Fr. Salvatore Di
Nardo, OP
Fr. Salvatore was born June 24, 1907, in Naples. Italy. He died April 24, 2004, in Mt. View, California,
97 years young. He had entered the Dominicans in Viterbo, Italy, at the age of 18. He was ordained priest
at Madonna dell’ Arco, Naples, Aug. 2. 1931. Having completed his formal studies in philosophy and
theology at Viterbo, he entered the University of Naples and in 1947 received his PhD in Arts and
Languages. He had but a single year of parochial ministry in Italy before setting out as missionary to the
Holy Name Province in the western U.S.A.. He served some 10 years at St. Peter Martyr, Pittsburg,
California, and 5 years beyond that at St. Dominic’s, San Francisco. His last formal assignment was
the chaplaincy at the Oakford Dominican sisters’ Villa Siena retirement center in Menlo Park from 1969
forward. Here, through 35 years to his death he served and was served by the sisters together with the
elderly at the center, and the Holy Cross brothers with whom he resided in rooms adjacent to the Villa.
Here are the bare bones of his life. They
should be filled in by what many of us have known and experienced of him through the years. He was always
dedicated to the Dominican laity, establishing and serving as chaplain in various chapters. He was
frequently chaplain of the Italian Federation and the St. Peter Claver Society, ministering to their
members in and through the sacraments and his counseling. He sometimes made practical use of his doctoral
degree by teaching upon request the Italian language and literature as well as religion. All this in
addition to his ordinary day to day work as a priest and religious: his living with his religious brothers
in community, his daily Mass and other prayer, his calls to the parlor or elsewhere to help those in need,
and on and on.
And all done, for the most part, not just
willingly but with quiet joy and the best of humor. So he was noted for his own happiness and the
preaching of happiness to others. Such was his burden of preaching especially to the young seminarians and
priests. If a young man was happy in his religious life then things must be all right with and for him. If
not, there was reason to worry about his vocation. Once he took a sad-looking young priest aside and
scolded him for not being happy. The priest peevishly replied: Please let me be happy in my own miserable
way. Later he regretted this, not just because he was rude to this happy old man but because he knew
Salvatore to be right and himself wrong. Salvatore certainly knew things could be terribly wrong with
himself and others but there were more things right than wrong and it’s this that must be thought about
and lived and appreciated and preached. So in Salvatore’s own life: all his disappointment in not being
able to make decent use of his doctorate in the field of academics, all his homesickness as a young
missionary so far from family and home, all his failures in ministry and community life, his sicknesses.
He knew the bad but he also knew God’s beauty in nature and the world in general, in his own gifts and
life, in the love people had for him. This was predominate in his thinking and so in his preaching. And he
wanted others to focus on the same in their own lives. We’re made not for the hell of misery but for the
happiness of Heaven, here almost as well as hereafter. All of us are or should be grateful to him for this
more than for anything else.
- Fr. Fabian
Parmisano, OP
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