The Spiritual Adroitness of a Singer From the Bronx

His restlessness is of the heart, not the feet, and he has yet to internalise the tried and tested Augustinian salvific remedy.

“As long as I can still breathe, I hope to be newly in love with the God who made me. He always gives me something to sing about” - Dion DiMucci.

Dion DiMucci, who became just “Dion” in the late 1950s, has been making music for seven decades now, from rock ‘n’ roll through Gospel and taking in the blues (which he once called "the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God”). It is likely that he was the first and only Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee to have recorded a song about Saint Jerome.

Recently he published a second memoir: Dion: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Philosopher. The book has a foreword by Bishop Barron, which is entirely proper for this chronicle of addiction, recovery and spiritual homecoming. Dion returned to his Catholic faith some time ago, having flirted with the evangelical alternatives, before being put off by that tradition’s denominational fecundity, and related tendency towards the dilution of doctrinal authority.