Padre Pio

• 1. The Vanished Wounds

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  Padre Pio, born Francesco Forgione, was an Italian Capuchin friar whose hands and feet bore wounds said to echo the crucifixion of Jesus. Such wounds are called stigmata, and his followers believed they lasted for half a century. A few days before he died in 1968, they vanished. The doctor at his deathbed examined the body and found skin that had healed without leaving any trace or scar.

  Few religious figures of the twentieth century were examined as often as this one. Physicians, bishops, a physician-priest and several popes all weighed in, and they did not agree. Was he a man of real holiness, a man misled by his own spiritual director, or something harder to name? Why did the Vatican silence him for years and then embrace him? And how did a farmer's son from a small southern town end up with shrines in several countries?

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• 2. A Farm Boy's Calling

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  Pietrelcina, a small town in the province of Benevento in the southern region of Campania, is where Francesco Forgione was born on the 25th of May 1887. His parents, Grazio Mario Forgione and Maria Giuseppa Di Nunzio, were peasant farmers. He had an older brother, Michele, and three younger sisters named Felicita, Pellegrina and Grazia. Two more children died in infancy. Grazia would later become a nun of the Bridgettine Order.

  The Forgione household heard Mass every day and prayed the Rosary every night. Three days a week the family gave up meat in honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Neither his parents nor his grandparents could read, yet they told Bible stories to the children.

  The Santa Anna Chapel, which stands on the walls of an old castle, is where Francesco was baptised and later served as an altar boy. He was named for Saint Francis of Assisi. By his own account, he had decided at the age of five to give his life to God. Until he was ten he worked the land, tending the family's small flock of sheep.

  Illness shadowed his childhood. The diary of Father Agostino da San Marco, who later became his spiritual director, records severe gastroenteritis at six and typhoid fever at ten. Francesco also reported heavenly visions and ecstasies as a young boy.

  In 1897, after three years of public school, he was drawn toward the friar's life by a young Capuchin from Sant'Elia a Pianisi. The visitor was collecting donations in the countryside. His parents went to Morcone, thirteen miles to the north, to ask whether their son could join the order. The friars were willing but said he first needed more schooling. To pay for private tutoring, his father went to the United States to find work. Francesco was confirmed on the 27th of September 1899 and passed the required academic tests.

  On the 6th of January 1903, at fifteen, he entered the Capuchin novitiate at Morcone. On the 22nd of January he received the Franciscan habit and the name Fra Pio, after Pope Pius I, whose relic is kept in the Santa Anna Chapel. He took the simple vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

  His seven years of study for the priesthood began at the friary of Saint Francis of Assisi in Umbria. At seventeen he fell ill with loss of appetite, insomnia, exhaustion, fainting spells and migraines. He vomited often and could keep down only milk and cheese. Devotees point to this period as the start of his unexplained experiences. At prayer he seemed to others to be in a stupor, as if absent from his body. One fellow friar later claimed to have seen him in ecstasy and even levitating.

  In June 1905 his superiors sent him to a mountain monastery, hoping the air would help. It did little, and doctors told him to go home. His health stayed poor even there, but he made his solemn religious profession on the 27th of January 1907. In August 1910 Archbishop Paolo Schinosi ordained him at the Cathedral of Benevento. Four days later he celebrated his first Mass at the parish church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

  Because of his fragile health, he was allowed to stay in Pietrelcina and keep the Capuchin habit. His father and brother briefly emigrated to the United States, and he was needed at home. From there he wrote mystical letters to his spiritual directors, Fathers Agostino and Benedetto, both friars at the monastery of San Marco in Lamis. On the 4th of September 1916, an order arrived that ended his years in his hometown.

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• 3. Wounds of 1918

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  The Capuchin Friary of Our Lady of Grace, in the Gargano mountains near San Giovanni Rotondo, held only seven friars when Padre Pio arrived. It was an agricultural community in the Province of Foggia. Apart from a spell of military service, he lived there until his death in 1968.

  The First World War reached the friary quickly. Four friars were called up first, and Padre Pio, then a teacher and spiritual director at the seminary, took charge when a fifth was drafted. On the 15th of November 1915 he was drafted too, and on the 6th of December he was assigned to the 10th Medical Corps in Naples. His poor health meant he was repeatedly discharged and recalled. Finally, on the 16th of March 1918, he was declared unfit and fully discharged.

  From the 5th to the 7th of August 1918, he later said, he felt himself pierced and burned, both spiritually and physically. Father Benedetto interpreted the experience as a transverberation. Padre Pio claimed it left a wound on his left side. Most witnesses described it as about three inches long and shaped like a cross.

  He had hinted at the wounds earlier. In 1915 Father Agostino sent him pointed questions, and Padre Pio answered that he was a stigmatic and felt the pains of Christ's Passion. He added that the experience terrified him. He had begged God to remove the visible marks but leave the pain, because he found them an almost unbearable humiliation.

  On the 20th of September 1918, while hearing confessions, he is said to have received the marks again. The blood from them reportedly smelled of perfume or flowers. He told Agostino the pain stayed with him and grew sharper on certain days. He said he would have preferred to suffer in secret, yet by early 1919 word had spread. He took to wearing red mittens or black coverings on his hands and feet, explaining that he was embarrassed.

  Hundreds of believers began arriving each day. People rebuilding their lives after the war saw in the friar a symbol of hope. Those close to him reported healing, bilocation, levitation, prophecy, miracles and the reading of hearts. They also spoke of speaking in tongues, a sweet fragrance around him and extraordinary fasting. One Capuchin recalled that during a stay in Venafro he lived for at least twenty days on nothing but the Eucharist.

  Bilocation, the claimed ability to be in two places at once, was one of the gifts most often attributed to him. Asked about it during a Vatican inquiry, he answered with caution. He said he did not know the nature of the phenomenon and did not dwell on it. As for whether he was physically present, he said: "I do not know whether I was there with my body or without it."

  The story of Gemma de Giorgi is told in the 1999 book Padre Pio: The Wonder Worker, in a segment by the Irish priest Malachy Gerard Carroll. Gemma, a Sicilian girl born without pupils, was brought to San Giovanni Rotondo by her grandmother in 1947. During the visit she began to see objects, including a steamboat and the sea. Her grandmother did not believe it. Then Gemma forgot to ask for grace during her confession, and the grandmother pleaded with the priest to ask God to restore the child's sight. He told her: "The child must not weep and neither must you for the child sees and you know she sees."

  Also in 1947, the twenty-seven-year-old Father Karol Józef Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, visited the friary and made his confession to Padre Pio. Austrian Cardinal Alfons Stickler reported that Wojtyła had told him of a prophecy. The friar supposedly said he would one day reach "the highest post in the church." Others dispute it. Father John Aurilia, who served as Pio's secretary, said the friar simply addressed Wojtyła as "your holiness" and asked for his blessing. John Paul's secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, denies any prediction, and George Weigel's biography Witness to Hope does not mention one.

  By 1919, physicians were already making their way to San Giovanni Rotondo to see the wounds for themselves.

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• 4. Doctors and Chemicals

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  Luigi Romanelli, chief physician of the civil hospital of Barletta, was the first doctor to study the wounds. On the 15th and the 16th of May 1919, he examined them on the order of the provincial father superior. He found the lesions on the hands covered by a reddish-brown membrane, with no bleeding, swelling or inflammation nearby. He was convinced the wounds were not merely superficial. Pressing a thumb on the palm and a finger on the back of the hand, he clearly felt a vacuum between them.

  On the 26th of July 1919, the pathologist Amico Bignami arrived. He proposed several explanations, among them skin necrosis that was kept from healing by chemicals such as iodine tincture. Giorgio Festa, a physician, examined the friar in 1919 and again in 1920. He was struck by the fragrance of the wounds, and like Bignami he described the side wound as cruciform. In a report to the Holy Office in 1925, Festa gave a positive verdict, resting largely on theological arguments. He wrote that the stigmata were not the product of an outside trauma or of potently irritating chemicals.

  Other physicians reached other conclusions. Some said the wounds were unexplainable and never seemed to become infected. They would appear to heal and then return from time to time. In 1954 Alberto Caserta took X-rays of the friar's hands and found no abnormality in the bone structure.

  Father Agostino Gemelli, a physician and psychologist, visited in 1920 to examine the wounds. Padre Pio refused unless he produced written authorisation from the Holy Office. Accounts differ on why Gemelli came. Castelli says Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val commissioned him, while Luzzatto says he acted entirely on his own. Gemelli left irritated and offended, and he wrote that Padre Pio was "a narrow-minded man, with low mental activity, monotonous ideations, avolition." He blamed Father Benedetto for planting suggestion in a feeble mind and urged that the two be kept apart.

  In 1925 Gemelli returned on behalf of the Holy Office, and this time he was allowed to see the wounds. His report, written in April of the following year, concluded that Padre Pio had caused them himself with a corrosive substance. He compared them to the sores of soldiers who had harmed themselves chemically during the war. From 1940 onward he wrote to the Holy Office several times, arguing that claims for the friar's sanctity were unjustified.

  A pharmacy in Foggia supplied the most colourful accusation. Maria De Vito, cousin of the local pharmacist Valentini Vista, testified that the young friar secretly bought carbolic acid and four grams of veratrine without any prescription. Vista described veratrine as a caustic mixture of alkaloids, poisonous enough that only a doctor should decide to prescribe it. It had been used against lice, and pharmacists also described it as a stimulant that dulls pain. Critics said the purchases pointed to faked wounds.

  Padre Pio gave a plainer account. The carbolic acid, he said, sterilised syringes used for medical treatments. The veratrine came after a practical joke played on him, in which veratrine was mixed into snuff tobacco and set off fits of sneezing. He bought his own supply to play the same trick on his fellow friars.

  Raffaele Rossi, the Carmelite bishop of Volterra, was formally commissioned by the Holy Office on the 11th of June 1921. Three days later he began his visit to San Giovanni Rotondo by questioning witnesses, two diocesan priests and seven friars. After eight days he wrote a favourable report and sent it on the 4th of October, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. He judged Padre Pio a good religious and the monastery a good community. The stigmata could not be explained, but they were neither the devil's work nor fraud. He saw them as a "real fact."

  Rossi's reading of the pharmacy story was generous. Where critics saw a plot, he saw "Padre Pio's simplicity, and his playful spirit." He recorded that the hand wounds were "very visible." The foot wounds were fading into two small raised spots of lighter skin. In the side he saw a triangular patch the colour of red wine. He also noted a strong violet-like fragrance he could not trace to a source. On reported healings he was more guarded, saying many were unconfirmed or nonexistent. Lucia Ceci says he found proof of none. Rossi asked the Holy Office for a copy of his collected material so that he might one day write about the friar's life.

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• 5. Rome's Suspicion

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  In the 1920s the Vatican imposed severe sanctions on Padre Pio to reduce the publicity around him. He was forbidden to say Mass in public, hear confessions, give blessings or answer letters. He could not show his stigmata or communicate with Father Benedetto. Church authorities planned to move him to a monastery in northern Italy, but local people threatened to riot, and the plan was dropped. A second attempt at removal was also cancelled. From 1921 to 1922 he was kept from public priestly duties altogether.

  The Holy Office, the body now called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal statement in May 1923. It said nothing supernatural had been proven about the friar and warned the public not to rely on his claims. Between 1923 and 1931 the Holy See repeated that his life showed no divine cause. The historian Sergio Luzzatto says he came to be seen as a prisoner in his own monastery.

  Pope Pius XI reversed the ban on public Mass in 1933. His explanation was blunt. "I have not been badly disposed toward Padre Pio, but I have been badly informed." In 1934 the friar was allowed to hear confessions again. He was even given honorary permission to preach, though he had never taken the exam for a preaching license. After Pius XII became pope in 1939, he went further and encouraged devotees to visit.

  After 1958, under Pope John XXIII, the mood turned cold again. John XXIII learned that Padre Pio's opponents had hidden listening devices in the friar's cell and confessional and recorded his confessions. In private notes the pope worried about tapes that supposedly suggested "intimate and indecent relationships with women." They came from what he called the friar's "praetorian guard." Luzzatto says the pope probably never listened to them. He adds that the Vatican had not ordered the wiretap. John XXIII also wrote that he had ordered a new apostolic visitation.

  Father Carlo Maccari, secretary-general of the Diocese of Rome, carried out that second visitation in 1960. He met Padre Pio nine times, and the distrust ran both ways. His diary reads: "Reticence, narrowness of mind, lies - these are the weapons he uses to evade my questions... Overall impression: pitiful." His report said the friar had inadequate religious education, worked hard for his age, was no ascetic and kept many outside contacts. He saw too much mixing of the sacred and the all too human.

  Maccari also listed the names of women who claimed to have been the friar's lovers, without judging whether they spoke truly. His sharpest words were for the devotees. He described their beliefs as oscillating between superstition and magic, and he called them a vast and dangerous organisation never urged toward moderation. He recommended moving the brothers of Our Lady of Grace gradually and bringing in an abbot from outside the region. Confession to Padre Pio should be limited to once a month, and the hospital needed new statutes. After the report, John XXIII called the friar a "straw idol," in Italian an "idolo di stoppa."

  In the mid-1960s Pope Paul VI dismissed all the accusations against Padre Pio. The hospital that Maccari wanted reformed had its own tangled story of money and politics.

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• 6. Hospital and Prayer Groups

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  By 1925 Padre Pio had turned an old convent building into a small medical clinic with a few beds, meant mainly for people in extreme need. In 1940 a committee was formed to create a larger clinic, and donations began pouring in. Construction started in 1947.

  According to the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto, most of the money came from Emanuele Brunatto, a devoted follower who had made a fortune on the black market in German-occupied France. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, known as UNRRA, added 250 million Italian lire. That help was arranged by Lodovico Montini, head of the Christian Democracy party, and his brother Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI.

  The hospital was first meant to carry the name "Fiorello LaGuardia." In the end it was presented as the work of Padre Pio himself and opened in 1956 as La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering. Padre Pio handed direct control to the Holy See. In 1957, however, Pope Pius XII granted him a dispensation from his vow of poverty so that he could supervise the project personally. Some of his detractors later suggested that funds had been misappropriated.

  The prayer groups grew out of the 1950s, when Pope Pius XII made a general request for groups to gather monthly and pray together. Padre Pio answered the call and urged his devotees to form them. A biweekly bulletin named after the hospital, published from 1949, helped the groups take shape. In 1951 the first statutes set out the basics. Each group would meet monthly, with the local bishop's agreement and a priest's guidance, to pray for the pope and for Padre Pio's work. The Vatican approved new statutes in 1986, and the groups are coordinated from headquarters at the hospital.

  At the time of his death in 1968, there were around 700 groups with 68,000 members in 15 countries. By 2013 there were about 3,300 registered groups in 60 countries, with roughly three million members. About 75 percent of the groups were in Italy. The rest were mainly in France, Ireland and the United States.

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• 7. Convictions and Politics

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  "The soul's bath" was how Padre Pio described weekly confession. He compared it to dusting a room once a week. He also advised meditation and self-examination twice a day, once in the morning to prepare for the day and once in the evening to look back. His five rules for spiritual growth were weekly confession, daily Communion, spiritual reading, meditation and frequent examination of conscience. His shortest advice became famous: Prega, spera e non preoccuparti, meaning "Pray, hope, and don't worry." He also taught that suffering was a special sign of God's love.

  Inside the confessional, he could be severe. Penitents who seemed insincere were sent away and refused absolution until they set right their personal lives. Sincere ones met gentleness. His humour could come across as abrupt, and when challenged on it he gave a reason. "I act like that so that I don't let myself be overcome with emotion. Seeing people suffer is enough to bring me to tears, and then I would no longer be able to continue my ministry." Of his own supernatural experiences, he once said they were "a mystery for me too."

  On the 12th of January 1930, Pope Pius XI issued a decree on modesty in dress. Padre Pio, a firm advocate of modesty, began sending people out of confession for inappropriate clothing. His fellow friars hung a sign on the church door. It said that by his explicit wish, women must enter his confessional wearing skirts at least 8 inches below the knees.

  His sister Grazia, a traditionalist nun, left her order at the age of 70 because of changes made after the Second Vatican Council. When Padre Pio saw her soon afterward, he burst into tears and scolded her. "They are wrong and you are right, but you still must obey. You must return." She refused, and he wept uncontrollably and went on praying for her. After the encyclical Humanae vitae, he wrote to Pope Paul VI affirming his obedience to Church teaching on birth control. He promised to offer his prayers and suffering for the pope.

  His nephew Ettorne Masone once asked for advice about opening a movie house after the Second World War. The friar urged care about the films he showed: "You don't want to contribute to the propagation of evil." He was wary of television too, though the Capuchins allowed it by the late 1950s. Thinking of rural life around San Giovanni Rotondo, he joked that the inventor of the refrigerator went straight to heaven while the inventor of the television went down. A 2021 interview with Father John Aurilia suggests that he took part in at least one televised interview for a local station. The line quoted from it was one he used all his life: "I want to be a poor friar who prays."

  Politics barely interested him before Mussolini, apart from a fear of communism because of its hostility to the liturgy. In August 1920, he blessed a flag for local veterans who were trying to build links with local fascists to fight communists. Giuseppe Caradonna, a fascist politician from Foggia, became close to the friar. Padre Pio heard the confessions of Caradonna and his militiamen, and Caradonna set up the "praetorian guard" that stood between the friar and any transfer elsewhere.

  Once Mussolini took power, the friar's attitude quickly changed. When one of Mussolini's messengers visited, he shouted that the man came only after destroying Italy, and that nothing could save it now. During the Second World War he was friendly to American soldiers stationed near San Giovanni Rotondo. He thought highly of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he called a "great man." In 1948 he wrote to Alcide De Gasperi to voice support for Christian Democracy. Italian communists resented him and blamed his influence for their losses in several general elections of the 1940s.

  After those Christian Democratic victories, leaders such as Aldo Moro, Antonio Segni, Mariano Rumor and Giovanni Leone consulted him. King Alfonso XIII of Spain wrote asking for his prayers in March 1923, and he also prayed for King George V of the United Kingdom. In 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he broke down in tears. Another priest asked whether he would pray for Kennedy's salvation. "It's not necessary. He's already in Paradise."

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• 8. Death and Sainthood

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  On the 22nd of September 1968, Padre Pio celebrated Mass for the fiftieth anniversary of receiving his stigmata. Pilgrims filled the church, and television crews were there. The crowd was so large that the monastery's superior chose a Solemn Mass, which is more demanding than a Low Mass. Padre Pio completed it but looked extremely frail, with a weak voice. Afterward he nearly collapsed on the altar steps, and his Capuchin brothers caught him. It was the last Mass he ever celebrated.

  Early on the 23rd of September, he made his last confession and renewed his Franciscan vows. He held his rosary as usual, but he lacked the strength to say the Hail Marys aloud. He repeated only the words Gesù, Maria, meaning "Jesus, Mary." He died in his cell in San Giovanni Rotondo at about 2:30 in the morning, aged 81. His funeral on the 26th of September drew an estimated 100,000 people. After a procession through the town and the funeral Mass, he was buried in the crypt of the church of Our Lady of Grace.

  The Palmarian Catholic Church, based in El Palmar de Troya in Andalusia, canonised him first. Its Tenth Papal Document of the 12th of September 1978 was devoted entirely to that single event. The recognised path took far longer. In 1982 the Holy See authorised the archbishop of Manfredonia to open an investigation, which ran for seven years. In 1990 Padre Pio was declared a servant of God. The inquiry never gave a public factual answer to the claims that his stigmata were not supernatural. The stigmata were left out of the required investigations so as not to block a successful outcome.

  In 1997 John Paul II declared him venerable. The next stage examined his effect on others, including the reported cure of an Italian woman, Consiglia de Martino. On the 2nd of May 1999, the pope celebrated the beatification Mass in St. Peter's Square before more than 300,000 people. In his homily, he said the friar had shared in the Passion with special intensity and never wavered in his sense that "Calvary is the hill of the saints." A second case followed, that of an Italian boy named Matteo Pio Colella who recovered from a coma. John Paul II promulgated the decree of canonisation on the 28th of February 2002, and he celebrated the canonisation Mass on the 16th of June 2002 before an estimated 300,000 people.

  The Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina rose beside the old monastery between 1991 and 2004. John Paul II dedicated it on the 1st of July 2004. The church holds about 6,000 people, and its parvise can hold 30,000. In Pietrelcina, pilgrims can visit the family house where he was born and the room in an old tower where he stayed while ill. An estimated 2 million pilgrims visit the town each year.

  Popes have followed him there. John Paul II first visited in 1947 as a young priest, returned in 1974 as a cardinal and came again in May 1987 for the hundredth anniversary of the friar's birth. Benedict XVI visited on the 21st of June 2009. Francis asked that the relics be shown in St. Peter's Basilica from the 8th to the 14th of February 2016. On the 17th of March 2018, he visited Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo for the fiftieth anniversary of the death.

  On the 3rd of March 2008, the body was exhumed so it could be prepared for display. A church statement called its condition "fair." Archbishop Domenico Umberto D'Ambrosio said the hands "looked like they had just undergone a manicure." The face had deteriorated, so the London-based Gems Studio made a lifelike silicone mask from a 1968 photograph. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins celebrated Mass for 15,000 devotees on the 24th of April 2008. Some 800,000 pilgrims had reserved places to see the body by December 2008, though only 7,200 a day could pass the crystal coffin. In April 2010 the remains were moved to a golden crypt.

  In Kleinburg, Ontario, the first parish named for Saint Padre Pio was established on the 16th of June 2002. A 2006 survey by the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana found that more Italian Catholics prayed to him for intercession than to anyone else. A group of 160 petitioners asked the Italian Bishops' Conference to name him patron saint of civil defence volunteers, and the Vatican approved. Less officially, the Catholic Enquiry Office in London named him patron of stress relief and the January blues. It tied that title to his advice to pray, hope and not worry. In 1998, an underwater statue of him was sunk 40 feet deep off Capraia Island. A statue in Messina, Sicily, supposedly wept tears of blood in 2002. In 2021 construction began on a new sanctuary on a hill above Cebu City in the Philippines, crowned by a statue 100 feet tall.

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