for almost two years, he was to walk the
Way of the Cross with his Divine Master.
To understand what Dominic had to face in Stone, we
must know something of the deplorable condition of the Catholic Church in
England at this time. From the days of Elizabeth until the Emancipation Act of
1829, during more than two centuries, Catholics had been subjected to cruel
persecution. And while the Emancipation Act stopped the open oppression of
Catholics, it meant only that they would be tolerated if they did not make too
much show of their religion. The days of the rack in London Tower, the hanging
and quartering on Tyburn Hill, and the hunting down of priests had indeed
passed. But men were still living who could remember the Gordon Riots, when
British mobs had risked burning down the city of London to show their hatred
for Catholics, and the King’s militia alone had been able to halt the butchery
of Catholic Englishmen.
When Dominic came to England, the fewness of priests,
the wretchedness of religious edifices, and the timidity of Catholics gave
ample indications of the sad effects of relentless persecution and intolerant
bigotry towards the Catholics. Newman in the Second Spring described English
Catholics as a:
“gens lucifuga, a people who shunned the light of day
. . . found in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the
recesses of the country; cut off from the populous world around them, and dimly
seen, as if through a mist or in twilight, as ghosts flitting to and fro.”
Especially the old spirit of hatred towards the monk
and friar was still rampant. For three centuries the religious habit had not
been seen publicly in all the realm of England. It was banned by law. Members
of Religious Orders were scattered, using the name and dress of seculars. They
were forbidden to receive new members, under pain of banishment.
Truly the great British windmills of religious bigotry
had well-nigh ground the Catholic Church in England into powder. Little did
anyone know that our modern Don Quixote was to put an end to much of their
clumsy wheeling. He was simply to pierce them with his lance, made in the form
of a Cross.
Tragedy
We cannot lay too much importance on what we are to
speak of now. The conflict we are to note took place in the quiet English
village of Stone between a single Italian monk and some hundreds or possibly
thousands of English people. But the results of that struggle were so
far-reaching as to be incalculable.
On the one hand, Dominic championed the right of
Catholics, not merely to practice their religion, but to flaunt it openly and
unafraid, to brandish it, to blazon it for all the world to see. On the other
hand, a multitude representing all the forces of bigotry in England did their
best to crush him.
During three centuries, I repeat, the religious habit
had not been seen publicly in all Britain. It was proscribed by law. Dominic
was the first religious in three hundred years to dare to appear in habit and
sandaled feet upon the streets and roadways of that kingdom. By this action he faced
banishment. Indeed he braved martyrdom. The action demanded blazing courage.
Its continuance called for sheer heroism.
However dimly they realized the full import of
Dominic’s daring. Catholics and Protestants alike must have sensed the issues
involved. They must have been somehow aware that if this barefoot missionary
were to retreat or fail in his bold enterprise, the open practice of
Catholicism in England would receive a setback; if he were to triumph, alone
against the forces of prejudice, his bravery and his victory must shame the
English Catholics into a courage like unto his own.
Thus Dominic shouted a direct challenge to British
bigotry on that first morning when he walked in his religious habit and sandals
into the village of Stone, entrenched in centuries of religious hatred of the
Church. It was a call to battle. And the bigots rose immediately to arms. As
eyewitnesses said later, all hell seemed to be let loose against him.
The walk from Aston to Stone was three miles. On the
first morning Dominic met few people until he came to the outskirts of Stone.
Those few were too dumbfounded to do more than stare at him. But as he neared
the village, people began to follow him. There were angry mutterings, then a
deepening clamor of many voices. Windows were thrown open along the streets.
Children left their play to join their elders. Some of the wastrels of the town
began to shout insults. One threw a stone. The temper of the crowd rose with
its numbers. When Dominic entered the inn, where he had hired a room in which
to say Mass, the mob waited outside for him. It grew larger with every passing
minute. Messengers were dispatched to bring the most bigoted from their homes
and offices. When the monk reappeared, he was greeted with a sullen roar.
Curses and insults grew louder, ribald, unrepeatable. Dominic walked slowly
through the crowd, hat in hand, and in perfect calm, bowing to all, and with a
kind word for all. But as he walked along, stones began to rain upon him.
People spat at him. Some of the more daring scooped mud and filth from the
roadway, and flung them in his face. Even the children joined in the mad
onslaught. All the way to the outskirts of the town the surging rout followed
him. When they left him at last, his habit was defiled, his face bloody, his
ears ringing with threats of death, should he return.
No doubt the mob thought that the stout little Italian
monk would never come back. But they did not know their man, nor how for
twenty-six years he had been preparing himself for martyrdom. Not only did he
return in a few days, but three times each week for two years he walked from
Aston to Stone and back again in his religious habit and sandals. After a few
visits, the mobs of the village did not wait for him. They came outside to meet
him. As he appeared in the distance, they set up a chant of “Here comes Father
Demonio! Here comes the Demon!” They had heaps of stones waiting for him. In
time his face was scarred from their battering. Once a huge beam that might
have killed him missed his head by inches. The warfare became diabolical.
Calumnies were added to the insults and blows. And more than once men lay in
wait for him in the dark to kill him as he walked back to Aston. There was no
miraculous dog, like the famous Grigio of Don Bosco, to protect his life. But
although there was only one road back to Aston, and though cut-throats waited
for him somehow Dominic always passed by without their seeing him.
Most of the Catholics were almost as bitter as the
Protestants against “the mad foreigner.” They feared that his “wild imprudence”
might react upon themselves. His Passionist companion stayed at home. Dominic
was alone, and at the lowest ebb of his gallant spirits. He writes:
“My God, for what distress and sorrow You have
reserved me. I spent so many years before coming to this island, preparing
myself at all times for suffering. But I find I am not half-well-enough
prepared for the dire reality. It seems to me that if I had ever foreseen all
that awaited me, I should never have had the courage to step on board ship.
Last Sunday I broke down, and wept bitterly. I can do no more. The Cross is too
heavy. My God, if You intend to increase it, You must increase my strength,
too.”
Martyrdom would have been a relief to him at any time
during those two years when he walked the Way of the Cross from Aston to Stone.
. . . And here was the beloved England for which his heart had burned, and
about which he could never speak during twenty-six years except in the broken
accents of a lover.
Second Spring
Yet never did he ask for relief, nor utter a word of
complaint to his Superiors. And slowly the stark courage and holiness of the
man began to break down his enemies. After many months, the children who had
stoned him began to cling to his religious cloak. Some of the more fair-minded
of his enemies began to be ashamed of their violent cruelty. More important,
the Catholics were little by little aroused from their apathy. The story of
Dominic’s sufferings and of his sanctity spread through England. More and more
he was in demand for missions and retreats. Like the poor old toothless Cure of
Ars, he could scarcely be understood with his broken English. But there was the
same sort of supernatural effects to his preaching. People rose early, walked
far, and waited long in cold and bad weather to hear him and to go to
confession. Prejudices were broken down; Catholics walked with new confidence.
In April of 1843, after only a year at Aston, Dominic could count seventy-five
converts. Innumerable Catholics had returned to their religious duties.
Next year the church at Aston was opened for public
worship. At Stone a church was built that served during weekdays as a Catholic
school. Three priests and some postulants now lived with Dominic at Aston Hall,
despite the threat of banishment against religious who accepted new members.
The regular monastic life of the Passionists was carried out in full. The
number of converts was well into the hundreds.
It was the first budding of the Second Spring. Next
year was to see its flowering.
Ever since his Belgian correspondence with Dalgairns,
Dominic had kept in close touch with the leaders of the Oxford Movement, those
men who with Newman as their head, were discovering their position in the
Anglican Church intolerable. He had written to them, prayed for them, publicly
praised them, visited with them. “These Oxford men,” he wrote, “work with the
spirit of martyrs. Let us pray for them. The finger of God seems to be there in
a wonderful manner.” Dalgairns wrote to him for hairshirts and disciplines, and
he remarked, “their practices of penances are extraordinary; their life is much
more severe than that usually led by religious.” In June of 1844 we find
Dominic at Littlemore with Newman and the devoted band he had gathered around
him. Newman took Dominic to Littlemore Church, and they prayed together. At
this meeting Newman must have told the Passionist something that stirred his
heart, for we find the General writing to him, “What consolation I feel at your
news about the declaration of the Head of Oxford University. The results ought
to be good. May the Lord give His grace to the others.” Dominic himself wrote,
“Only a little more grace is needed.”
We may recall it was while praying before the Blessed
Sacrament at Castellazzo that Paul of the Cross began to reflect on those men
who deny the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist. England especially had
come to his mind, England where for centuries the Real Presence had been
denied, and where the Sacrifice of the Mass had been declared an idolatrous
superstition. For this country Paul and his sons had never ceased praying. Now
Dominic was to have a ceremony which would be a significant prelude to the
conversions of the Oxford leaders. They wished, above all, to restore belief in
the Eucharist before which Paul had been inspired to pray for them, that
Sacrament which Newman was to speak of later as “prompted by our Lord’s love,
devised by His wisdom, and realized by His omnipotence.”
Dominic’s ceremony was a public, outdoor procession in
honor of the Blessed Sacrament. He himself carried the monstranced Host. It was
an event unparalleled since pre-Reformation days. Two thousand spectators,
Protestant and Catholic, witnessed the ceremony. All bore witness to the fact
that while the rain fell in torrents, it did not fall on the property through
which Dominic led the procession. Later he remarked drily that the Protestants
had said, “The devil is in these Papists.”
Here again we see Dominic defying precedent and common
procedure. Again we see him calling to Catholic England to put down its
timidity and show forth once more the spirit of Augustine and Thomas of
Canterbury, of Fisher and Sir Thomas More. And this public honor shown to Our
Lord in the Eucharist, after centuries of neglect and contempt, appeared to be
the immediate prelude to the full flowering of the Second Spring in England.
Soon afterward, Dominic received Dalgaims into the Church. Newman’s closest
friend, Saint John, was received at Stonyhurst. Then came the fateful 8 October
1845, the invitation to Littlemore, the wild ride on the stage-coach through
the storm, and the unforgettable tableau of Newman on his knees to the Italian
monk, begging him to hear his confession and accept him into the Church. On the
following morning Newman, Bowles, and Stanton made their profession of Faith to
Dominic together.
The news of Newman’s conversion at once reechoed all
over the world. Masses of thanksgiving and Te Deums were offered up throughout
Christendom. Dominic wrote. “All that I have suffered since I left Italy has
been well compensated by this event, and I hope the effects of such a
conversion may be great.”
Who can calculate how great were the effects of
Newman’s conversion? The historian Lecky called it “an event unparalleled in
magnitude since that which had taken place under the Tudors.” In his The Church
and the Nineteenth Century, Father Raymond Corrigan, S J. writes:
What the Oxford Movement has meant for the Church is
beyond computation. It brought to her a trained army of scholars and writers at
a time when she was silent and helpless in England against calumny and
contempt. Only those who can accurately gauge the impact of Catholic thought on
the English world of letters and the importance of the English language around
the globe are fitted to pronounce on the results of the Oxford Movement. The
whole Catholic body are better able to meet the modern world in a spirit of
calm and unabashed confidence because they know and all the world knows that
the Church can still appeal to an elite among the intellectual classes.
Many years after Newman’s reception into the Church,
someone remarked that since that time every intellectual conversion in the
English-speaking world might in some way be traced to his influence. The list
of those who followed him would require a special book. But even in our own day
we can remark how the intellectuals continue to be drawn into the
Church—Chesterton, Dawson, Benson, Lunn, Hollis, Gill, Knox, Martindale,
Maturin, Rosalind Murray, Noyes, Lord Alfred Douglas, etc. And in America there
have been multitudes like Brownson, the Stoddards, Bishop Kinsman, Isaac
Hecker, Rose Hawthorne, Delaney, Tabb, Joyce Kilmer, Heywood Broun, Dorothy
Day, Bishop Curtis, Michael Williams, and Fidelis Kent Stone.
Of course it might be argued that any priest could
have received Newman into the Church. But we have tried to show that Dominic
was precisely the one who should have had that happiness. This tremendous
conversion rightly belonged to Paul of the Cross, who had sowed the first seeds
of the Second Spring in Castellazzo; to the Passionists who had been praying
for England during more than a century; to Dominic, whose life for more than
thirty years had been a complete holocaust for his beloved England; to this
apostle who had roused the English Church to new life, whose blood had flowed for
it in the streets of Stone. Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B. remarks:
If a conversion is chiefly and necessarily the work of
God’s grace in answer to the intercession of Catholics, shall we be wrong if we
attribute to Father Dominic a far greater share in this unique conversion than
appears or can appear on the surface?
When we go beneath the surface and see the story which
lies behind that conversion, we know that in the designs of God Dominic’s share
in it was immense and inevitable. Until the end of his life Dominic kept up a
correspondence by letter and mutual visits with Newman, whom he called “one of
the humblest and most lovable of men.” The converts at Littlemore lived for a
while according to a simple rule of life arranged for them by the Passionist
monk. Later he defended them publicly against calumnious attack. Newman called
Dominic his father in God, and kept a picture of him in his bedroom, with a
light always burning before it. He probably spent Dominic’s last Christmas with
him at Aston, after having brought to him some books from the General in Rome.
Newman frequently visited with the Passionists there, offered a Mass of
thanksgiving at the altar of Paul of the Cross, and wished to be one of his
patrons at his canonization. When Dominic’s “Cause” for canonization was
introduced, Newman said to Cardinal Parrocchi:
I thank you for the interest you manifest in a “cause”
which to me is most dear, as the Passionist Fathers well know. Father Dominic
was a marvelous missioner and preacher, filled with zeal. He had a great part
in my own conversion, and in that of others. His very look had about it
something holy. When his form came within sight, I was moved to the depths in
the strangest way. The gaiety and affability of his manner in the midst of all
his sanctity was a holy sermon. No wonder, then, that I became his convert and
his penitent. His sudden death filled me with grief. I hoped and still hope
that Rome will crown him with the aureole of the saints.
A Noble and A Grenadier
October, the month of Mary’s Rosary, to which Dominic
had been devoted since boyhood, was always to be a great month for him, from
the time of his vision in Italy. In October, just one year after his reception
into the Church, Newman was moved to write to a friend one of the most striking
things he ever said about Dominic’s Congregation. It was occasioned by a
remarkable happening. He wrote from Rome:
“What do you think of Mr. Spencer having joined the
Passionists? I am glad, for Father Dominic’s sake. We went to their house with
Cardinal Acton — suppose we all become Passionists!”
We have already seen in Lord Shrewsbury’s letter how
Father Glover had declared that “no Englishman would ever become a Passionist.”
God’s answer to that statement was made almost melodramatically. The first Englishman
to demolish Father Glover’s prediction was a son of the former First Lord of
the English Admiralty, the Hon. George Spencer. A member of that great Spencer
family from which Winston Spencer Churchill has come, he was in later life a
welcome visitor at Buckingham Palace even in his religious habit and sandals.
The coming of Father Spencer to the Passionists is
only another proof that Paul of the Cross was at the bottom of the Second
Spring in England. Spencer, as an Anglican minister, had been drawn into the
Church by reading a book of Saint John Chrysostom concerning the Eucharist. He
had been amazed to learn that Chrysostom had believed in the “Real Presence.”
After his ordination in Rome, he had become a great friend of the Passionists.
He had drawn up the petition that invited them to England. And he had not only
enlisted himself in their crusade of prayer for the conversion of his country,
but he had for years traveled all over the Continent and the British Isles,
building up that crusade to become a veritable avalanche of petitions for
England. As the Archbishop of Liverpool said:
Dominic and Spencer sounded the trumpet which
announced the birth of a new and better day for Catholics; they were the
apostles and first laborers in the glorious work of the reconversion of England
to the Catholic Faith.
It was inevitable in the designs of God that Father
Spencer should become a son of Saint Paul of the Cross, that he should make his
vows with his hands in those of Dominic, and receive from him as a legacy the
English Passionist Province. He died in 1864, after a saintly and distinguished
career. And as he was so closely united with Dominic in life, it is appropriate
that they lie together in death at Saint Ann’s in Sutton — Ignatius Spencer,
scion of British aristocracy, and Dominic Barberi, child of a peasant home in
Italy.
If Lord Shrewsbury and other Englishmen were
astonished when Father Spencer became a Passionist, they must have been
dumbfounded when the nephew of the Duke of Wellington followed him. The young
and dashing Captain Pakenham of the Grenadier Guards was received into the
Church by Bishop Wiseman in 1850. A year later, he rode up to the gates of the
Passionist Novitiate at Broadway, Worcestershire, dismounted, gave his horse to
a groom, and went inside to clothe himself in a facsimile of Dominic’s coarse
black habit and sandals. The Iron Duke said to him in his monastic cell, “You
have been a good soldier. Be a good monk.” So good a monk did he become that he
died in the odor of sanctity as the young rector of the Passionist Monastery of
Mt, Argus in Dublin. Thirty-seven years after his death, his body was found to
be altogether incorrupt.
Do you wonder why I say that there is no drama like
the lives of the saints?
Last Days
Strangely enough, it was after the reception of Newman
into the Church that Dominic seemed to realize clearly that the time for the
conversion of the- English masses had not yet come. He wrote:
God can do what He wills. But, humanly speaking, I see
no prospect of the total conversion of England. There are too many passions,
too many prejudices, too much egoism, too much indifference.
All this, however, should not be too surprising when
we remember how for centuries the cry of “No Popery” had been dinned into the
ears of the English until it had become almost synonymous with, “Saint George
for England!” But it is difficult to understand how so reasonable a people as
the English can be so unreasonable with regard to the Catholic Church. They
shout, “No Popery!” Yet it was the Pope who sent them Augustine. Their great
cathedrals were built by their Catholic ancestors; their greatest kings and all
their saints have been Catholics. And they still style their Ruler “Defender of
the Faith,” though that title was given by the Pope to Henry VIII for his
defense of the ancient Catholic religion.
Of course Dominic added to his remarks about the
hopelessness of converting the English masses, “We must not, however, lose
courage.” Nor did he ever lose his own. He persisted in doing most startling
things in England until his death. At one time we see him preaching in habit
and sandals in the streets of London, and, crucifix in hand, urging astounded
Englishmen to come to his mission. At another time we read how he “preached in
a hay-loft to five hundred Protestants.” Even in Ireland he upset all precedent
by converting fifteen Protestants during a mission in Dublin. This, for
Ireland, was simply a miracle.
The famine of 1846 drove multitudes of starving Irish
to England, and fever and plague followed hard on their overcrowding and
starvation. Dominic and Spencer and their companions worked heroically amid the
poor sufferers. Spencer was struck down and almost died. Dominic had to fight
on alone. And now he could not say, as he had said during the cholera epidemic
in Ceprano, “Death cannot come near me. I must die in England.” For he was at
last in England. And death did come near him. The fever felled him at last. Its
effects stayed with him until the end.
Dominic lived in England only eight years. During that
time he gave more than a hundred memorable missions and retreats. But mostly he
was busy with his duties as head of both the English and Belgian Passionist
Provinces. He had to lead the way in keeping up the monastic observance. He had
to take care of the houses under his jurisdiction, and to be continually solicitous
for new monasteries, churches, and schools. In 1847 his old friend, Bishop
Wiseman, became Bishop of London, and immediately offered him a house in the
suburbs. In 1848, rejoicing that he now had twenty professed religious, he
began another foundation at Sutton in Lancashire. In the summer of 1849 he made
a visitation in Belgium. He returned to Aston on August 26th. That night he
planned to go to Woodchester on the following day. It was to be the last day of
his life.
Triumph of Failure
Dominic started out on the morning of August 27th with
a companion, Father Lewis. On the way to the train he remarked simply that the
end of his life was near. But he had been saying the same thing for several
months, and Father Lewis paid no special heed to it.
Now, however, the onslaught of death, cheated so
often, was to come suddenly and savagely. The train had just passed Reading
when Dominic was seized with a violent heart attack. The train stopped at
Pangbourne, and a doctor helped Father Lewis lift the dying man out of the
carriage. Because of the cholera then raging in London, nobody would give him
shelter. And so he lay on the bare ground of the railway station, in terrible
agony. What were Dominic’s thoughts as he lay there on the railway platform,
with his crucifix pressed to his lips? Was he satisfied with his life, now that
he knew it was drawing to a swift ending?
We behold the glory of the saints after their deaths
in the miracles that God works in their names, in the results that have
followed from their labors and their sufferings. But the saints, for the most
part, look upon themselves as failures. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Virgin, dying
after years of preparation for a missionary career, without even becoming a
priest, sick during almost all his religious life, must have thought himself a
disappointment and a burden to his Congregation. He knew nothing of the glory
he was to bring to that Congregation after his death. Peter Chantal, sitting on
the floor of his little hut in Futuna, with his lifeblood flowing from the
spear wound made by a murderous savage, must have esteemed his life a fiasco.
He had converted not a single soul on the island which he had wanted to bring
to Christ. How could he have seen, as we do, the whole island brought to Our
Lord because of his martyrdom? And Dominic, dying on the floor of a railroad
station in England—what had he accomplished after thirty years of preparing for
his mission, after eight years in England, after all his prayers and labors and
sufferings? He had wished to convert all England. Actually he was leaving
behind him some hundreds of converts, a few poor religious houses, a handful of
religious.
We can see the entire pathway of Dominic’s life
lighted up for us now. We can see the highlights of that life, and there is a
sort of glow about our hero. But Dominic always saw himself as he really was,
crippled with sickness, half-blind, ungainly, almost ugly. He saw himself
rebuffed and opposed by his own. He saw himself laughed at, mocked, spit upon,
even stoned in the roadways of the country he had loved so dearly.
How could he foresee all the good that was to follow
from his labors, or the spread of his Passionist Province through the British
Isles, and even to Australia?
Yes, the story of Dominic, like the story of all the
saints, is high drama, but we must never forget that by far the greater part of
it for him was dark and bitter tragedy. And yet, as with all the saints, he
must have been in uttermost peace of soul as he lay dying on the ground at
Pangbourne. He had done the best he could. God would take care of the rest, as
He had always done. As Father Urban Young, C.P. writes so well:
It was Dominic’s final Gethsemani, and he knew it.
This was the end. It had been a long way, weary and thorn-strewn, from the sun-steeped
slopes of Italy to the mists and fogs of England, and this deathbed at a lonely
wayside station. But not for worlds would he have retraced a step of it. For
was it not all for England— dear England—that he had paced every foot ol the
way? That she might return to the faith of her fathers he had grudged no
sacrifice. For her he had studied and toiled and endured. In that lifelong
martyrdom for England, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, toils, persecutions, and
contempt had been his lot, crowned now in lonely death by a very torment of
pain and dereliction supreme. But little did he reck of it. His death, like his
life, would be for England.
Father Lewis bent down and gave the dying man his last
absolution. He had already, that morning, given himself his own Viaticum. He
was carried into the train that now came into the station, bound for Reading.
At Reading he was taken to a railway tavern. His agony lasted five hours.
During it he asked Father Lewis to write immediately to Father Spencer and tell
him to take his place until Father General would settle the matter. The doctor
held hopes of recovery, but Dominic knew better. “In your charity,” he said to
Father Lewis, “do not leave me.” Suddenly his agony was terrible to behold. It
was the last anguish, the last struggle, the supreme sacrifice. Dominic’s head
fell back in death. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, the hour of His
Master’s triumph over death on Calvary.
Three days later, Dominic’s Requiem was held at Stone.
And now along the way that had once been his Via Dolorosa he was borne slowly
back to Aston. A few short years before, he had walked these same streets day
after, day overwhelmed with insults, stoned and beaten, his poor lace covered
with his blood and the filth of the streets. Now those who had once mocked and
stoned him came out in their thousands to do him reverence. We read:
Never before or since, has a Passionist gone to his
rest in such a setting for the final scene. The mourning thousands filled the
streets, the doors, the windows, the very roofs, on that sad, yet glorious day.
Slowly the procession moved, swaying, in the surging crowds who wept their last
goodbye as the coffin was borne through the familiar streets where Dominic had
walked and toiled and suffered. . . . And outside the town, the sorrow-stricken
multitude still streamed onward to witness his homecoming to Aston and the
retreat he had loved so well.
Almost forty years later, Dominic’s body was
re-interred at Saint Ann’s in Sutton. It was found to be still incorrupt.
Afterword
Dominic of the Mother of God, Passionist, needs no
eulogy from us. His life is his eulogy. Pages might be filled to prove that he
practiced all the virtues to a heroic degree. In a pamphlet such as this there
is not room enough. Is it even necessary? We could, for example, show Dominic’s
humility, by telling how he shrank from the honors of the episcopacy that were
pressed upon him more than once in Italy. We might speak of his poverty, how,
characteristically, on one long trip from England to Belgium, he spent over and
above his third-class railway fare two pence for a pork pie, and a penny for a
morsel of bread, washing down the repast with a draft of water from a roadside
pump. We could talk of his strict mortification, and his love for prayer, which
was continual with him; of his zeal for the religious observance, which made
him rise for midnight Matins in England when he had only two laymen to chant
with him. We could write of his faith and hope and charity, of his fortitude,
and his spirit of obedience. But we have seen all these virtues displayed
throughout his life. The two resolutions he had made as a young man, always to
do the best he could and leave the rest to God, and never to waste a minute in
God’s service, sum up his life.
We might, however, add a few- words about a trait of
the saints that people often overlook — their sense of humor. The wisdom of the
saints is foolishness to the world, and consequently their humor seems to it to
be gloom. But just as there is a sorrow too deep for tears, there is a humor
too deep for laughter. The chuckle, so to speak, lies deep within the soul.
Thus it is with the humor of the saints, a cheeriness that seems to increase as
difficulties multiply, one that is illustrated by the remark of the old Irish lady,
“My rheumatism is much worse today — thanks be to God.”
Damien of Molokai as a young student had over his desk
a sign which read, “Prayer, Silence, Recollection.” His superior advised him to
add a fourth word, “Merriment.” Dominic had learned that lesson. He knew, with
Saint Paul, how to ”rejoice always in the Lord.” He understood, with Blessed
Juliana of Norwich, how to be, “strong and merry in the love of Jesus
Crucified.” On one occasion, unrecognized, he was kept waiting in the anteroom
of a convent. The Mother Superior asked him if he had been waiting long. “Only
a few hours,” said he, dryly. Hungry after a long journey, one of the Sisters
gave him some bread and milk. It disappeared rapidly. “Maybe you’d like an egg.
Father,” she said. “Maybe,” he said, “I’d like a dozen. But three or four will
do, I think.” Once the religious were buying milk from some neighbors, and it
appeared to be growing weaker each day. Finally Dominic said gently to the
little girl who brought it, “Will you please ask your good mother to put a
little more milk with the water tomorrow?” As Newman said, there was an
affability and a gaiety in Dominic’s manner that was a holy sermon in itself.
During the terrible days at Stone he did cry out in agony of soul, but so did
his Master cry out in His dereliction, on Calvary.
Faults Dominic undoubtedly had — a certain
stubbornness, as when he insisted on wearing sandals in public, even though the
authorities in Rome advised him to wear shoes. But here he had the backing of
Bishop Wiseman, and he himself had learned by experience that without the
sandals he did not have the same influence on the missions. And what would he
have done without that stubbornness through all his years of trial? Anger could
flare up suddenly, too, as on the day he saw a picture of himself displayed in
the parlor of one of his monasteries in England. Ordinarily il was directed
only against those who publicly and maliciously attacked the Faith. But these
incidents only prove what a struggle it cost him to be his usual self, gentle
and mild and serene. And, after all, who ever expects even a saint to be
without some human faults? How could we ever hope to imitate them at all?
Was Dominic’s life a failure? It was, in the sense
that the lives of the saints appear very often as failures, because their
Master’s seemed so on Calvary. They are, rather, triumphs of failure. The seed
must die before the harvest appears. What was Dominic’s harvest? It can be
measured only by what the Second Spring meant to the Church in England and all
over the world. And that measuring is beyond our powers.
“That little band of converts at Littlemore!” writes
Dom Bede Camm. “Was not that a harvest for which a man might well have spent a
lifetime of prayer and penance? And was it mere chance that it fell to his hand
to gather in these souls and herald thus the birthday of the Second Spring?”
What of all those who came under Dominic’s influence
in Italy and Belgium? What of the hundreds, possibly thousands of converts in
England? What of the tens of thousands of reawakened English Catholics?
When Dominic came to England, as we have seen,
Catholics were almost afraid to move. Religious Orders were in the catacombs.
His daring to appear on the public roadways of Britain in the religious habit
and sandals, unseen and forbidden during three hundred years; his fortitude
during years of public stonings and beatings; his fiery preaching, even in the
English thoroughfares; his public processions of the Blessed Sacrament,
hitherto unheard of for centuries in England; all sounded a trumpet that roused
the Catholic English Church from its apathy and cowardice. The first Provincial
Synod of Westminster in 1852, where Newman preached THE SECOND SPRING, was made
possible only by the progress of the English Church during the eight years that
Dominic worked in England. That progress was due, in great measure, to him.
Since his day the English population has doubled. But
the Catholics in England have trebled in numbers. Magnificent Catholic
churches, monasteries, schools, and religious institutions of every kind cover
the land. Conversions continue apace. After the first World War, for instance,
until 1930, it was estimated that there were 12,000 conversions each year,
mostly of mature and earnest men and women. And best of all, the centuries-old
hatred and stigmatizing of Catholics as un-English, which Dominic knew, has
largely disappeared.
Of his Congregation there are now sixteen houses in
England and Ireland and Scotland; a house in Paris stemming from the English
Province; and four foundations in Australia. Before the war English Passionists
were also working in Tanganyika, Africa.
Thus Dominic’s harvest still cannot be estimated,
because it will continue to grow until that last day when God alone will be
able to estimate its riches. For the harvest of the saints never dies in this
world. It has its roots and its flowering in that Mystical Body of Him Who
walks the roadways of the world until the end of time.
Was Dominic a saint? Those who knew him thought he
was, from Leo XIII and Cardinal Newman to his fellow religious and the lay-folk
for whom he spent himself so utterly. There has been well-attested evidence
that he had supernatural gifts — prophecy, the reading of hearts, even
bi-location. There is strong proof of miracles worked through his intercession.
But only the Church can decide whether he is worthy of
canonization, only the Holy Spirit Who speaks through the visible head of the
Mystical Body on matters such as this. Cardinal Bourne, however, in speaking of
those who have labored for the conversion of England during the last three
centuries, has well written:
In the front rank among them all stands Dominic
Barberi, worthy indeed of our private prayer and veneration, pending the hour
when the Church may authoritatively set him publicly among her saints.
Dominic alone, of all connected with England’s Second
Spring, has received the public stamp of the Church’s approval with the title
of Venerable. And as the Archbishop of Westminster has said, “It would be a
crowning triumph to the celebrations to mark the centenary of Cardinal Newman’s
reception into the Church if the Holy See saw fit to raise to the altar the
priest who received him into the Church.”
Surely Cardinal Newman in heaven must be hoping, even
more than he did on earth, that the Church will crown his “Father in God” with
the “aureole of the saints.” It would add new color and beauty to all the
flowering of THE SECOND SPRING.
– from The Apostle of the
Second Spring by Kenan Carey, C.P., published by the Paulist
Press of New York; copyright 1945 by the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the
Apostle; Nihil Obstat: Arthur J Scanlan, S.T.D., Censor Librorum; Imprimatur: +
Cardinal Francis J Spellman, D.D., Archbishop of New York, 19 July 1945.
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/apostle-of-the-second-spring-by-kenan-carey-c-p/
Beato Domenico della Madre di Dio Barberi Sacerdote
passionista
Viterbo, 22 giugno 1792 - Reading, Inghilterra, 27
agosto 1849
Nato a Viterbo nel 1792, Domenico Barbieri a 22 anni
entrò nei Passionisti, prendendo come nome da religioso Domenico della Madre di
Dio. Ordinato sacerdote, cominciò la sua opera di predicazione in Italia, ma
soprattutto in Inghilterra, dove ricondusse alla fede cattolica moltissimi
fedeli e ministri, tra i quali anche John Henry Newman. Fu apprezzato dai Papi
Leone XIII, che lo conobbe di persona quando era nunzio a Bruxelles, e Pio X,
che ne ricordò la figura in una lettera del 1911. Fu uomo di vasta erudizione,
come dimostrano molte sue opere filosofiche, teologiche e ascetiche. Morì a
Reading nel 1849. È sepolto a Sutton-Oak nel ritiro di Sant'Anna, presso
Liverpool. (Avvenire)
Etimologia: Domenico = consacrato al Signore, dal
latino
Martirologio Romano: A Reading in Inghilterra,
beato Domenico della Madre di Dio Barberi, sacerdote della Congregazione della
Passione, che, dedito alla ricostituzione dell’unità dei cristiani, riaccolse
molti fedeli nella Chiesa cattolica.
La chiamavano mamma non solo gli undici figli ma anche
i poveri della città, verso i quali il suo cuore era sempre spalancato. E
Domenico, l'ultimo figlio, non dimenticherà mai l'ottima mamma Maria Antonia
Pacelli. L'esempio di lei, morta purtroppo così presto, l'accompagnerà per
tutta la vita. Sarà sacerdote e missionario; eserciterà il ministero in Italia,
Francia, Belgio, Inghilterra; sarà superiore e professore, ma il ricordo della
mamma gli sarà sempre benedizione e carezza, luce e conforto.
Il contadino sale in cattedra
Da lei e da Giuseppe Barberi nasce Domenico presso
Viterbo il 22 giugno 1792. Si vive del lavoro dei campi; il pane anche se la
famiglia è numerosa non manca mai. La morte entra subito in casa Barberi. Nel
1797 a 10 anni muore la piccola Margherita. Prima di spirare chiama il
fratellino Domenico e gli sussurra: "Quando sarò morta mi coprirai con
velo candido e con rose bianche". Il 26 marzo 1798 muore anche papà
Giuseppe. Maria Antonia ne deve colmare il vuoto. Il piccolo Domenico apprende
i primi elementi della istruzione nel vicino convento dei Cappuccini,
dimostrando "un grande ardore per lo studio".
Il 23 marzo 1803 è la mamma Maria Antonia ad andarsene
in cielo... Domenico, orfano di entrambi i genitori a 11 anni, si affida alla
Madonna scelta come madre. Venduti i campi, gli orfani ancora in casa vanno a
vivere con i fratelli più grandi ormai sistemati. Domenico invece è ospitato
amorevolmente da uno zio materno, contadino. Avviato al lavoro dei campi deve
lasciare gli studi che gli sono particolarmente cari. Così va avanti fino a 21
anni: con i soliti sogni, i soliti sbandamenti (forse più accentuati del
lecito, almeno per quel tempo), le solite crisi che accompagnano l'adolescenza
e la giovinezza. Conosce i Passionisti del vicino convento di Vetralla
(Viterbo), ne diventa scolaro e penitente; da loro è aiutato nello studio e
nella formazione cristiana. Napoleone intanto sta arruolando giovani per la
spedizione in Russia. Domenico è in apprensione temendo di dover partire. In
sogno gli appare la mamma che lo conforta assicurandolo che non partirà e
raccomandandogli la fedeltà al rosario. Dopo una sofferta crisi interiore,
lascia la fidanzata ed a 22 anni entra in convento. Echi di questo dramma si
trovano in un suo scritto dal significativo titolo: "Tracce di
misericordia divina nella conversione di un gran peccatore".
Entra nel noviziato di Paliano (Frosinone) nel 1814.
Fino ad ora ha lavorato nei campi; gli studi sono stati pochi ed
approssimativi: una follia pensare al sacerdozio. Ma a lui interessa solo
diventare religioso passionista. Pregando però davanti all'immagine della
Madonna avverte una voce chiara che non ammette dubbi: diventerà sacerdote e
sarà apostolo del Nord Europa, specialmente dell' Inghilterra. E la voce non
tradirà. Intanto per vie umanamente inspiegabili tracciate da Dio, durante il
noviziato passa dalla condizione di religioso fratello a quella di aspirante al
sacerdozio. Il 15 novembre 1815 emette la professione religiosa. Studia poi al
Monte Argentario (Grosseto) e nella casa generalizia dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo
in Roma. Ricco di scienza e sapienza frutto certamente non solo di libri il
primo marzo 1818 a Roma è ordinato sacerdote. Insegna filosofia, teologia,
sacra eloquenza prima a Sant' Angelo di Vetralla (Viterbo) e poi a Roma e
Ceccano (Frosinone).
Ma non trascura l'apostolato. Diventa maestro
apprezzato non solo di scienza ma anche di vita. Assiduo al confessionale,
preciso e concreto nella predicazione, scrittore acuto e fecondo, religioso
esemplare. Rinuncia all' episcopato di Palermo, ma è chiamato a ricoprire posti
di responsabilità all'interno della congregazione: superiore, consigliere
provinciale, provinciale. E' sempre impegnato. Ha fatto il voto di non perdere
mai tempo. Dà alle stampe un trattato di mariologia in lingua francese e il
"Commento al Cantico dei Cantici". In alcuni studi affronta le
questioni socio-morali del tempo. Compone un trattato di teologia, uno di
filosofia in sei volumi, biografie di giovani confratelli. Nel "Pianto
dell'Inghilterra" c'è tutto il suo sconfinato dolore per lo scisma
anglicano. Per ordine del direttore spirituale scrive anche l'autobiografia.
Pubblica numerosi altri libri di vari argomenti. Una produzione immensa: complessivamente
oltre 180 titoli.
E quella voce che lo voleva apostolo
dell'Inghilterra?... No, non era illusione. Domenico attende con fiducia l'ora
segnata da Dio. Scoccherà nel 1840, 27 anni dopo la chiamata. Inizialmente non
è neppure nella lista dei partenti per la nuova fondazione. Ma Domenico è
sicuro che non si partirà senza di lui. Infatti una serie di imprevisti lo
portano ad essere addirittura il superiore del gruppo dei quattro religiosi che
il 24 maggio 1840 partono per la nuova fondazione in Belgio. Il 22 giugno
entrano nella nuova casa religiosa di Ere presso Tournai. E' la prima casa
passionista fuori dell'Italia. Nel mese di novembre Domenico compie un
sopralluogo in Inghilterra in vista di un' altra fondazione in quella terra. E'
di nuovo in Belgio nel mese di dicembre. Il 30 settembre 1841 partenza
definitiva per l'Inghilterra. Finalmente. Con il cuore vi era arrivato da
tempo. Il 17 febbraio 1842, dopo aver soggiornato provvisoriamente altrove,
apre la nuova casa religiosa di Aston Hall presso Stone. Si realizza così la visione
di Paolo della Croce che fin dalla giovinezza pregava per la conversione
dell'Inghilterra. Dopo una estasi infatti l'avevano sentito esclamare:
"Che ho veduto!... Che ho veduto!... I miei figli in Inghilterra" .
Domenico svolge anche il compito di parroco,
superiore, maestro dei novizi, insegnante. A questa prima casa religiosa ne
seguiranno altre. Inizia un fruttuoso apostolato. Vengono anche nuove
vocazioni. Per tutti, cattolici e protestanti, Domenico diventa una voce
autorevole. Predica al popolo, al clero, alle religiose. Si spinge anche in
Irlanda. Con il passare degli anni il suo fisico non può non risentire del
lavoro sfibrante e continuo. Non ha alcun riguardo per sé. Il bene delle anime
lo porta a lavorare con un ritmo superiore a quanto umanamente possibile. Nel
1849 mentre è in viaggio, viene colto da improvvisi dolori alla testa ed al
cuore. Muore così sulla breccia il 27 agosto 1849 a 57 anni a Reading presso
Londra. Serenamente, pieno di gioia: l'Inghilterra ha iniziato il suo cammino
verso la piena comunione con il papa. Numerose e gravissime erano state le sue
malattie, ma lui aveva sempre avuto la certezza che sarebbe morto solo nella
sua" cara Inghilterra".
"I miei carissimi fratelli separati
Torniamo sulla specifica vocazione di Domenico. Prima
ancora di entrare tra i Passionisti durante le feste natalizie del 1813 assorto
in preghiera egli sente chiaramente una voce che gli dice: "lo ti ho
eletto affinché tu annunzi le verità della fede a molti popoli". Nel 1814
è giovane novizio: non ha la prospettiva del sacerdozio, gli proibiscono
addirittura di leggere libri, lo destinano a fare il cuoco. Per lui va bene
così. Ma il primo ottobre durante un momento di preghiera alla Madonna avviene
qualcosa di straordinario. Lo racconta lui stesso: "Intesi che io non
dovevo rimanere laico, ma che io dovevo studiare e che dopo sei anni io avrei
cominciato il ministero apostolico; e che non era già né la Cina, né l'America,
ma bensì il Nord-Ovest di Europa dove io sarei destinato e specialmente l'Inghilterra...
lo rimasi talmente assicurato essere questa voce divina che io sarei più al
caso di dubitare della mia esistenza che di questo". Domenico non strepita
avanzando diritti o pretese: si affida a Dio. Scrive: "Se Dio vorrà tal
cosa da me egli stesso penserà ad aprirmene la strada, né io farei un passo
positivo per richiedere di esservi mandato (in Inghilterra), ma mi basta
riposare nelle braccia della divina Provvidenza" .
La sua spiritualità ed esperienza mistica sono legate
a questa missione. Lo spirito ecumenico struttura la sua personalità, ispira i
suoi atteggiamenti, segna la sua vita, raccoglie le sue preghiere ed i suoi
sacrifici. Già durante lo studentato con altri compagni più fervorosi ed in
sintonia con i suoi ideali si impegna a pregare per gli infedeli e
particolarmente per l'Inghilterra. In seguito organizzerà una "crociata di
preghiere" cui invita confratelli, fedeli, anime consacrate...Tra i
confratelli che lo sostengono anche il beato Lorenzo Salvi. L'Inghilterra da
tempo è il suo tormento e la sua ansia. "Dio, dice Domenico, si degnò
infondere nel mio cuore fin dai più teneri anni un amore ardentissimo per i
miei carissimi fratelli separati e specialmente per gli inglesi". Emette
il voto di "rinunziare ad ogni consolazione spirituale e corporale"
per il ritorno alla chiesa cattolica dei "fratelli separati". Per i
suoi "carissimi fratelli anglicani" si dichiara disposto a
"patire tutte le pene che dovrebbero patire tutti gli inglesi se si
dannassero".
Intanto Domenico ha contatti con numerose personalità
dell'anglicanesimo come James Ford, John Dobree Dalgairns e con i professori di
Oxford. Egli anticipa di 150 anni il movimento ecumenico odierno, basato
sull'amore, sul dialogo, sul rispetto della coscienza, sull' ascolto dell'
altro. Il suo è e sarà sempre un dialogo intellettualmente profondo,
dottrinalmente ineccepibile, umanamente cordiale rispettoso e caritatevole. Un
dialogo cioè cristiano e perciò fruttuoso. Nel trattatello dal titolo
Avvertimenti necessari per chi desidera trattare con frutto coi protestanti in
materie controverse di religione, scrive: "In primo luogo è necessaria una
grande umiltà... accompagnata da una grande confidenza in Dio dal quale
solamente può attendersi la mutazione dei cuori... In secondo luogo è necessario
un gran fondo di scienza; non basta al certo una infarinatura... che abbiano
avuto la laurea dottorale: convien essere non dottore, ma dotto e dotto
davvero... Si procuri con ogni impegno mantenere il cuore tranquillo e
pacifico, il volto gioviale, il tratto che ispiri carità cristiana...
Persuadiamoci che solo il cuore è quello che può parlare ai cuori: la
mansuetudine e la dolcezza cristiana sono i veri contrassegni di un difensore
della religione cristiana" .
Domenico chiede agli anglicani di pregare per lui e
per la chiesa cattolica mentre lui assicura di pregare per loro. Anticipando i
tempi ammette umilmente i torti della chiesa cattolica. Entra in intima
amicizia con George Spencer, futuro sacerdote passionista con il nome di padre
Ignazio...
Una volta in Inghilterra spende tutte le sue forze per
la ricomposizione dell'unità della chiesa. Il suo zelo inarrestabile suscita
numerose conversioni. Non mancano invidie e contrasti. Tutto si tenta per
fermare Domenico; a tutto Domenico risponde con pazienza, tenacia, preghiera.
"La sola volontà di Dio è il mio sostegno: sono qui perché Dio mi ci ha
voluto da tutta l'eternità. Posso dire che le sofferenze hanno superato ogni
mia aspettazione. Ma che devo attendermi per l'avvenire? Croci, croci, croci.
Ma quali? Non lo so, né mi curo di saperlo". Alcuni ragazzi un giorno gli
lanciano contro un sasso. Domenico lo raccoglie, lo bacia, e se lo mette in
tasca. I ragazzi restano ammirati; in seguito diventeranno cattolici. Frequenti
le conversioni dei protestanti. Domenico accoglie anche la confessione e
l'abiura del futuro cardinale John Henry Newman stimato "il papa dei
protestanti, il loro grande oracolo, il più dotto uomo che si trova in
Inghilterra". Il suo esempio è seguito da altri professori di Oxford: oltre
300 alte personalità del clero e del laicato anglosassone passano alla chiesa
cattolica. Di Domenico tutti ammirano la sicura dottrina, l'attraente
personalità "composta, dicono, di quanto vi è di umile e sublime nella
natura umana". E' detto "bambino per la sua semplicità e leone per la
sua intelligenza"... Con lui il mondo anglicano respira il profumo di una
nuova primavera. Con lui la congregazione dei Passionisti mette profonde radici
oltre la Manica.
Per la chiesa anglicana Domenico offre tutto: studio,
pianto, preghiere, la vita stessa. Lo aveva scritto nella Lettera ai professori
di Oxford: "Ditemi fratelli carissimi, qual è quel sacrificio che io possa
offrire per voi: ed io con l'aiuto di Dio, spero di poterlo offrire. Magari Dio
mi concedesse di dare la vita per la vostra salvezza... Intanto mentre non mi è
dato spargere il sangue, mi sia dato almeno di spargere lacrime". Così
descrive le ore precedenti la sua partenza per l'Inghilterra: "lo mi
ricordo che offrii la mia vita, dichiarandomi pronto a morire sommerso nel mare
avanti di toccare l'Inghilterra, purché questa isola tornasse al seno della
chiesa cattolica". La voce comune, compresa la chiesa protestante, lo
acclama santo da vivo e da morto. Il papa Paolo VI nel 1963 durante il concilio
ecumenico vaticano II lo dichiara beato e lo saluta gioiosamente "apostolo
dell'unità".
La data di culto è stata fissata nel Martyrologium Romanum al 27 agosto, mentra la Famiglia Passionista lo celebra il 26 agosto.
Autore: Passionistipiet.it
SOURCE : http://www.santiebeati.it/dettaglio/34300
Den salige Dominikus Barberi (1792-1849)
Minnedag: 27.
august
Ordensnavn: Dominikus av Guds Mor (a Matre Dei)
Den salige Dominikus Barberi (it: Domenico) ble født
den 22. juni 1792 i Palanzano ved Viterbo i regionen Lazio i Midt-Italia. Han
kom fra en fattig bondefamilie og var den yngste av elleve barn, hvorav seks
vokste opp. Han ble foreldreløs som åtteåring og ble oppdratt av sin onkel
Bartolomeo Pacelli og hans hustru på en gård i Merlano. Som uutdannet
gjetergutt tilbrakte han tiden med flokken i bønn. En vennlig kapusinerpater
lærte ham bokstavene, og han lærte å lese og skrive av en landsens gutt på sin
egen alder. Selv om han leste alt han kom over, hadde han ingen regulær
utdannelse.
Han møtte mange pasjonistprester som bodde i Merlano
mens de var forvist fra Frankrike under Napoleons undertrykkelse. Mens han ba
sammen med dem, mottok han et guddommelig budskap som sa at han skulle komme
til å arbeide i Nord-Europa og England. En dag i 1814, like før han skulle
inngå et arrangert ekteskap, rømte han fra familien og sluttet seg til
pasjonistordenen (Congregatio Passionis Iesu Christi – CP) i deres
kloster i Vetralla som legbror med ordensnavnet Dominikus av Guds Mor (Domenico
della Madre di Dio).
Selv om han ikke hadde noen utdannelse, viste han seg
å være en glimrende student, rask til å få taket på filosofi og teologi, så han
ble snart sendt for å studere. Han ble presteviet i Roma den 1. mars 1821.
Deretter ble han predikant og professor, åndelig veileder og forfatter. Han
skrev flere bøker om filosofi og teologi og utga flere prekensamlinger. Et av
hans verker var basert på ideen om å bringe moderne vitenskap til filosofiske
studier. Det ble fordømt på den tiden, men nå ses det som å berede veien for
noen av pave Leo XIIIs (1878-1903) reformer. Han var også kjent for sin askese
og utga også bøker om temaet.
Han underviste i ti år i filosofi og teologi for kongregasjonenes studenter. Han hadde også flere stillinger i ordenen: rektor, provinsialkonsultor og provinsial. Han var delegat til ordenens generalkapittel i 1833. Sammen med p. Peter Magagnotto, p. Serafim Giammaria og br. Crispin Cotta grunnla han i 1840 pasjonisthuset i Ere nær Tournai i Belgia, det første utenfor Italia. Der traff han også den pavelige nuntius Gioacchino Pecci, senere pave Leo XIII.
Han følte seg
alltid trukket mot England, han arbeidet for å lære seg engelsk og traff alle
engelske besøkende i Roma han kunne finne. Han sto hele livet i nær
kontakt med de engelske katolikkene i Roma. I ordenen presset han på for
behovet for arbeidet i England, og i 1840 ble han valgt av sine overordnede til
å innføre pasjonistordenen der. Han kom til landet i 1841 og ble den første
provinsialen for den engelske provinsen. Han var en tidlig økumen som mente at
et mer kristent liv blant katolikkene var den beste spore til enhet.
Han grunnla i påsken 1842 det første
pasjonistklosteret i England, Aston Hall i Staffordshire, og han grunnla to
pasjonisthus til. Han opptok flere fremtredende medlemmer av Oxford-bevegelsen
i Kirken, den mest prominente av hans konvertitter var den senere kardinal John
Henry Newman, som han opptok i Den katolske kirke den 8. oktober 1845. Han
mottok også p. George Spencer i pasjonistordenen. Det løper
saligkåringsprosesser for både Newman og Spencer.
Dominikus ble kalt «Englands apostel på 1800-tallet».
Han døde av et hjerteattakk klokken tre om ettermiddagen den 27. august 1849 på
en liten jernbanestasjon nær Reading i England. Han ble gravlagt under
høyalteret i pasjonistkirken i Saint Helen's i Lancashire. Han ble saligkåret
den 27. oktober 1963 av pave Paul VI (1963-78). Hans minnedag er 27. august.
SOURCE : http://www.katolsk.no/biografier/historisk/dbarberi
