Few saints enjoy the popularity of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, known by most as Padre Pio. The only saintly rivals he has in statuary and recognition is Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. Therese of Liseaux, and the father of the religious community Padre Pio was a member, St. Francis of Assisi. So who was this man that many people still adore and who makes many uneasy to this day?
His birth name was Francesco Forgione. He was borne and lived in Pietrelcina, a small Italian town eight miles out of Benevento. His parents Grazio and Maria had eight children, three of which died young. They were both illiterate but had profound faith and much common and practical sense. By the time Francesco was 15 he joined the Capuchins and become Fra (Italian for brother in the context of friars) Pio. Five years later, despite significantly bad health, he made solemn vows and within seven years of religious life was ordained a priest and became known to all as Padre Pio.
Even by this time Padre Pio was becoming noticed as someone special to those who were around him. His prayer seemed profound, mystical even, but during those early years his health declined so severely that doctors encouraged the Capuchins to allow him to live a relatively cloistered, and unconventional life in his home town of Pietrelcina for six years. During this time he spent most of his days in the rustic church of his hometown, Saint Anne, where he would celebrate a mass that could often last for four hours! Needless to say, many didn’t attend. In 1916 Padre Pio’s health reached a point where he could enter into a more conventual life of a Capuchin in a friary and he found himself residing in San Giovanni Rotondo, the place where he would remain and live the rest of his life until his death in 1968.
Padre Pio is one of those saints that we need to talk about, but also one of those saints that we need to hold in tension with others. In today’s world we know that most of us (of course, barring the Blessed Virgin Mary) are borne sinners, sin throughout our lives, and some of us, by the grace of God, undergo conversions throughout one’s life and become great saints. That is God’s will for all of us, truthfully. When we look at the saints raised to the status of the altar it is tempting to impose a particular view of holiness upon all those canonized. As far as that goes, it is a good impulse to see the common thread of the saints, that is, Jesus’ love in their lives. One of the things that makes the saints so profound is that they are the living hope for our lives of the living God transforming us. We know we are sinners and often sainthood seems impossible. But what the saints actual lives reveal is that is is possible by His grace. So when we look at their stories we often encounter rock bottom moments where they experienced profound conversions. Reading of their stories those even serve to “lift the bottom,” as it were, for us so that we need not stray as far as they did to grow as close to the Lord and in His service.
With this in mind we can look at the saints and see the Lord at work on their souls, as clay in the hands of the potter, or perhaps, more than likely, broken cisterns mended by their Maker. Great sinners made great witnesses. This is a glorious thing and we shouldn’t seek to gloss over the truly human or sinful behaviors the saints engaged in, were exposed to, or fought against in their lives. With that being said, as Father Gabriele Amorth says in his lovely memoir, Padre Pio: Stories and Memories of My Mentor and Friend, “We should not forget that the saints are, first of all, masterpieces of grace, so that at times, in addition to imitating the example they leave for us, we should admire the extraordinary plan of God in them, completely unique and unrepeatable” (12). For most saints there is a temptation in hagiography (that is holy writings) to gloss over their lives with an almost constant sanctity. We make them porceline figures where the slightest crack in their character must be hidden from view. Thankfully, with the sheer volume of modern means of recording information, we now know of almost all the faults of those great men and women who became saints by God’s healing power. We now no longer can whitewash saints to make them more appealling.
This is good, but… this is not the case with Padre Pio. Despite his immently human personality of a gruff, funny, compassionate Italian man, Padre gave off a distinct quality of holiness virtually his entire life. From the time Padre Pio was a child it was evident God had big plans for him. His spiritual awareness was off the charts. He was given a special grace to visibly see what we often regard to be invisible forces in our lives. He saw his guardian angel, the Blessed Mother, the saints, and our Lord. In fact, as when Pio was a boy in his village another little boy had gone missing. They had gathered the whole town to look for him and had come up short. When they approached young Francesco he simply asked them, “Have you asked your guardian angel where he is?” They thought it was cute, but not a serious remark. Francesco proceeded ask and follow his guardian angel right to where the lost boy was!
Certainly this is not a “normal” experience of most of us. In his youth and throughout his life he physically (in a real sense) wrestled with demons on behalf of those he prayed for. We all have heard the stories, many confirmed by multiple credible witnesses, of Padre Pio bilocating by God’s grace and for God’s purposes (somehow appearing in two places at once). In fact, this was how Padre Pio, despite being in the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, was seen in Rome at the beatification of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1923 (which is 166 miles away, as the crow flies) from where he was praying in his cell. There are countless other qualities and miracles we cannot cover. Many volumes have been written on the graces God poured into this faithful servant throughout and after his life to demonstrate His power and love.
But all of this is still more blown away by the most unique characteristic of Padre Pio. Padre Pio is the only priest who has borne the stigmata, that is the visible wounds of Christ. In 1918 Padre Pio received the stigmata on the feast day of the Stigmata of Saint Francis upon receiving a wound of love in his heart known as a transverberation. Blood dripped from his hands, feet, and side just as our Lord’s. For fifty years he bore these painful wounds, suffering on behalf of sinners and the souls in purgatory for whom he had made himself an advocate, what is known as victim soul. The wounds left him just before his death in 1968. They had served their purpose. But what was it? Why did the Lord do what he did with Padre Pio?
The full answer to the question remains in heaven, but we have, I think, some fair assumptions to make based upon what Padre Pio’s primary ministries were. The Lord made St. Pio a walking, bleeding icon of the merciful love He is still pouring out for the world in His priests. He wanted Padre Pio to be a visible reminder of what His Church was for. Padre Pio’s greatest ministries were his celebration of the mass, hearing of confessions, building a hospital for the poor, and encouraging prayer groups amongst the lay faithful.
Padre Pio, by all accounts, was an extraordinary confessor. In a miraculous manner he had the gift of reading souls, meaning he was often given the grace to know the sins of his penitents and thereby the penances or changes needed for their hearts to be mended by Jesus. This enabled him to guide the souls who came to him for forgiveness and healing in a manner that gave them the best opportunity for lifelong conversion and a deepened relationship with Jesus. During his heyday Padre Pio would hear confessions for 16 hours straight! Though he didn’t maintain that pace for the entirety of his priestly life, he did for most of it. In an “ordinary” (if we can use that word for anything in the spiritual life) way Padre Pio was Christ to those he ministered to in the sacrament of reconciliation. But he also made the mass “real” to those who attended his. He celebrated with the utmost reverance, prayer, and emotion, though he tried to mask the excruciating suffering he experienced in solidarity with the Lord during the holy sacrifice. Witnessing this bleeding priest at the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice for His Body, the Church, for over 2 hours was powerful to people. In fact, though initially people avoided his masses as a baby priest, Padre Pio’s mass would become in his life an opportunity people would wait days, years even, to see. For lack of space I won’t go into details on the hospital or the prayer groups (or the spiritual children he had!). But, I will briefly say, Padre Pio felt solidarity with the sick and suffering due to the almost constant state of poor health he had been in since his youth, and he firmly wanted to support the efforts of the popes to encourage the laity to adopt praying together in community in addition to the mass as a regular part of Catholic life. Any good biography of Padre will cover such details.
So let us, in the spirit of Padre Pio’s mission, remember the mystery of our faith. This man was a walking sign of contradiction. He was a man, yet an image of God’s love. He was clearly human, yet the Lord worked countless miracles through him, which to his own admittance, he didn’t understand. We must renew our faith with awe and wonder. We must let the scales fall from our eyes and see how strange, how peculiarly particular God’s love is for us. It was, in God’s mind the fullness of time when the Son would become flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. No one could have forseen the atonement on the cross. Jesus Christ died for us to forgive us, to commune with us, to heal us, and to teach us how to pray to our Father. He revealed a new way of life, the Catholic way, which would bring us fullness of life, life abundent. The saints are our witnesses of its reality, that it is tried and true. This was God’s plan, but a plan He wanted and wants us to be a part of. Jesus was raised up on the Cross for the conversion of the world, and it is this reality Padre Pio represented in his very flesh. Let us not forget the mystery Padre Pio’s life participated in and was a sign pointing toward. This is a mystery for all our lives, no matter how “ordinarily” or extraordinarily the Lord wants to work with and through us. The way, the truth and the life remains: Jesus (whose very name means God saves). The same Jesus who was Padre Pio’s greatest love and source of all he did.
Padre Pio, pray for us.
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