Saint Pio of Pietrelcina

Yet what made Padre Pio great was not the painful nail wounds or the astonishing miracles. His greatness lay in this: he freely turned his whole life into a “living sacrifice”, shutting himself every day for sixteen to eighteen hours in the confessional to listen, to forgive and to heal the wounds of people’s souls.

As a child, little Francesco was quiet and shy, and remarkably close to God. From the age of five, he saw Jesus, Mary and his guardian angel appear and talk with him as close friends. The boy assumed that everyone in the world saw such visions just as he did. He often slipped away to a corner behind the house, slept on the cold ground and used a stone for a pillow as penance.

Seeing that his fourth child had a special religious vocation, his poor father, Grazio Forgione, twice left his homeland and went all the way to America to work as a laborer, sending home every penny he earned for his son’s schooling.

His years of novitiate and study were years of fierce struggle with illness: strange high fevers of more than 48 degrees Celsius that burst ordinary thermometers, and chest pains and violent coughing that led the doctors of the time to think he had terminal tuberculosis and could not survive. Yet he came through it all with extraordinary strength of spirit.

Padre Pio later wrote in a letter to his spiritual director:

“I felt as if I were dying... When the vision disappeared, I opened my eyes and was stunned to see that my hands, my feet and my side had been pierced and were bleeding profusely! Utter pain tore through my body, but my soul was flooded with indescribable peace!”

The five wounds of Jesus were deeply imprinted on the body of the thirty-one-year-old priest:

• two wounds piercing through the palms and backs of his hands;
• two wounds piercing through his feet;
• and a wound in his side in the shape of an inverted cross, five centimeters deep, constantly oozing fresh blood and giving off a sweet fragrance of flowers, known as the odor of sanctity.

For fifty years afterwards, those wounds bled fresh every day, soaking the bandages. Out of humility, Padre Pio always wore fingerless brown woolen gloves to hide the nail marks on his hands.

One medical professor and leading pathologist after another, from Italy and across Europe, was sent by the Holy See to examine him rigorously. After months of observation and every kind of chemical treatment, the scientists had to sign a report confirming: these wounds belonged to no known pathological or psychological condition; they never became infected, never festered, and were entirely beyond the laws of nature.

From 1923 to 1933, the Holy See issued several decrees placing strict restrictions on Padre Pio. The climax came in 1931, when he was stripped of the faculty to hear confessions and forbidden to say Mass publicly before the faithful. He was allowed to celebrate Mass only alone in the private chapel.

Through two long years of unjust discipline, Padre Pio showed complete obedience and humility. He did not write a single letter of complaint, nor say a word of reproach against the Church or his superiors. He said:

“The will of my superiors is the will of God!”

In 1933, after the whole matter had been reexamined, Pope Pius XI lifted every prohibition and declared:

“I have not been against Padre Pio, but I was deceived!”

Padre Pio was free once more to serve his flock.

Standing at the altar, the priest who bore the stigmata did not simply read the liturgical texts; he relived every moment of the Passion on Calvary. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and his body trembled with fierce pain in the nail wounds as he spoke the words of consecration. The altar suddenly became a living Calvary.

After Mass, he went straight into the confessional. For more than fifty years, he sat there fourteen to eighteen hours a day.

God gave him an extraordinary gift of reading souls, kardiognosis: he saw into the depths of each penitent’s conscience. If someone deliberately hid a sin out of shame, he would gently or sternly name the exact date, place and circumstances in which that person had sinned.

He was stern with hypocrites and the hard-hearted, but endlessly tender with those who truly repented, embracing them with tears. Millions of hardened sinners and notorious atheists fell at his feet to ask forgiveness and begin their lives again.

On May 5, 1956, the hospital named “Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza”, the Home for the Relief of Suffering, was formally opened with its many beds and the most advanced equipment of the time. It is still regarded today as one of the most effective hospitals in Europe.

Padre Pio told the doctors:

“Here, the sick must be treated not only with the most advanced medicine, but with the very love of Christ... Remember that in every patient lying there, it is Jesus who is suffering!”

Along with the hospital, he founded the “Padre Pio Prayer Groups”, Gruppi di Preghiera, which spread worldwide, gathering millions of lay people to pray daily for the Pope’s intentions.

On June 16, 2002, the Holy Father himself canonized Pio of Pietrelcina in Saint Peter’s Square before more than three hundred thousand faithful, one of the largest canonizations in the history of the Church. The Church celebrates him on September 23 each year.

In 2004, a huge pilgrimage church designed by the famous architect Renzo Piano was dedicated in San Giovanni Rotondo, with enormous stone arches — the largest spanning fifty meters — seating six thousand five hundred people inside and thirty thousand more in the square outside. In 2010, his body was moved to the crypt beneath the main altar of that new church, and today San Giovanni Rotondo has become one of the most visited Catholic pilgrimage centers in the world, second only to the Vatican itself.