Filomena's Life and Story

Filomena Vendola Dingle, known simply as Filomena Dingle to many, was a spiritual healer -- located in her later years on the island of Maui in Hawaii -- who worked with the Blessed Mother, Mary, to heal people of many diseases via the use of healing water blessed by the Blessed Mother. The blessed water was not sold, and rather, it was distributed freely to clients who arrived to visit Filomena in person and was also remotely blessed on a daily basis in the homes of distant clients. Filomena offered both remote healing and in-person healing. Some clients preferred to visit Filomena V. Dingle in person, and if they did so, they received blessed water directly from Filomena for the duration of their visit.  There was no charge for the water or for her healing treatments, although donations were accepted.

Filomena never asked to become a spiritual healer, and indeed, she spent most of her adult life as a devout Roman Catholic housewife in Italy, the wife of a medical doctor, never once anticipating her eventual destiny of offering spiritual healing to all who asked. However, Filomena suffered a stroke in her later years, and lay in a coma for 40 days and nights -- with no trace of brain activity -- before finally awakening. However, in the aftermath of her stroke, she remained paralyzed on the right side of her body from the effects of the stroke.  Within several years after recovering from her stroke, Filomena was again visited by a divine being who had first visited her during the time that she was in a coma. Filomena identified her visitor as the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary, who told her that she had been with her during the coma and had healed her, and the Blessed Mother now asked Filomena to become a healer. As she pursued her new role as a spiritual healer, Filomena eventually moved from Italy, first moving to the Philadelphia area of the USA and finally to Hawaii, where she was to remain for the rest of her life.

In the years in which Filomena worked as a healer, she remained paralyzed on one side of her body, and thus required some assistance to travel about the house and to take care of her basic needs, but nonetheless, she freely offered her spiritual healing to all who called or visited, and she answered the telephone herself despite her physical condition. Due to Filomena's disabled condition, her brother Raffaele lived with her and cared for her, and also helped to meet and greet and usher the numerous pilgrims from across the world who showed up at the doorstep of their home in a quiet residential neighborhood each day seeking healing.

Here is the photo of her brother Raffaele -- who was her tireless helper -- which appeared for years on Filomena's website:

Filomena was quite similar to the "victim souls" or "victim healers", most of whom who were stigmatics. Stigmata may be actual physical marks on the body or persistent illness, pain and suffering, according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, of which Filomena was a devout member. She has reminded many of several other Roman Catholic saint/healers over the the past several centuries, including Padre Pio, who died in the 1960s, and Audrey Santo, the comatose (unconscious since a childhood near-drowning in a swimming pool) child in Massachusetts who is reputed to have great healing powers (please note that there is some controversy here regarding the veracity of the claims.)  Incidentally, Padre Pio was eventually canonzied by the church as a saint, now known as Blessed Pio.  "Victim souls" were a phenomena occasionally seen in the ranks of the faithful of the Roman Catholic church over the past several hundred years, and basically, the term denotes someone who has been asked to take on various afflictions or illnesses in order to show the Grace and Presence of God and the Blessed Mother via courage and luminance in the face of pain and disability. Many have felt that Filomena was a victim soul and a stigmatist because of her persistent paralysis on one side of her body and attendant difficulties and pain which she endured twenty-four hours a day.

Filomena's connection with the Blessed Mother Mary has already been recounted above, and it is very interesting to note that the two other well-known victim souls who were mentioned above also seem to have had incontrovertible links to the Blessed Mother. Padre Pio and those around him claimed that he was visited by the Blessed Mother, and that he was asked by her to undertake what would be his lifelong mission of being a mystic, stigmatic, and healer, with many illnesses as his accompaniment; they also claimed that it was She who healed through him.  Much the same with the victim soul Audrey Santo, as numerous apparitions and visions of the Blessed Mother Mary are said to have materialized in Audrey's vicinity, and her mother, Linda Santo, and relatives have claimed repeatedly that Audrey Santo was given her abilities as gifts from the Blessed Mother, and they also claim to have received messages from Her through Audrey.

In a way, the victim healers of the past two centuries may be seen as a kind of religious precursor of the modern secular concept of the wounded healer so popular in modern psychology. Another well-known victim soul from recent history in the USA was a chronically ill woman known as Little Rose, whose full name was Marie Rose Ferron, also known as the Stigmatized Ecstatic, of Woonsocket, Rhode Island (strangely, not far from the city where Audrey Santo lives....). Little Rose became quite popular as a suffering victim soul in the 1930's, and also seemed to attribute the holy or mysterious phenomena of her presence to the Blessed Mother Mary as well.  Two famous victim souls from the 19th century include Gemma Galgani (1878-1903) of Tuscani, a lifelong sufferer and stigmatic, who was eventually canonized as a saint (as Saint Gemma Galgani) by the Catholic church, and Sister Josefa Menéndez, a sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart, and who suffered nearly constant pain and "attacks" throughout her adult life, dying early at an age of 34. As with many of the other victim souls, Saint Gemma Galgani and Sister Josefa Menendez also seemed to have special connections with the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Note: This section was written by Vinny Pinto, who was a friend and colleague of Filomena's, and who is a spiritual healer himself. Vinny has regularly mentioned Filomena and her website on several of his websites, and he has also operated the Filomena Dingle website from the time that Filomena asked him to do so in early 2003, and as a result he has received a number of inquiries about Filomena's life and her work.  The note below has been written by Vinny, and any errors therein are only those on Vinny's part!

Those who know me are usually aware that I wear several hats in this life. Nowadays, in addition to working as a consulting scientist, I also wear the hat of a spiritual healer. I have been on the spiritual journey since about age 13, and it has taken me to many places, including Christian monasteries, yogic ashrams, Buddhist monasteries, Tibetan temples, Jain and Hindu temples, and polyglot roadside temples and shrines in India. I worked briefly as an energy healer in the 1980s and early 1990s, and also trained in a graduate program in acupuncture during that same period, and these paths led to my meeting many interesting healers from across many traditions along the way. Since being guided to start working as a spiritual healer in the year 2000, I have in the interim made the acquaintance of many famous healers from a wide variety of traditions from all over the world. They have ranged from an ex-MD-turned-healer to a Long Island Jewish housewife to an ascetic Roman Catholic Capuchin monk and they ranged in personage from ex-nuns to an Australian roustabout-turned-chef-turned-healer, and have also included wizened Jain healers and Hindu gurus from India, traditional shamanic healers, Native American healers, elderly Baptist preachers-turned-healars from the East Coast of the USA, and, in one case, an evangelical Christian preacher from Texas. 

However, one of the most unique and powerful remote healers whom I have ever met was my friend and colleague Filomena Dingle, the famed elderly Roman Catholic remote healer who worked with the divine being whom she chose to call the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary, aka the Blessed Mother. Filomena had lived most of her lived most of her life as a devout Roman Catholic, housewife and mother in Italy; her husband had been a medical doctor. In 1985, while she was in her early fifties, she suffered a massive stroke and lay in a coma for 40 days and 40 nights. She later related to some friends, including myself, that the Blessed Mother had come to her during her time in the coma and advised her that she would awaken, and that she was being asked henceforth to be a healer who would work with the love and Presence of the Blessed Mother. She was also given a specific prayer and procedure to use for her spiritual healing treatments. She is reputed to have healed many clients of many very serious ills over the past 17 years, and grateful clients claim that she has healed them of illnesses which included cancer, heart disease, AIDS, hepatitis, arthritis and leukemia, many after they have exhausted all conventional Western medical resources. Filomena was brought to Philadelphia to live by some Catholic followers in the late 1980s, and in 1995 a young man, then living in Hawaii and whom she had healed of a serious illness, noticed that she was not thriving in Philadelphia and offered to pay for her move to Hawaii. She accepted his offer and relocated to Hawaii, where she continued her work until her passing in May of 2006. 

Film and Video

At least two videos have been made of Filomena and her work: One was a short 20-minute documentary on her healing work, and the other, which I have never seen, is reportedly a feature-length documentary on her life and work, totaling well over an hour in length. The afore-mentioned longer documentary has apparently since been reduced in length to a 5 minute-plus video clip which is available on a number of video file sharing websites such as AOL Video, Google Video and one medical information website as well. This video was filmed and produced by Patty Holbrook, a friend of Filomena's and her former client, along with  Mike Dejean. 

Filomena's Memorial Pages on Facebook and MySpace

You may find a memorial devoted to Filomena Dingle at http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Filomena-Dingle-aka-Mama-Filomena/109278395782222

Likewise, you may also find a MySpace memorial page dedicated to Filomena Dingle and her work at http://www.myspace.com/mamafilomena

How I Met Filomena

I first met Filomena when she approached me in early 2002 to help spread the word of her work around the world via my contacts in the healing world. A year later, her then-existent website (run by volunteers in Hawaii) floundered, and Filomena asked me to create and operate a website for her (at the same URL as that of this memorial website), which I did until her passing in mid-2006. 

Filomena passed away in early May 2006; she was 70 years old at the time of her death. No condolences or regrets are needed on Filomena's passing; she often told me that since she was still partly paralyzed from the stroke which had sent her into a coma for 40 days and 40 nights (whence the BVM came to her and asked her to become a healer) and was very uncomfortable physically, she would welcome "moving on" when the time came; she felt that she had hung on in her aged body for the approximately 20 years since her stroke only to be able to offer healing to people who needed it. So, I am sure that she much welcomed passing, and she did pass quite peacefully. I was happy when I heard that she passed, and I had sensed for the previous two months that she would likely be leaving this level of existence soon. I enjoyed Filomena much; to me, she -- and the peaceful Presence she carried -- was a particular expression of Divine Mother, one full of compassion and Love and Grace and yet fully able to be hard and forceful as needed. I referred many healing clients to Filomena over the years, as and when I was guided to do so by Holy Spirit.

Whenever Filomena has spoken to me of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Blessed Mother, I have always felt and known in my Heart that she was referencing an aspect of what I call Divine Mother, just as goddess Kali -- from Hindu mythology -- is another aspect of Divine Mother. My direct experience -- and I am speaking here as a mystic, healer and intuitive -- is that Filomena herself was an instantiation of Blessed Mother, and therefore an instantiation of the Divine Mother -- the Presence of the Divine Mother in her was quite palpable. In the period since Filomena's death, I have heard that some Roman Catholic clergy in Philadelphia and Hawaii are planning to petition the Catholic Church to have her declared a saint.

My own feeling and experience is that although Filomena has moved on, there are always some persons present on this earth, and they are usually women -- but not always women -- who carry a particularly strong instantiation of the Divine Mother -- as did Filomena -- each offering a different aspect of the Divine Mother. Indeed, in my experience, I have seen this in several other persons during my time on earth, always in women so far, and all were powerful healers or teachers. Some were enlightened, as was Filomena, and thus fully aware of the Presence and of their mission, and others were still largely immersed in the karmic dance, and were largely unaware -- but not totally unaware -- of the Presence, Divine Radiance and Love of Divine Mother within them, although that radiance has been glaringly obvious to observers who were at the right "frequency". And still others whom I have met have been in transition, halfway between immersion in the karmic dance and enlightenment, and in them the Radiance and Wisdom of the Divine Mother has also been very obvious.

I offer you all my best and my love. Thank you.

with love and care,
--Vinny 

May 15, 2006; revised and updated on September 3, 2007
  

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ed. note: Please note that Filomena's full name was Filomena Vendola Dingle, but many called her simply Filomena Dingle. I have occasionally encountered Filomena's first name mis-spelled on the web as Fillomena, Filomina, and Philomena, and, occasionally, her last name -- which was Dingle -- spelled as Dingel, Dingl or Dingell. Please rest assured that these variant spellings all indicate the one and the same Filomena Dingle, aka Filomena Vendola Dingle, who gained fame for her Maui miracles by working with the Blessed Mother Mary!