Vigils Reading – St Pius of Pietrelcina

ST PIO OF PIETRELCINA

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints1

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The most famous stigmatist since St Francis of Assisi was born into a

family of agricultural laborers in Pietrelcina, northeast of Naples, on May 25,

1887. In 1903 he received the capuchin habit, taking the name of Fra. Pio. Seven

years later he was ordained to the priesthood. Not long after this he began to

experience pains in his hands and feet, and on September 11, 1911 he confessed

to his spiritual director that he had had invisible stigmata for over a year. He

also suffered the pains of Christ’s crown of thorns and scourging.

On august 5, 1918 he underwent the further mystical experience of

“transverberation” (piercing with the lance), which left him with a wound in his

side that bled continually. A month later the stigmata in his hands and feet

became visible and remained so until the final day of his life. The Capuchins

made no attempt to conceal Padre Pio’s condition, which soon became known

all over Italy and was the main cause of both his celebrity and the controversy

that surrounded him. As people started flocking to his convent in their

thousands, the Vatican, cautious as ever when faced with “private” favors and

revelations, had him examined by a succession of doctors. The physical

manifestations were undeniable. But were they from God, the psychosomatic

effect of a disturbed personality, or even a fraudulent attempt on his part of that

of the convent to achieve notoriety?

Huge crowds attended his Masses, during which he went into ecstatic

states that could last for two hours or more. In July 1923 he received an order

to say Mass in private, but so real was the threat of a violent popular reaction

that it was rescinded the following day. Padre Pio himself made no comment on5

his condition other than that he was “a mystery to himself” but his gifts should

produce benefits for others.

His community was able to ensure that they were so used when money

offerings started coming in from his penitents and admirers. In January 1925,

he opened a twenty-bed hospital that was named after St. Francis and remained

in operation for thirteen years…

In 1940, with the particular support of Maria Pyle, a wealthy American

woman to whose mother he had ministered as she was dying in 1929, Padre Pio

was in a position to undertake a more ambitious hospital project. Medical and

administrative committees were set up, but the Second World War delayed

further implementation of the project until 1946, when a limited company was

formed to carry the work forward…

In 1959 Padre Pio’s own health deteriorated. Then in August he

recovered, apparently miraculously, when a statue of Our Lady of Fatima was

brought into the hospital for two days. He died on September 23, 1968, and

doctors who examined his body found his hands and feet unmarked and “fresh

as those of a child”. He was beatified and later canonized by Pope John Paul II.

In his address the Pope spoke not so much of Padre Pio’s extraordinary

experiences but of the long hours the friar would spend in the confessional and

of his extraordinary charity, which, he said, “was poured like balm on the

sufferings of his brothers and sisters.”