The following is the text of the sermon by Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan in the Church of SS. John and Paul, Rome, Italy, on Tuesday, October 29, on the occasion of the Triduum honoring Blessed Dominic Barberi, Italian Passionist Missionary to England, who was beatified last Sunday in St. Peter’s Basiclica. Fernando Cardinal Cento, Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Chancery, was celebrant of the Mass, assisted by the students of the Bega College in Rome. The Pontifical Sistine Choir sang the Liturgy. Yesterday (October 30) the Triduum closed with a Pontifical Mass celebrated by Archbishop John C. Heenan of Westminster, England. The preacher was Father Alfred Wilson of the English Province of the Passionist Fathers.

“Christ sent me to preach the gospel; not with an orator’s cleverness, for so the cross of Christ might be robbed of its force. To those who court their own ruin, the message of the cross is but folly; to us who are on the way to salvation, it is the evidence of God’s power.” 1 Corinthians 1: 17-18.

In October 1841, a young Italian priest went to England to establish the first house of the Passionist Fathers in that country. Eight years later, he died. It was an incredibly short apostolate, but Dominic Barberi was an incredible man. He has slipped into history by the back-door (as one writer has put it): It was he who received the great John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church. This was no mean claim to distinction, because Newman’s conversion is one of the unmistakable landmarks of English Catholicism. But if Dominic became famous only because of the accident of being the right man at the right time and place, then surely the Catholic world should ask—was it a mere accident? Why was he at Littlemore at the precise moment that Newman’s will and the divine impulse of grace came together? Why was Dominic Barberi the right man?

We could start with the very name of the religious community that is now honored by his beatification. The Passionists take their name from the passion of Our Lord; their cross is the symbol of His suffering and death. But our language today gives an added meaning to the word ‘passion,’ meaning that goes beyond the acceptance of pain. We use the word to describe what happens in the heart of a man who suffers. Passion becomes an active flame, a burning desire, an overwhelming urge. We often speak of a passion for life or for love. But these are human. A divine passion is the flame and the urge in a man who has surrendered himself to the redemptive suffering of Christ on the cross. It leaps forward to conquer a soul, a neighborhood, a world, not for gain nor for fame, but to bring back the world to Him who died for it. Dominic is now called Blessed by the Church he loved and served. He is blessed because he immersed himself in Christ, and identified himself with Christ’s passion, but he is blessed too because this experience seized his soul, and poured itself out in a passionate burst of energy that was both perfectly disciplined but recklessly spent. He totally resigned to the will of God, but he was almost hopelessly ambitious in his plans for the advancement of the Kingdom. This is the Passionist pattern. This was Dominic’s pattern.

Those who knew him did not need to ask why he was the right man for England in the mid-nineteenth century. His novice-master spoke of his “extraordinary humility”. A Belgian priest who had attended his conferences later wrote: “For forty years and more, I have regarded him as a saint.” And the most renowned of his converts, Newman himself, said this of Dominic: “His very look had about it something holy. When his form came into sight, I was moved to the depths in the strangest way.”

Dominic’s holiness was not achieved in a cloister. It bore the dreary marks of daily, petty, boring administrative details. It is one thing to carry, for 28 years, the dream of becoming an apostle in a foreign country. It is quite another to have to spend those year directing novices, teaching philosophy, serving as superior and then provincial. He did all these things well. His words and actions seemed to merge into a perfect hymn of humility and zeal. The hymn was never serene, but it was always sublime. He never forgot the call he had received from God when he was only 21: “I understood that I was to labor in northwest Europe, and especially in England.” His health was very poor, and deteriorating rapidly. One setback after another slowed up the plans for the proposed English mission. At the age of 48, Dominic bravely began to learn the French language so that he could preach in Belgium. Two years later he tackled the English tongue. When he spoke to his first English listeners, he had to memorize the little sermon:

“I wish to say a few words for your edification, but I cannot do it because I am not yet able to speak English. However, I shall say something, a very short sermon! My dearly beloved, let us love one another, because they who love their brothers accomplish perfectly the will of God. Let you love God, and man for God’s sake, and you shall be perfectly happy forever. Amen.”

If the words came haltingly, the message did not. His sentences were broken English, but it was holy eloquence to those who heard it. With a face and body shrunken by pain, he spoke to them from his heart. He was living now as St. Paul said, “Not I, but Christ lives in me.” To the cultured groups at Oxford, and to rough and ready people in the scattered Catholic missions of the Midlands, this was the voice of God, because it was quite evident that it was the voice of a man of God.

That he was kind, and brave, and spiritually resourceful, that he was an obedient religious, that he was full of god’s fire, these marks are all in the record of his life. In part, they explain how in those nine short years, Dominic’s dream moved toward its fulfillment: sermons, retreats, missions; a hearing for the Catholic Church; respectful concern on the part of Protestants; converts by the hundreds. The present Archbishop of Birmingham, where Dominic once lived, has expressed it in this manner”

“He acted as a sort of catalytic agent between Protestants who were turning towards the Church, and Catholics who were suspicious of anything within the ‘Elizabethan Establishment.”

But the surface record is not quite enough to explain the tremendous impact of the man. Now, decades after his death, the hidden record has come to light. He was in love with God.

The story of his life, quaint, picturesque and quixotic, does not tell it all. But the story of his soul goes deeper. It explains not only Dominic the man, but Dominic the saint. He wrote a great deal, but he set two formidable barriers against any revelation of his inner life. One was his own natural self-effacement, the other was a style of handwriting that challenged even his admirers. Because he was always in a hurry, his mystical writings (like everything else he wrote) were almost illegible. A mysterious shorthand obscured even those parts that can be made out. Because he was shortsighted, the ending of some words and lines was written, not on the paper, but on the table. Now because of the great interest in his beatification, his spiritual life is being reexamined and freshly appraised. That he was a rue mystic seems beyond question: his autobiography, a spiritual diary, and especially his Commentary on the canticle of Canticles reveal a life intimately spent in loving god. True to his vocation as a Passionist, he found his own mystical death in Christ’s death. He experienced the desolation of an interior purgatory in which he shared Christ’s agony on the cross, and then the transforming union by which his life was spent more in heaven than on earth. I his colleagues and his congregations did not know this, Dominic did.

Father Alfred Wilson, a fellow Passionist, corrects those who estimate Dominic’s place in England only in human achievements and natural gains. “This long, drawn-out martyrdom, he has written, “and not Dominic’s short ministry, was his major contribution to the second spring. The graces that his Oxford converts and hundreds of others received came not just because Dominic spoke to them. They came chiefly because he suffered for them.”

It is an appropriate time to pay tribute to this body of men, the Passionist Fathers, whose community produced this holy priest. All over the world, they follow, as Dominic himself did, the footsteps of their founder, St. Paul of the Cross. Their aim is to become “Specialists in unfolding the lesson of the cross, relating the way of the cross to daily living, opening up to mankind a vision of the divine world. Those bishops among us who are privileged to have them serving our own diocese would be the first to honor them, and to pray God send us more Passionists, more men like Dominic Barberi.

The midst of the second Vatican Council is a ripe time for the church to recognize this early apostle of the ecumenical age. The humble Italian priest spoke to those not of our faith in accents we have ourselves heard in the voices of Popes John and Paul. Dominic always assumed good faith in others; he refused to enter into empty controversy; he put a high value on tact and courtesy, and above all, charity. He went to England because he loved, in an amazing way, the people, all the people, of that great nation.

Three short sentences sum up the ecumenical approach that Dominic used. To a Protestant minister, he wrote: “If we seek the truth simply, we shall easily find it, and it will free us from our bonds.” But he always carried truth in the vessel of charity. “Endless patience and charity, and above all, good example,” he wrote to Rome, “these are the great needs.” And while he plied his apostolic trade with truth and charity, he never missed the basic lesson of all ecumenical effort; “Anyhow, this is work of God’s own,” he said, “and we have to let him take His own way, having a care on our part to follow faithfully the path which the divine mercy lovingly points out to us.” To speak the truth, to live in charity, and to trust in God, these are the real instruments of Christian unity, today in the 1960’s as well as in Dominic’s time, the 1840’s.

This is a man whom history barely knows, or knows only because he was John Henry Newman’s first priest. When he met Newman, Dominic’s life spoke far more eloquently to the sensitive Anglican clergyman than his halting words. He was the right man for Newman and for countless others, at the right time and right place. May God give us, in the twentieth-century manner, men like Dominic Barberi who can speak of Christ, and Christ’s cross, and Christ’s Church to a troubled world. The great fruits of the harvest of souls come not to those who are conversion of the world awaits those who are steeped in Christ’s life,--His sufferings as well as His glories, His Cross as well as His words of consolation. May God provide, through the gracious intercession of his servant, Blessed Dominic of the Mother of God, this kind of men, this kind of priests, this kind of saint.