The Drama Of Padre Pio
Based on an article by John Cornwell
Padre Pio was canonized on June 16, 2002. He died on September 23, 1968. John Cornwell’s article, upon which this is based, appeared in The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly,www.thetablet.co.uk
Padre Pio
Devotees of Padre Pio say that his life proved that God intervenes directly in human affairs. He was a deeply religious child and believed he had visionary experiences of angels and conversations with Jesus and Mary. He heard heavenly choirs and believed he was harassed by “assaults of the devil.”
First Miracle Witnessed
A miraculous event in August 1895, when he was eight, profoundly affected him. His father took him to the shrine of San Pellegrino where a great crowd of pilgrims stood before his statue, waiting for miraculous healings. A “raging, disheveled” woman started to scream and pushed her way to the front. She held her child who had a huge, hydrocephalic head and shrunken, paralyzed limbs. The child could only squawk “like a crow.” The mother threw herself on the ground, asking ceaselessly for a miracle. She began to abuse the saint, screaming and cursing. Pio’s father decided to go but the boy stayed on, against his fathers wishes, earnestly praying for a miracle.
The mother hurled the child at the statue screaming, “Keep him! He’s all yours.” The baby bounced off the statue, hit his head on the marble floor with a loud thud and stood up, completely healed, running towards the woman, calling out , “Mother, mother!”
Pio associated the healing with his own prayer, rather than the efficacy of the saint, and saw the defiance of his father’s wishes as an important element: he was already about his real Father’s business.
His interior life
Born Francesco Forgione and one of five children, he grew up determined to be a Franciscan priest. He entered the Capuchin Franciscan seminary at 15 after a spotty education and was ordained eight years later. His superiors found him a problem from the start. He practiced excessive self-denial and fasting and long hours in private prayer. He was often sick with migraine, very high temperatures, constipation and vomiting. He slipped into ecstasies and sometimes took two hours to celebrate Mass.
His frequent illnesses gave him more solitude and further opportunities to pursue his intense interior life. At one stage he spent months living alone in a tower. Neighbors talked of crashes, bangs and shouts like “drunken brawls.” Pio confirmed later that he had been in dire struggles with demons that “struck me violently and threw pillows, books and chairs through the air and cursed me with exceedingly filthy words.”
Willing Victim
Called up for army service in World War One, he went AWOL. His spiritual director had him removed to a remote friary at San Giovanni Rotundo. There his mystical life deepened. Its focus was a powerful dedication of himself as victim, to suffer with Christ on behalf of others. At times this seemed to go beyond the norms of even the most radical expressions of spirituality. “Punish me and not others, even send me to hell, provided that I can still love you and everyone else is saved.” His visions seemed to be of two kinds, those that fell within a rigorous peasant tradition and those that approached the classic high mysticism of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.
Pio wrote accounts of jocular and scolding conversations with his guardian angel whom he referred to as “my boy.” He wrote too, “My ordinary way of praying is this: hardly do I begin to pray than at once I feel my soul begin to recollect itself in a peace and tranquility that I cannot express in words. The senses seem suspended.” He describes a vision of Christ in which “the Lord immersed my soul in such peace and contentment, that all the sweetest delights of this world, even if they were doubled, paled in comparison to even a drop of this blessedness.”
However, it seems that for the most part Pio’s spiritual life was subject to a long chain of afflictions, both physical and psychological. He had a mystical experience where a fiery weapon delivered a “mortal wound in the depths of my soul, a wound that is always open and which causes me continual agony.” His spiritual director was convinced that Pio had been chosen by God as a “co-redeemer and victim.”
Self-offering
The phenomenon of the stigmata illustrates clearly the marriage of vivid traditional iconography and the deeper implications of Pio’s self-offering. For several years, he experienced incipient pains and visible symptoms. On September 20, 1918, when he was 31, he received the stigmata proper. The five wounds, in his hands, feet and side, opened up fully and poured with blood. He was to become the most famous male stigmatic since St Francis in the 13th century.
Padre Pio wrote to his spiritual director about the great peace he felt at that time but he also told of the agony he experienced and continued to experience almost every day. The bleeding usually increased from Thursday evening till Saturday. “I am dying because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment,” he wrote.
The phenomenon of the stigmata was to last for 50 years and drew both unwelcome adulation and aggressive skepticism. Many psychiatrists and physicians came over the years to San Giovanni Rotundo. Some declared that here was a genuine mystery to science. Others accused Pio of fraud, hysteria, self-hypnosis and even of being in league with the devil. Rumors and accusations persisted until the friar’s death.
Pio’s life was full of paradox and controversy. Despite the long periods of contemplative prayer each day he would also spend up to 12 hours in the confessional and doing other good works. Though his spirituality seemed unattainable, his attachment to familiar pieties kept him in touch with people. His saintliness was evident to most but he could be irreverent, brusque, sharp-tongued and comic. He lived enclosed in his friary, yet had an impressive grasp of what was going on in the local community, in Italy and around the world.
Italian Communists mocked him as “the richest friar in the world.” He opened a hospital that was free to the poor but insisted that it should be built with the finest materials. There were rumors of financial scandals. Rome was suspicious of his popularity: people flocked to him in their hundreds of thousands.
Thousands of Miracles
The number of miracles attributed to Padre Pio ran into thousands. On one occasion a brother friar claimed that Pio had visited him in hospital and healed him of a deadly illness when it was known that Padre Pio hadn’t been out of the friary. When his superior asked him if he bilocated Pio said, “Is there any doubt about it? Yes, I went, but don’t say anything to anyone.”
Those who confessed to Padre Pio would say that he “saw the whole of one’s life at a glance.” He sometimes got angry in the confessional, especially if he detected pride or mere curiosity or no evident purpose of amendment in one living in sin. He could send people away with an earful of abuse and without absolution and was known to slap faces and box ears.
Wounded Servant
The Mass was the high point of Padre Pio’s day at San Giovanni. He would rise at 2:30 am and prepare himself in prayer and meditation. The people would be let in at 5:30 and race for the best places, sometimes trampling on uninitiated pilgrims. There was a totally different atmosphere once Mass began. A brother friar wrote, “His Mass produced such an impression that time and space between the altar and Calvary disappeared. The Divine Host, raised by those pierced hands, made the faithful more aware of the mystical union between the offering priest and the eternal priest.” Padre Pio passed through fear, joy, sadness, anguish and pain and often his whole body was shaken by sobs.
He seemed to age prematurely and his physical suffering increased as he grew older. He was confined to a wheelchair. The stigmata began to disappear in the final year of his life and when he died on September 23, 1968, there was no sign of the wounds. Hundreds of thousands flocked to his funeral Mass, celebrated in the presence of cardinals and bishops. The perfume that had accompanied his stigmata filled the church where he had lain in state.
Pope John Paul decreed that September 23 be observed throughout the Church as an obligatory memorial of St Pio.