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| Saint Pio of Pietrelcina OFMCap | |
|---|---|
| Official portrait photograph of Padre Pio, c. 1947 | |
| Born | Francesco Forgione 25 May 1887 Pietrelcina, Benevento, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 23 September 1968 (aged 81) San Giovanni Rotondo, Foggia, Italy |
| Resting place | Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, San Giovanni Rotondo |
| Venerated in | Roman Catholic Church Palmarian Catholic Church[1] |
| Beatified | 2 May 1999, St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City by Pope John Paul II |
| Canonized | 16 June 2002, St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City by Pope John Paul II |
| Major shrine | Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina in San Giovanni Rotondo, ItalyNational Centre of Padre Pio in Barto, PennsylvaniaParish and National Shrine of Saint Padre Pio in Santo Tomas, Philippines |
| Feast | 23 September |
| Attributes | Stigmata, Franciscan habit, sacerdotal vestments |
| Patronage | Civil defense volunteers, Adolescents, Pietrelcina, Stress relief, January blues[2] |
Pio of Pietrelcina (born Francesco Forgione; 25 May 1887 – 23 September 1968), widely known as Padre Pio (Italian for ‘Father Pius’), was an Italian Capuchin friar, priest, Stigmata, and mystic. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, celebrated on 23 September.[3]
Pio joined the Capuchins when he was fifteen and spent most of his religious life in the convent of San Giovanni Rotondo. He was marked by stigmata in 1918, leading to several investigations by the Holy See. Despite temporary sanctions imposed by the Vatican, his reputation kept increasing during his life, attracting many followers to San Giovanni Rotondo. He was the founder of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, a hospital built near the convent of San Giovanni Rotondo.[4]
After his death, his devotion continued to spread among believers all over the world. He was beatified on 2 May 1999 and canonized on 16 June 2002 by Pope John Paul II. His relics are exposed in the sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, next to the convent of San Giovanni Rotondo, now a major pilgrimage site.[5]
Life
Early life
Francesco Forgione was born on 25 May 1887 to Grazio Mario Forgione (1860–1946) and Maria Giuseppa Di Nunzio (1859–1929), in Pietrelcina, a town in the province of Benevento, in the Southern Italian region of Campania.[6] His parents were peasant farmers.[7] He was baptized in the nearby Santa Anna Chapel, which stands upon the walls of a castle.[8] He later served as an altar boy in this same chapel. He had an older brother, Michele, and three younger sisters, Felicita, Pellegrina, and Grazia (who was later to become a Bridgettine nun).[7] His parents had two other children who died in infancy.[6] When he was baptized, he was given the name Francesco. He stated that by the time he was five years old, he had already made the decision to dedicate his entire life to God.[6][8] He worked on the land up to the age of 10, looking after the small flock of sheep the family owned.[9]
Pietrelcina was a town where feast days of saints were celebrated throughout the year, and the Forgione family was deeply religious. They attended Mass daily, prayed the Rosary nightly, and abstained from meat three days a week in honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.[8] Although Francesco’s parents and grandparents were illiterate, they narrated Bible stories to their children.
According to the diary of Father Agostino da San Marco (who was later his spiritual director in San Marco in Lamis), the young Francesco was afflicted with a number of illnesses. At six he suffered from severe gastroenteritis. At ten he caught typhoid fever.[10]
As a youth, Francesco reported that he had experienced heavenly visions and ecstasies.[6] In 1897, after he had completed three years at the public school, Francesco was said to have been drawn to the life of a friar after listening to a young Capuchin who was in the countryside seeking donations. When Francesco expressed his desire to his parents, they made a trip to Morcone, a community 13 miles (21 km) north of Pietrelcina, to find out if their son was eligible to enter the Order. The friars there informed them that they were interested in accepting Francesco into their community, but he needed to be better educated.[8]
Francesco’s father went to the United States in search of work to pay for private tutoring for his son, to meet the academic requirements to enter the Capuchin Order.[6] It was in this period that Francesco received the sacrament of Confirmation on 27 September 1899. He underwent private tutoring and passed the stipulated academic requirements. On 6 January 1903, at the age of 15, he entered the novitiate of the Capuchin friars at Morcone. On 22 January, he took the Franciscan habit and the name of Fra (Friar) Pio, in honour of Pope Pius I, whose relic is preserved in the Santa Anna Chapel in Pietrelcina.[8][11] He took the simple vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.[6]
Priesthood
Commencing his seven-year study for the priesthood, Pio travelled to the friary of Saint Francis of Assisi in Umbria.[8] At 17, he fell ill, complaining of loss of appetite, insomnia, exhaustion, fainting spells, and migraines. He vomited frequently and could digest only milk and cheese. Religious devotees point to this time as being that at which inexplicable phenomena began to occur. During prayers, for example, Pio appeared to others to be in a stupor, as if he were absent. One of Pio’s fellow friars later claimed to have seen him in ecstasy, and levitating above the ground.[12]
In June 1905, Pio’s health worsened to such an extent that his superiors decided to send him to a mountain convent, in the hope that the change of air would do him good. This had little impact, however, and doctors advised that he return home. Even there his health failed to improve. Despite this, he still made his solemn religious profession on 27 January 1907.
In August 1910, Pio was ordained a priest by Archbishop Paolo Schinosi at the Cathedral of Benevento. Four days later, he offered his first Mass at the parish church of Our Lady of the Angels.
His health being precarious, he was permitted to remain with his family in his hometown of Pietrelcina while still retaining the Capuchin habit.[13] He stayed in Pietrelcina until 1916, due to his health and the need to take care of his family when his father and brother briefly emigrated to the United States.[14] During these years, Padre Pio frequently wrote mystic letters to his spiritual directors, Father Benedetto and Father Agostino, two friars from the Capuchin monastery of San Marco in Lamis.[14][15]
Arrival at San Giovanni Rotondo
The church-shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo, Padre Pio’s own church
The conventual cell of Padre Pio in the monastery of Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo
On 4 September 1916, Pio was ordered to return to his community life. He moved to an agricultural community, Our Lady of Grace Capuchin Friary, located in the Gargano Mountains in San Giovanni Rotondo in the Province of Foggia. At that time the community numbered seven friars. He remained at San Giovanni Rotondo until his death in 1968, except for a period of military service. In the priesthood, Padre Pio was known to perform a number of successful conversions to Catholicism.[16]
Pio was devoted to rosary meditations. He compared weekly confession to dusting a room weekly, and recommended the performance of meditation and self-examination twice daily: once in the morning, as preparation to face the day, and once again in the evening, as retrospection. His advice on the practical application of theology he often summed up in his now famous quote: “pray, hope, and don’t worry”.[17] He directed Christians to recognize God in all things and to desire above all things to do the will of God.[18]
Many people who heard of him travelled to San Giovanni Rotondo to meet him and confess to him, ask for help, or have their curiosity satisfied. Pio’s mother died in the village around the convent in 1928. Later, in 1938, Pio had his elderly father Grazio live with him. His brother Michele also moved in. Pio’s father lived in a little house outside the convent, until his death in 1946.[19]
World War I and aftermath
When World War I started, four friars from his community were selected for military service in the Italian army. At that time, Pio was a teacher and spiritual director at the seminary. When one more friar was called into service, Pio was put in charge of the community. On 15 November 1915, he was drafted and on December 6, assigned to the 10th Medical Corps in Naples. Due to poor health, he was continually discharged and recalled until on 16 March 1918, he was declared unfit for service and discharged completely.[20]
In September 1918, Pio began to display permanent wounds on his hands and feet, known as stigmata in reference to Christ’s wounds.[21] In the next months, his reputation of sainthood grew rapidly in the region of San Giovanni Rotondo, attracting hundreds of believers at the monastery coming each day to see him.[21]
People who had started rebuilding their lives after the war began to see in Pio a symbol of hope.[18] Those close to him attest that he began to manifest several spiritual gifts, including the gifts of healing, bilocation, levitation, prophecy, miracles, extraordinary abstinence from both sleep and nourishment (one account states that Padre Agostino recorded one instance in which Pio was able to subsist for at least 20 days at Verafeno on only the Holy Eucharist without any other nourishment), the ability to read hearts, the gift of tongues, the gift of conversions, and pleasant-smelling wounds.[22][better source needed]
Pio increasingly became well known among the wider populace. He became a spiritual director, and developed five rules for spiritual growth: weekly confession, daily Communion, spiritual reading, meditation, and examination of conscience.[18]
La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza hospital
By 1925, Pio had converted an old convent building into a medical clinic with a few beds intended primarily for people in extreme need.[23] In 1940, a committee was set-up to establish a bigger clinic[24] and donations started to be made. Construction began in 1947.[23]
According to Luzzatto, the bulk of the money for financing the hospital came directly from Emanuele Brunatto, a keen follower of Pio, who had made his fortune in the black market in German-occupied France.[25][26] The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) also contributed 250 million Italian lire.[27]
Lodovico Montini, head of Democrazia Cristiana, and his brother Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI) facilitated engagement by UNRRA.[28] The hospital was initially to be named “Fiorello LaGuardia”, but eventually presented as the work of Pio himself.[29] The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (‘Home for the Relief of Suffering’) opened in 1956.[24] Pio handed direct control to the Holy See. However, in order that Pio might directly supervise the project, Pope Pius XII granted him a dispensation from his vow of poverty in 1957.[30][31] Some of Pio’s detractors have subsequently suggested there had been misappropriation of funds.[30]
Death
Some photos of the funeral ceremony (attended by near 100,000) and procession to Our Lady of Grace
Pio’s health deteriorated in the 1960s, but he continued his spiritual works.[32] On 22 September 1968, Padre Pio celebrated the Mass to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his receiving the stigmata, with a huge crowd of pilgrims present to celebrate the event as well as television crews.[33] Due to a large number of pilgrims present for the Mass, the superior of the monastery decided that a Solemn Mass be celebrated.[34] Pio carried out his duties, but appeared extremely weak and frail.[35] His voice was weak, and, after the Mass had concluded, he nearly collapsed while walking down the altar steps. He needed help from his Capuchin brothers.[36] This was his last celebration of the Mass.[37]
Early in the morning of 23 September 1968, Pio made his last confession and renewed his Franciscan vows.[18][38] As was customary, he had his rosary in his hands, though he did not have the strength to pray the Hail Marys aloud, instead repeating the words Gesù, Maria (‘Jesus, Mary’).[39] He died in his cell in San Giovanni Rotondo around 2:30 a.m. at the age of 81.[40]
A few days before dying the stigmata had disappeared. Examining Padre Pio’s body, the doctor who was present at his deathbed observed that the wounds of the stigmata were completely healed, without any trace or scar.[40] His body was placed in a coffin in the church of the monastery to allow pilgrims to pay their respects. The funeral ceremony was held on 26 September, with an estimated 100,000 people attending.[41][42] After a funeral procession in San Giovanni Rotondo and the funeral Mass, the body was buried in the crypt in the Church of Our Lady of Grace.[41]
Supernatural phenomena
Pio was said to have had mystical gifts such as reading souls, the ability to bilocate and the ability to work favours and healings before they were requested of him.[43] His reported supernatural experiences also include celestial visions, communication with angels and physical fights with Satan and demons. The reports of supernatural phenomena surrounding Pio attracted fame and amazement, even if the Vatican seemed sceptical. Some of these phenomena were reported by Pio himself in letters written to his spiritual directors, while others have been reported by his followers.
Stigmata
Pio wrote in his letters that, early in his priesthood, he experienced bodily marks, pain, and bleeding in locations indicative of the (not yet visible) stigmata.[44] In a letter to his spiritual companion and confessor Father Agostino, dated 21 March 1912, Pio wrote of his devotion to the mystical body of Christ and the intuition that he would bear the stigmata. Luzzatto claims that in this letter Pio uses unrecognized passages from a book by the stigmatized mystic Gemma Galgani.[14]
In a 1915 letter, Agostino asked Pio specific questions, including: when did he first experience visions, whether he was stigmatic, and whether he felt the pains of the Passion of Christ, namely the crowning of thorns and the scourging. Pio replied that he had had visions since his novitiate period (1903 to 1904) and that he was stigmatic, adding that he had been so terrified by the phenomenon that he begged God to withdraw his stigmata. He also wrote that he did not wish the pain to be removed, only the visible wounds, since he considered them to be an indescribable and almost unbearable humiliation.[44]
On 20 September 1918, while hearing confessions, Pio is said to have had a reappearance of the physical occurrence of the stigmata. His stigmatism reportedly continued for fifty years, until the end of his life. The blood flowing from the stigmata purportedly smelled of perfume or flowers.[45] Pio conveyed to Agostino that the pain remained and was more acute on specific days and under certain circumstances. Though he said he would have preferred to suffer in secret, by early 1919, news that he was a stigmatic had begun to spread. Pio often wore red mittens or black coverings on his hands and feet, saying that he was embarrassed by the marks.[30]
Agostino Gemelli claimed that the wounds were consistent with those that soldiers had inflicted on themselves “by the use of a caustic substance”,[46] while Amico Bignami considered that Pio’s wounds might be a skin necrosis that was hindered from healing through the use of iodine tincture or similar chemicals.[47]
Once made public, the wounds were studied by a number of physicians, some hired by the Vatican as part of an independent investigation. Some claimed that the wounds were unexplainable and never seemed to have become infected.[30][48] Despite seeming to heal they would then reappear periodically.[49] Alberto Caserta took X-rays of Pio’s hands in 1954 and found no abnormality in the bone structure.[50] Some critics accused Pio of faking the stigmata, for example by using carbolic acid to make the wounds. Maria De Vito (the cousin of the local pharmacist Valentini Vista at Foggia) testified that the young Pio bought carbolic acid and the great quantity of four grams of veratrine “without presenting any medical prescription whatsoever” and “in great secret”.[51] Veratrine is a “mixture of alkaloids”, a “highly caustic product”: “Veratrine is so poisonous, that only a doctor can decide whether to prescribe it”, as the pharmacist Vista stated in front of witnesses.[52] Veratrine was once used as a paralyzing muscle insecticide, primarily against lice, but was also described by pharmacists as an “external stimulant” that renders one insensitive to pain.[53] Pio maintained that the carbolic acid was used to sterilize syringes used for medical treatments and that after being subjected to a practical joke where veratrine was mixed with snuff tobacco, causing uncontrollable sneezing after ingestion, he decided to acquire his own quantity of the substance in order to play the same joke on his confreres;[54][55] the bishop of Volterra, Raffaele Rossi came to share this view, believing that “Instead of malice, what is revealed here is Padre Pio’s simplicity, and his playful spirit”,[55] and that “the stigmata at issue are not a work of the devil, nor a gross deceit, a fraud, the trick of a devious and malicious person […] his ‘stigmata’ do not seem to me a morbid product of external suggestion.”[56] Rossi saw these stigmata as a “real fact”.[57]
Transverberation
In August 1918, a few weeks before reportedly receiving the stigmata, Pio described a mystical experience during which he felt being pierced and burnt spiritually and physically. According to Pio, this mystical experience began on 5 August and ended on 7 August. Padre Benedetto, his spiritual director, interpreted this phenomenon as a transverberation. Pio later claimed that this experience left a physical wound on his left side.[58] Most witnesses who examined Pio’s wounds reported that he had a wound on his left side, around three inches long and the shape of a cross.[59][60]
Bilocation
Pio was believed by his followers to have the gift of bilocation, the ability to be in two places at the same time. When bishop Raffaele Rossi asked him about bilocation as part of a Vatican inquiry, Pio replied: “I don’t know how it is or the nature of this phenomenon—and I certainly don’t give it much thought—but it did happen to me to be in the presence of this or that person, to be in this or that place; I do not know whether my mind was transported there, or what I saw was some sort of representation of the place or the person; I do not know whether I was there with my body or without it.”[61][62]
Healing
In the 1999 book Padre Pio: The Wonder Worker, a segment by Irish priest Malachy Gerard Carroll describes the story of Gemma de Giorgi, a Sicilian girl whose blindness was believed to have been cured during a visit to Pio.[63] Gemma, who was brought to San Giovanni Rotondo in 1947 by her grandmother, was born without pupils. During her trip to see Pio, the little girl began to see objects, including a steamboat and the sea.[63][64] Gemma’s grandmother did not believe the child had been healed. After Gemma forgot to ask Pio for grace during her confession, her grandmother implored the priest to ask God to restore her sight.[63] Pio told her, “The child must not weep and neither must you for the child sees and you know she sees.”[63]
According to the bishop of Volterra, Raffaele Rossi, in charge of investigating Pio: “Of the alleged healings, many are unconfirmed or non-existent. In Padre Pio’s correspondence, however, there are some credible declarations that attribute miracles to his intercession. But without medical confirmation it is difficult to reach a conclusion, and the issue remains open.”[65]
Prophecy
In 1947, 27-year-old Father Karol Józef Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) visited Pio, who heard his confession. Austrian Cardinal Alfons Stickler reported that Wojtyła confided to him that during this meeting, Pio told him he would one day ascend to “the highest post in the church, though further confirmation is needed.”[66] Stickler said that Wojtyła believed that the prophecy was fulfilled when he became a cardinal.[67] John Paul’s secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, denies the prediction,[68] while George Weigel‘s biography Witness to Hope, which contains an account of the same visit, does not mention it.
Others
[edit]
Rossi describes in Pio a “very intense and pleasant fragrance, similar to the scent of the violet”, and concludes that he was unable to determine the origin of the scent.[69] Pio replied that he had intellectual visions seen through the eyes of the intellect,[70] accounts of diabolical assaults and harassment against him,[71] malicious visions under human shape and beastly shape,[72] and Pio confirmed to Rossi: “A very few times I happened to feel inside me with clarity someone’s fault, or sin, or virtue, of people of whom I had some knowledge, at least generally”.[73]