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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.

Don Dolindo Ruotolo

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.