St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

The Capuchin friar and priest marked by the stigmata, famed as a confessor and spiritual father to countless souls.

St. Padre Pio (Francesco Forgione) was an Italian Capuchin friar and priest who bore the stigmata for fifty years and became one of the most sought-after confessors of the twentieth century.

Life

Francesco Forgione was born on May 25, 1887, in Pietrelcina, a farming village in southern Italy, to a poor and devout family. As a boy he was drawn to prayer and to the Capuchin friars who came begging through the countryside, and his father went abroad to work in America so the family could pay for the schooling he needed to enter the Order. In 1903, at fifteen, he received the Capuchin habit and the name Pio, and on August 10, 1910, he was ordained a priest.

His health was fragile, and for several years his superiors let him live at home in Pietrelcina, where he prayed long hours and began to suffer the first hidden signs of the wounds of Christ. In 1916 he was sent to the friary of Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo, a remote town on the slopes of Mount Gargano, and he remained there, apart from brief military service during the First World War, for the rest of his life. On September 20, 1918, while praying before a crucifix in the friary choir, he received the visible stigmata: wounds in his hands, feet, and side that bled and never healed or became infected, and that he bore until shortly before his death.

News of the wounds drew enormous crowds, and with them suspicion. Doctors examined him repeatedly, and the Holy See, wary of fanaticism, for a time forbade him to say Mass in public or to hear confessions. Padre Pio accepted these restrictions in silent obedience; when they were lifted in 1933, he returned to the work that would define him. He spent as many as ten or twelve hours a day in the confessional, and his Masses, celebrated with visible absorption in the Passion, could last for hours. Pilgrims from around the world came to San Giovanni Rotondo, and among the young priests who sought him out was Fr. Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope St. John Paul II.

He also founded works that outlived him: the prayer groups that still meet across the world, and the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (Home for the Relief of Suffering), a large modern hospital opened in 1956 and funded largely by the gifts of ordinary people. He died on September 23, 1968, the day after celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his stigmata, with the names of Jesus and Mary on his lips. John Paul II beatified him in 1999 and canonized him on June 16, 2002, before one of the largest crowds ever gathered in St. Peter's Square.

What he taught

Padre Pio was not a scholar, and his teaching came mostly through the confessional, his letters of spiritual direction, and the example of his life. Its center was the Cross. He understood the sufferings he carried not as a curiosity but as a share in Christ's own offering for the salvation of souls, and he urged those he guided to unite their own trials, great or small, to the Passion of the Lord rather than waste them in complaint.

He was a demanding confessor because he took sin and mercy equally seriously. He could send away a penitent who came without real contrition, yet many of those he refused returned changed, and he received them with great tenderness. He insisted on frequent Confession, even for venial sins, as the ordinary way of growing in holiness, and he held the Mass to be the heart of the Christian life: the same sacrifice as Calvary, made present on the altar. His counsel to anxious souls was simple:

"Pray, hope, and don't worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer."

Why he matters today

The extraordinary gifts reported of Padre Pio, including the stigmata, reading of hearts, and accounts of bilocation and healing, have made him famous, but they were not what the Church judged when she raised him to the altars. His cause first examined whether he had lived the virtues to a heroic degree: his humility, his obedience under long and painful restrictions, his tireless charity to sinners, and his constant prayer. Then, as is customary, she required miracles worked through his intercession after his death: the healing of Consiglia de Martino from a ruptured thoracic duct in 1995, approved for his beatification, and the recovery of seven-year-old Matteo Pio Colella from meningitis and the failure of his organs in 2000, approved for his canonization. The gifts of his lifetime were signs pointing beyond himself, and he consistently refused credit for them, saying only that he was a friar who prayed.

In an age that often treats suffering as meaningless and Confession as obsolete, Padre Pio shows the opposite. Suffering offered in love can become fruitful, and the sacrament of Penance is where the mercy of God is poured out most personally. Millions still visit San Giovanni Rotondo each year, and his hospital and prayer groups continue the double work of his life: caring for the body and praying for the soul.

A prayer

Padre Pio prayed Stay With Me, Lord after Holy Communion, asking Christ to remain with him through the dangers of life and the approach of death.

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have you present so that I do not forget you. You know how easily I abandon you.

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need your strength, that I may not fall so often.

Stay with me, Lord, for you are my life, and without you I am without fervor.

Amen.

— An excerpt from Stay With Me, Lord