Saint Padre Pio and Jesus

No. He was born on 25 May 1887 in Pietrelcina, a hill town in southern Italy, and he died on 23 September 1968. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem around AD 30. About nineteen centuries separate them, which is the widest gap of any saint people commonly search for.

The world he received the stigmata in was 1918, not first century Judea. The First World War was in its final weeks. The influenza pandemic was killing millions. He had been conscripted into the Italian army medical corps and discharged for poor health. San Giovanni Rotondo, the town on the Gargano promontory where he spent more than fifty years, had a telegraph, electricity arriving, motor cars on the coast road, and doctors who owned microscopes. Within two years the town was caught up in the street violence that carried Italian fascism to power.

That matters for how his story was handled. No physician ever examined the hands of an apostle. Padre Pio was examined by doctors with instruments, photographed, questioned under oath by a bishop sent from Rome, and eventually recorded on hidden microphones. There is a documentary record about him that no first century figure has.

So there are no gospel scenes to cite here. What he offered instead was a claim that Jesus had marked his body, and a life spent in a confessional acting on that claim.

On 20 September 1918, while praying in the choir loft of the friary church after Mass, Padre Pio reported a vision, and afterwards there were wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. He was thirty one. He had described something similar and invisible in 1910, and in early August 1918 he described a piercing of his side that his spiritual director called a transverberation.

The wounds stayed open for almost exactly fifty years. They bled. Multiple observers reported a floral smell from the blood, which Catholic writers call the odor of sanctity. He wore fingerless mitts in public for most of his adult life to cover his hands. Days before he died the wounds closed, and the doctor who examined the body reported clean skin with no scarring.

In Catholic understanding, the stigmata are not a proof of holiness and never have been. The church has never taught that they are required, expected, or a guarantee of anything. What they are is an attempted physical identification with the crucified Christ, a body trying to say what Paul said in one line to the Galatians about bearing the marks of the Lord Jesus in his own flesh.

Catholic sources commonly describe him as the first priest on record to have received them. That is a claim repeated in Catholic writing about him, and no tribunal ever ruled on it. Francis of Assisi, founder of the wider Franciscan family Padre Pio belonged to, is the earliest well documented case, in 1224, and Francis was a deacon.

This is the part most Padre Pio pages skip, and it is the most interesting thing about him. The Catholic Church did not accept the wounds at face value. It sent people.

On 15 and 16 May 1919 Luigi Romanelli, chief physician of the civil hospital at Barletta, examined him and reported that the wounds were not superficial. On 26 July 1919 the pathologist Amico Bignami examined him and proposed a natural mechanism, skin damage kept from healing by an applied chemical such as iodine. The physician Giorgio Festa examined him in 1919 and again in 1920 and reported in his favor. Three doctors, three conclusions, one body, inside fifteen months.

In 1920 Agostino Gemelli, a Franciscan who was also a physician and a psychologist, came to San Giovanni Rotondo and asked to see the wounds. Padre Pio asked him for written authorization from the Holy Office, Gemelli had none, and no examination took place. Gemelli afterwards wrote a hostile assessment describing the wounds as a product of suggestion in a hysterical subject, and repeated it in 1925. He had conducted no physical, histological or neurological examination, and he said so.

The Holy Office then sent Bishop Raffaele Carlo Rossi of Volterra to conduct a formal apostolic visitation. Rossi began on 14 June 1921, questioned Padre Pio and the friars under oath over about a week, and sent his report to Rome on 4 October 1921. He concluded that the wounds were a real fact, and that they were neither gross deceit nor the work of the devil. His report was favorable and it was filed away.

In May 1923 the Holy Office published its finding anyway, in the standard Latin formula non constare de supernaturalitate, meaning the supernatural character of the facts is not established. That formula means unproven. It convicts nobody of anything and it certifies nothing, and the distinction is one to hold on to.

Restrictions followed. At various points across the 1920s and into the 1930s he was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public, to hear confessions, to show the wounds, and to write to his spiritual director. Pope Pius XI restored his public Mass in 1933, saying afterwards that he had been badly informed about the man. Confessions were restored in 1934.

A second apostolic visitation came in 1960, conducted by Carlo Maccari, and during that period listening devices were placed in the friary. Maccari's report was severe. Pope Paul VI dismissed the accusations against him in the mid 1960s. The cause for canonization opened after his death, he was beatified on 2 May 1999, and John Paul II canonized him on 16 June 2002 before a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

There is also a live historical dispute. The Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto published a study of Padre Pio in Italian in 2007, translated into English in 2010, citing testimony that the young friar obtained carbolic acid without prescription. Padre Pio's own account, given during the Rossi visitation, was that the acid sterilized syringes. Rossi weighed that testimony and rejected the fraud reading. Catholic organizations rejected Luzzatto's conclusion on publication. Both the documents and the disagreement are real, and a page that hides either one is not telling you the truth.

For most saints on this site we quote their own words about Jesus from a pre-1929 translation. For Padre Pio we cannot, and the reason is worth stating plainly.

He died in 1968. His letters, the long correspondence with his spiritual directors Padre Benedetto and Padre Agostino published in several volumes by the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo, are under copyright in the original Italian and in every English translation of them. So are the memoirs of the friars who knew him. Almost every quotation you see attributed to him online is either lifted from a copyrighted translation or was never traced to a source at all. The short mottoes about praying and not worrying that appear on candles and phone wallpapers fall into the second category more often than people realize.

What can be described honestly is the shape of what he wrote. His letters return again and again to the crucifixion as the center of everything, to his own suffering as a share in it, to Jesus in the Eucharist as the reason to get up at four in the morning, and to long stretches of spiritual dryness in which he described feeling abandoned by the God he was certain of. That correspondence reads as a man reporting a condition to two superiors, over and over, and telling them he could not explain it.

The one thing from his own mouth that everyone agrees on is the shortest. In the early hours of 23 September 1968 he repeated two names until he died: Jesus, Mary.

If you want his actual words, read them from the people who hold the rights. The Capuchin friary at San Giovanni Rotondo publishes the letters, and libraries carry the English editions. Go there. A paraphrase dressed up in quotation marks would put words in a dead man's mouth.

Both spent their working lives in a small provincial place that people had to travel to reach. Jesus taught in Galilee, an unimportant northern district. Padre Pio stayed in one friary in the Gargano hills from 1916 until his death and almost never left it. In both cases the crowd came to the backwater.

Both spent most of their hours on individual people in trouble. Jesus is shown one at a time: a woman at a well, a tax collector in a tree, a father with a dying child, a soldier asking for a servant. Padre Pio heard confessions ten, twelve, sometimes fifteen hours a day for decades, with waiting lists that ran to days. Whatever anyone concludes about the wounds, the hours in that box are documented and enormous.

Both were investigated by the religious authorities of their own tradition. Jesus was interrogated by the temple leadership. Padre Pio was silenced by the Holy Office. The parallel only goes so far, because the church that investigated Padre Pio later canonized him, and it is still a real parallel, because he obeyed the restrictions without publicly fighting them.

Both put their attention on sick bodies as well as souls. Jesus healed. Padre Pio spent sixteen years raising money for a hospital, from a founding committee in 1940 to the opening of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the House for the Relief of Suffering, on 5 May 1956, in a town that had almost no medical care. It is still a working research hospital.

Both attracted organized movements they did not plan. The prayer groups that formed around Padre Pio during his lifetime spread across Italy and then well beyond it, and they still meet.

Jesus is worshiped. Padre Pio is not. Catholic teaching uses two words for the two acts. Adoration, latria, belongs to God alone. The honor given to a saint, dulia, is different in kind. The Catechism makes the point in its section on the communion of saints by reaching for a second century account of a martyr's death, and that account is old enough to quote here in full.

For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we adore; but the martyrs, as disciples and followers of the Lord, we worthily love. That is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, written around AD 160, in the Roberts and Donaldson translation of 1885. Adore the Son of God, love the martyrs. Asking a saint to pray for you is, in Catholic terms, a request made to a person, the same kind of act as asking a friend to pray, and a different kind of act from prayer offered to God.

Orthodox Christians venerate saints and ask their intercession, and they draw the same line between worship and honor. They do not accept Roman canonizations made after the churches divided, so Padre Pio does not appear on Orthodox calendars. He is a Catholic saint, honored in the Catholic Church. This page is not a Catholic publication and carries no church approval.

Many Protestants reject the distinction itself, and they deserve to be quoted accurately when they do. The Anglican Articles of Religion of 1571, still a formulary in that tradition, call the invocation of saints a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture. Reformed and evangelical churches usually argue from one verse in First Timothy about one mediator between God and men. That is a genuine disagreement about how prayer works, and neither side settles it by being rude about the other.

There is also a difference in what the church asks anyone to believe. Catholic teaching treats the death and resurrection of Jesus as public revelation, binding on every Catholic. It treats the visions Padre Pio reported as private revelation, which no Catholic is obliged to believe at all. Canonization says the church is certain a man is in heaven and may be publicly honored. It does not certify a single vision he described.

The differences keep going. Jesus forgives sins on his own authority in the gospels. Padre Pio, as a Catholic priest, understood himself to forgive in the name of Christ under an authority he had received and could be stripped of, and for a period he was stripped of it. Jesus receives his wounds by public execution at the hands of the state, once. Padre Pio's wounds appeared in private with no witness, were disputed for a lifetime, and were officially ruled not established as supernatural.

And there is a difference of category the tradition itself insists on. The church claims Jesus rose. It has never claimed that of Padre Pio. His body was exhumed in 2008, forty years after burial, and church officials described it as in fair condition and singled out the hands as remarkably preserved. The face was restored for display, and the body was placed in a glass sided tomb where pilgrims still file past it. That is what the church says about him. It is a long way from an empty tomb.

The traffic to this name is not made of historians. People search Padre Pio when someone they love has a diagnosis, when a teenager is in trouble, when a marriage is going, when the panic will not stop, and when they want a specific saint to ask because asking God directly has started to feel like shouting into a room. He is invoked for stress relief and for adolescents, which tells you who is looking.

A second group arrives from a film, a relic tour at a local parish, or a photograph of the wounds that turned up in a feed. They want to know whether any of it is real before they spend any feeling on it.

If you are in the first group, here is the honest thing. Nothing about Padre Pio's wounds changes whether your prayer is heard. He would have said the same. What his life actually offers is a model of staying put and doing the next small duty through decades of being disbelieved, and a hospital he built because prayer alone was never going to get anyone in that town an X-ray.

If you are in the second group, the documents are open. Read Rossi's conclusion and the 1923 decree and Luzzatto's argument and decide what you think. The church itself lived with an unresolved verdict on this man for seventy nine years.

Either way, do the practical things tonight. Tell one real person what is happening. Write down what you would ask for if you were sure someone was listening. If tonight is worse than that, and you are thinking about hurting yourself, stop reading and contact a crisis line or emergency services where you are.

Francesco Forgione was born on 25 May 1887 to a farming family in Pietrelcina. He entered the Capuchin novitiate in January 1903 at fifteen and took the name Pio. He was ordained a priest on 10 August 1910. Poor health, including recurring high fevers doctors never resolved, sent him home for long stretches in his twenties.

In 1916 he was assigned to the friary of Our Lady of Grace at San Giovanni Rotondo, and he stayed there for the rest of his life. After 1918 the crowds came and never stopped. He spent his days in the confessional, corresponded with spiritual directees by the thousand, raised the money for the hospital, and lived through two Vatican investigations and several periods of enforced silence.

He died on 23 September 1968, around half past two in the morning, aged eighty one. Roughly a hundred thousand people came to the funeral. His feast day is 23 September. He is a patron of civil defense volunteers, of adolescents, of his home town of Pietrelcina, and, in popular devotion, of people under stress.