A Life, for his feast on the twenty-third day of September
Ego enim stigmata Domini Iesu in corpore meo porto.
“For I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body.” — Galatians 6:17
A note on the calendar
Honesty about the day comes first. Padre Pio was canonized in 2002 and has therefore no place in the calendar of 1962. In the traditional books, the twenty-third of September in this year of 2026 is Ember Wednesday of September, a feria of the second class, with a commemoration of St. Linus, Pope and Martyr, the immediate successor of St. Peter. The decree Cum sanctissima of 22 February 2020 permits the Mass of a saint canonized after July of 1960 to be said on his universal feast, but only on days of the third and fourth class; an Ember Wednesday impedes it. This year, then, he may be honoured in private devotion and in the reading, and the Church’s public prayer belongs to the fast and to the first pope after the Apostle.
That is not a diminishment. Padre Pio would have been the last man to want his own Mass displacing an Ember Day. He fasted; he obeyed the rubrics; he spent fifty years saying the Mass of the Ember Days along with all the rest.
I. Francesco Forgione
He was born on the twenty-fifth day of May, 1887, at Pietrelcina in the province of Benevento, the son of Grazio Maria Forgione and Maria Giuseppa De Nunzio, peasant farmers of the Campanian hills. He was baptized Francesco. The house had a stall on the ground floor and the family above it, and the parents could not read.
What they could do was believe, and the household ran on the calendar of the Church: daily Mass, the Rosary, abstinence from meat three days in the week in honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the feasts kept properly. This is worth saying plainly, because the extraordinary things that came later did not come out of nothing. They came out of a family that said its prayers.
The boy was sickly and serious and reported, from about his fifth year, that he saw and spoke with Our Lord, with the Blessed Virgin, and with his guardian angel — and assumed, with the flat literalism of a child, that everyone else did too. He was astonished later to learn otherwise.
At fifteen he asked to enter the Capuchins. To make it possible his father crossed the Atlantic twice, working in Pennsylvania and in New York, and sent home the wages that paid for the tutoring his son needed to qualify. It should be remembered when reading of the stigmata that they were purchased, humanly speaking, by a labourer’s remittances.
II. Fra Pio
He received the Capuchin habit at Morcone on the sixth of January, 1903, and took the name Pio, after St. Pius V, whose relic was venerated in his native town. He made simple profession on the twenty-second of January, 1904, and solemn profession on the twenty-seventh of January, 1907.
Then the illnesses began, and did not stop. Fevers that no physician could account for, vomiting, an inability to keep food, a constitution that broke down whenever he was in community and mended whenever he was sent home. He was ordained priest at Benevento on the tenth of August, 1910, by Archbishop Paolo Schinosi, at twenty-three years of age — and then spent the better part of the next six years not in a friary but in his father’s fields at Pietrelcina, under obedience, saying Mass in the village church, unable to live the common life.
It was in this obscure interval, on or about the twentieth of September, 1910, under an elm at Piana Romana, that he first received the wounds of Our Lord — visibly. He was appalled. He begged that they be taken away and that the pain remain, and his prayer was granted: the marks faded and for eight years the suffering continued without the sign.
Called up in the war, he was assigned in 1915 to the Tenth Medical Corps at Naples, proved as unserviceable to the army as he had been to his friary, and was discharged as unfit on the sixteenth of March, 1918. On the twenty-eighth of July, 1916, he had been sent for his health to a remote mountain friary in the Gargano: Santa Maria delle Grazie at San Giovanni Rotondo. He never left it again.
III. The twentieth of September, 1918
On the fifth of August, 1918, while hearing the confessions of boys, he underwent what the mystical theologians call the transverberation — he described to his director a figure with a blade of fire that pierced him through, and afterwards a wound in his side which bled.
Six weeks later, on the twentieth of September, he was alone in the choir of the old church after Mass, before a crucifix. What happened there he described afterwards, with great reluctance and under obedience, in a letter to Padre Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis: the same figure, the same fire, and then his hands, his feet and his side running blood. He tried to hide it. He was thirty-one years old, and he carried those five wounds, open and bleeding, for fifty years, almost to the day.
The theological fact deserves to be stated precisely. St. Francis of Assisi received the stigmata on Alverna in 1224, and after him a long succession of saints and mystics, most of them women, most of them religious. Padre Pio is the first priest in the recorded history of the Church to bear them. The Church has been careful never to make this the ground of his sanctity, and neither should we; but the fittingness is not accidental. The man who stands at the altar in persona Christi and offers the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary was permitted to carry Calvary in his flesh.
Physicians came: Romanelli, Bignami, Festa, each examining, each unable to produce a natural account. The wounds neither healed nor suppurated nor putrefied; they gave off an odour that witnesses described as perfume. In 1920 the Franciscan physician and psychologist Padre Agostino Gemelli, founder of the Catholic University of Milan, examined him briefly and reported adversely, and his report did real damage.
IV. What the stigmata were for
Here a distinction must be insisted upon, because the popular devotion to Padre Pio is forever in danger of standing it on its head.
St. Thomas teaches that there are graces given to sanctify the one who receives them — gratia gratum faciens — and graces given freely for the benefit of others, gratiae gratis datae, among which he numbers prophecy, the working of miracles, and the discernment of spirits (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, aa. 1, 4-5). The second kind do not of themselves make a man holy. A man may read hearts and be damned. Charity alone unites to God.
St. John of the Cross is severer still, and says that the soul which rests in visions, locutions and sensible favours is a soul that has stopped short of God and settled for His gifts (Ascent of Mount Carmel, II). Padre Pio himself was of the same mind: he hated to be looked at, refused to discuss the wounds, wore half-mittens over his hands for half a century, and when pressed about the marvels would turn the conversation to the state of the questioner’s soul.
So the wonders — the bilocations attested by credible witnesses, the perfume, the readings of consciences, the cures — are not the life. They are the advertisement. The life was in the confessional.
He heard confessions for ten, twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day, year upon year, until the crowds required a booking list and pilgrims waited days for a place. He was frequently brusque. He turned penitents away — sometimes for want of contrition, sometimes to bring them to it — and men who had come for a spectacle went home converted because he had named to them, quietly, the sin they had not intended to mention. This is the point of the whole life. The marks of the Passion were given to a man whose daily employment was the application of the Passion’s fruits to particular souls, one at a time, in the dark, through a grille.
V. Suspicion, and the first silencing
The fame was enormous and immediate, and the Holy See is properly slow with such things.
On the thirty-first of May, 1923, the Holy Office issued the judgment non constare de supernaturalitate — it is not established that the phenomena are supernatural — and exhorted the faithful to abstain. Restrictions followed and tightened: he was forbidden to show the wounds, forbidden to answer letters from his spiritual children, forbidden to say Mass publicly, and at length, in 1931, stripped of every priestly faculty except the celebration of Mass in private, in an interior chapel, alone.
He had been ordered once to be transferred out of San Giovanni Rotondo altogether; the townspeople surrounded the friary and made it impossible, which did nothing to improve his standing with the authorities.
Of those two years of enforced silence, 1931 to 1933, there survives the sentence that is worth more than all the accounts of the bilocations: asked how he bore it, he said that he was a friar who prays. He did not organize a defence. He did not write to the newspapers. He did not permit his devotees to agitate. He obeyed.
In July of 1933 Pius XI restored his faculties, saying that he had not been ill-disposed toward Padre Pio but ill-informed. In 1934 he was permitted the confessional again.
VI. The Home for the Relief of Suffering
Sanctity in the Catholic tradition is never merely interior, and his took a very concrete form.
From 1940 he pressed a project on his friends: a hospital, on that poor and roadless mountain, for people who had nowhere to go. He called it, deliberately, Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza — the House for the Relief of Suffering — not a clinic, not an institute; a house. It was to be a place where, in his phrase, the sick should be loved before they were treated, and where medicine and prayer were understood as two hands of one work.
Money came in coins from peasants and in cheques from strangers. It opened on the fifth of May, 1956, with three hundred beds. It is today one of the major hospitals of southern Italy and a research centre, and it stands on the hill above the friary where he had nothing.
In 1947, at the request of Pius XII, who had called on Catholics to form themselves into cells of prayer, he began the Gruppi di Preghiera — Prayer Groups — which multiplied into thousands across the world, bound to weekly prayer, monthly Communion in common, and obedience to the local bishop. He called them, characteristically, seedbeds of faith and hearths of love.
In 1947 also a young Polish priest studying in Rome, Karol Wojtyła, came to San Giovanni Rotondo and made his confession to him. In 1962, as a bishop at the Council, he wrote asking prayers for a Polish woman dying of cancer; she recovered. Forty years after that, he canonized him.
VII. The second trial
The old man was not left in peace. Between 1960 and 1964 came a second wave of denunciations, investigations, and surveillance. An apostolic visitation was conducted in 1960 by Monsignor Carlo Maccari, who was hostile; the friary was placed under observation; microphones were concealed and his confessional was recorded; accusations of financial irregularity and of improper conduct were laid against a man then over seventy. Restrictions were reimposed: limits on the hours of his Mass, on the length of it, on whom he might see.
He answered none of it. In December of 1964 he signed a declaration, prepared for him at the Holy Office, that he enjoyed full liberty in his ministry and had neither enemies nor persecutors. Whatever one makes of the document, the disposition behind it is unmistakable and is the same disposition as in 1931. He had said, thirty years earlier, that to obey superiors is to obey God, and he did not revise the principle when it cost him.
In February of 1964 Cardinal Ottaviani had already directed the Capuchin General to let him exercise his priesthood freely. Monsignor Maccari is reported, many years afterwards, to have asked his forgiveness.
VIII. The Mass
He offered the Roman Rite as he had received it at his ordination in 1910, and he offered it for fifty-eight years. Those who assisted describe a Mass that in his earlier years ran to two hours and more, the celebrant visibly absent, the wounds bleeding at the Consecration; obedience eventually compelled him to shorten it, and he shortened it.
In February of 1965, told that an experimental new order of Mass was coming, he wrote at once to Paul VI asking to be dispensed from it and to be allowed to continue with the Missal of St. Pius V. The indult was granted and was brought to him in March by Cardinal Antonio Bacci. Of the motive there is disagreement, and candour requires that both readings be set down: some hold that it was a judgment on the reform; others, including his own Order, that it was the ordinary provision for an aged and nearly blind priest who could no longer learn a new rite, and note that similar permissions were given to elderly clergy generally. What is not in dispute is the fact. He asked; it was given; and he died in September of 1968, some months before the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated, so that he never celebrated any rite but the old one.
Twelve days before his death he wrote to Paul VI to offer his obedience and that of his prayer groups, and his particular support for Humanae Vitae, then two months old and under attack.
IX. The twenty-third of September, 1968
On the twentieth of September, 1968, the fiftieth anniversary of the stigmata, the friary was thronged. He was very weak.
On the twenty-second he sang his last Mass and collapsed at the end of it. In the small hours of the twenty-third he was helped to a chair, made his confession, renewed his vows, took his rosary, and repeated the two names — Gesù, Maria — until he stopped. He died at about half past two in the morning, in his eighty-second year.
When they prepared the body, the wounds were gone. There was no scarring on the hands, the feet or the side; the skin was whole, as though there had never been anything there. Fifty years of bleeding closed without trace in the week of his death.
He lies at San Giovanni Rotondo, where several million pilgrims come in a year.
X. Glorification
He was beatified by John Paul II on the second of May, 1999, and canonized by him in St. Peter’s Square on the sixteenth of June, 2002, before a crowd estimated at three hundred thousand. His memorial in the universal calendar is kept on the twenty-third of September, the day of his death.
XI. What the life teaches
That the sign is not the thing signified. He bore the wounds of the Redeemer and spent his days doing what any good parish priest does: saying Mass, hearing confessions, instructing the ignorant, comforting the sick. The charisms were for others; the sanctity was in the fidelity. A devotion to Padre Pio that collects the marvels and neglects the confessional has got hold of the wrong end of him.
That obedience is the test of the mystic. The surest mark against illusion in the spiritual life is submission to lawful authority, and the Church applied that test to him twice, hard, and he passed it twice. He was silenced by the Holy Office and did not complain; deposed from his ministry and did not organize a party; recorded, investigated and accused, and signed a paper saying he had no persecutors. The visionary who resists correction is to be doubted. The visionary who accepts it is, at the least, not lying.
That suffering is productive. He was given the Passion in his body and he built a hospital. The two are one act. The Church has never taught that pain is good in itself; she teaches that pain united to the Cross becomes an instrument, and Padre Pio’s fifty years of wounds and his three hundred beds on a bare hill are the same doctrine stated twice.
Practice
Examine. Where do I want a sign? Consolation in prayer, an answer, a felt assurance, a confirmation that I am on the right road? Ask whether the wanting has begun to matter more than the obedience. St. John of the Cross would say that the dryness you resent is the better gift.
Do. Go to confession this week, and make it a real one — the sin you keep phrasing carefully, phrased plainly. Padre Pio’s whole public life was spent making that possible for other people, one at a time, for fifty years.
Pray. His own prayer after Communion, long attributed to him and used by his prayer groups:
Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have Thee present that I may not forget Thee. Thou knowest how easily I abandon Thee. Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Thy strength, that I may not fall so often.
Or more simply, the two words he died saying: Gesù, Maria.
Devote. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Crucifixion; and the Rosary daily, which he called the weapon and which he is said never once to have let out of his hand.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path treats the stigmatics and the mystics — Francis, Catherine of Siena, Gemma Galgani — and the Church’s rules for discerning them. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Thomistic distinction between sanctifying grace and the charisms, which is the key to reading a life like this one without superstition. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Mass as sacrifice, which is what he was offering and, in some manner, what he was.
Sancte Pie de Pietrelcina, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the acts of the beatification and canonization; the letters of Padre Pio to his directors Padre Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis and Padre Agostino of San Marco in Lamis; the decree of the Holy Office of 31 May 1923; the materials of the Capuchin Friars Minor of the Province of Foggia and of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza; the decree Cum sanctissima (CDF, 22 February 2020) for the calendar question. Where accounts of the events of 1960-1965 differ in interpretation, the disagreement has been noted rather than resolved.