Don Dolindo Ruotolo (Naples, 6 October 1882 - Naples, 19 November 1970), was a presbyterian, a tertian-Franciscan friar, venerated as a servant of God by the Catholic Church.
Fifth of the eleven sons of Raffaele, an engineer and mathematician,
and Silvia Valle, descendant of the Neapolitan and Spanish nobility, had
a difficult childhood due to the health problems and the financial
difficulties of the family. In 1896, with the separation of the parents,
Dolindo (whose name refers to the "pain") was started with his brother
Elio at the Apostolic School of the Priests of the Mission and three
years later he was admitted to the novitiate.
He took religious vows
on 1 June 1901 and two years later he asked unsuccessfully to be sent to
China as a missionary. After the presbyteral ordination of 24 June
1905, he was appointed professor of the clerics of the Apostolic School
and teacher of Gregorian chant. For a short period he moved to Taranto
and then to the seminary of Molfetta where he taught and worked for the
reform of the seminary itself. On 29 October 1907 he was recalled to
Naples, ordered not to care more about the matter and was suspended a
divinis. Accused of being a "formal and dogmatizing heretic", he went to
Rome to submit to the judgment of the Holy Office, after four months of
inquiry, in which Ruotolo did not retract, was suspended a divinis and
forced to undergo a psychiatric examination, from which he turned out to
be sane. On 13 April 1908 he was summoned to Naples by the superiors of
the congregation, who expelled him and submitted him to an exorcism. He
moved to Rossano, in Calabria; on August 8, 1910 the request for
revision of the suspension was successful and was rehabilitated after
two and a half years of suspension. For the second time, in December
1911, he was summoned to Rome and then sent back to Naples in 1912. He
underwent a trial in 1921, was sentenced and again removed. He was
definitively rehabilitated on July 17, 1937. His life as a diocesan
priest continued in Naples, in the church where his brother Elio was a
parish priest.
In 1960 a stroke immobilized the left side of his
body. He died on November 19, 1970. Ruotolo left the Commentary on
Sacred Scripture, many works of theology, asceticism and mysticism,
entire volumes of epistolaries, autobiographical writings and Christian
doctrine. It is customary to pray with faith and knock three times on
the marble of his sepulcher in the name of the SS. Trinity, to receive,
through his intercession, spiritual and material graces.