(Note to you, dear friend: Though I've put all fifteen chapters of my fictionalized biography on Facebook and on my blog for you to enjoy, free of charge, I'll try to add to my Facebook page and to my blog some quotes of St. Padre Pio and other Saints for you--at least once a week. These will be quotations I've found most helpful in my own journey through this "vale of tears.")
For this week, here are some comforting words from St. Padre Pio for when you think you have failed miserably, that God has rejected you, and that there is no hope left for you to lead a holy, tranquil life: "To call yourself a thorn that tormernts the lovable Lord, and to think that your unworthiness is a clear and obvious fact which leaves no room even for the shadow of a doubt, is a downright lie, a scene presented to you in vivid and glowing colors by the skillful artist of the darkness [guess who that is!] whose treachery is equal to his ability to enhance his picture by the bold use of light and shade. It is absolutely untrue that you have corresponded badly with God's grace, and that by your unfaithfulness you have cut yourself off from God, earning the refusal of His grace and earning His irreconciable enmity. The Lord is with you. He is with you; He is patient, suffering, eager Love; He is with you, crushed and trampled upon, heartbroken; in the shadows of the night and even more so in the desolation of your own personal 'Gethsemane,' He is associated with your suffering and associates you with His own. This is the whole fact of the matter, this is the truth, and the only truth. Therefore, you can and must be tranquil." (Letters 3, page 882)
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15 of Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
DON’T GO, PAPA
Chapter 12
February 19, 1944–October 14, 1945
Alone in the corridor outside the refectory, Padre Pio’s hands shook as he read the note from his older brother Michele. A week before writing to Pio, Michele had received word that Pellegrina, living in Chieti near the Adriatic Sea where she worked as a seamstress, had sometime during the previous month suffered serious injuries when the Allies bombed the city and caused mounds of rubble to fall on her house. “Our sister was rescued from the debris,” Michele wrote, “but she is horribly injured. When I went to visit her at the hospital, Francesco, I found her in great pain and so alone and afraid.” Michele’s next sentence shot slivers of ice into Pio’s heart: “The doctors say she has only a few weeks to live.”
Too stunned to even cry, Pio now recalled the promise he’d made to his Mammella before she died. Knowing her son could, by God’s grace, spiritually “travel” to help others without ever leaving San Giovanni Rotondo, she had peered at her priest-son, her eyes flashing with determination, and said, “Go to Pellegrina and convince her she must return to God before it’s too late.”
With the promise he’d made to his mother reverberating in his mind, he now sighed in resignation and glanced upward. A sob finally escaped his throat as the image of his saintly mother arose in his mind. Pio could almost see Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione’s intense light-blue eyes, her dark brown hair always neatly tucked behind her neck, the beautiful features of her face, always wrinkled by the constant fatigue and worry due to raising a family, and now he whispered up at the ceiling, “Mama, I promise you, I’ll go to Pellegrina, trusting the Holy Spirit to use me to help her.”
That night alone in his cell, as he prepared to catch a few hours of sleep, Padre Pio suddenly found himself in a strange hospital room illuminated only by moonlight filtering through the one window. In that pale light he discerned the sleeping form of a woman, her face highlighted by a few short white strips of bandaging material. Padding over to her side, he gazed down at her still form and flicked on the table lamp on her nightstand. The click of the lamp switch must have awakened the woman because her eyes opened and, at the same time, Pio gasped. He recognized those dark eyes and the long dark hair that spilled over her shoulders as she lay there.
“Pellegrina,” he breathed as guilt stabbed his heart. Here lay the sister he had slapped across the face when he had first found out about her scandalous behavior with her first lover. And now she lay dying. “My sweet Pellegrina,” he whispered, gently brushing a strand of hair from her face. He forgot the pain in his own heart and body when he saw the hopelessness and fear in those familiar dark eyes. Fearing he might cause her more pain, he resisted the urge to embrace her, and instead he gently held her thin, badly bruised hand in his stigmatized one and finally allowed his tears to fall unashamedly onto the crisp, white sheet covering her body. He wanted to hold her and let her rest in his arms, just like she had done so many times as a child when she had come to him for help and comfort. Oh my Jesus, somehow use me to comfort her now, to lead her to You, Lord, before it’s too late. Please.
“Francesco, you’ve come.” Pellegrina’s lips, almost white as if all the blood and life were slowly seeping from her body, struggled to rise into a smile, but failed. With the small reserve of energy she had left in her dying body, she whispered hoarsely, “I wanted you to come so much, Francesco, but I knew you never left the friary.” Staring at him, she finally smiled. “But here you are.”
Hope hummed in Pio’s heart. She wanted me to come? “Si, here I am,” he said tenderly, “and now what is it you want to say to me, nenne, my little one?” He knew she’d always be his dear little sister, even beyond death, and the thought choked him as he gazed down at this one who had broken their mother’s heart by getting pregnant out of wedlock, not just once, but twice, to two different men. Though Pio had always thought Pellegrina was outwardly the most beautiful of his three sisters, after her first affair he knew that inwardly Pellegrina’s soul was still shrouded by sin because she had continually refused his plea for her to turn to the unfathomable merciful Jesus and receive forgiveness. But now? Hope not only hummed in his heart, it flooded his soul.
And Pio’s hope gave birth to joy and gratitude that filled his heart and soul as Pellegrina finally, through her priest-brother, turned to Jesus, confessed her sins, and asked for forgiveness. “Ego te absolve a peccatis tuis; I absolve you of your sins, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Moments later, holding his sister’s hand, Pio gazed through a hazy veil of tears as Pellegrina’s dark eyes closed in death, but the peace he had seen in those eyes just before they closed would remain in his memory forever, bringing him joy and making him eternally grateful that the Lord had used him to save the soul of his sister.
During World War Two, word of Padre Pio’s holiness and spiritual gifts spread among the American soldiers stationed in nearby Foggia. Whenever they had “leave,” many of them would pile into a military vehicle and travel for three long rough uphill miles to reach the mountainside friary and church of Our Lady of Grace. God never disappointed them once they arrived and met Padre Pio or heard him say Mass. Never. One day the visiting Sergeants Johnson and Morgan were given the special privilege of eating the noon meal in the refectory. Sitting at the long table drinking a light-brown liquid that was supposed to taste like coffee but didn’t, the two American soldiers stopped chatting with the friars at their table when Padre Pio appeared in the doorway of the refectory. Out of respect, the soldiers stood up along with the others as the Padre limped on swollen feet to the table where the Provincial and the Father Guardian sat. Ignoring the signs of respect given him by his confreres who were still standing, Pio, out of his profound humility and sense of lowliness, slowly knelt and kissed the sandaled feet of his two superiors. With great effort, he rose and padded slowly to the table of the two soldiers, sat down in the seat across from them, and spent the entire meal enjoying their stories about their home and families that they missed so much.
While Padre Pio pretended not to listen, Sergeant Morgan said, “One day while I was on the battlefield and we were experiencing heavy enemy fire, I saw a brown-robed, bearded monk suddenly appear a few yards from me.” Morgan glanced over at Pio who pretended great interest in the peas on his plate. Then Morgan continued, “The monk was very pale but had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. He hollered out to me above the deafening noise of artillery and told me to get away immediately from where I was standing and come to him. I trudged toward the monk, but just before I reached him he disappeared. When I turned around and looked at where I had been when he had called out to me, I watched in horror as a grenade exploded in the exact place where I’d been standing.”
Now both Sergeants Morgan and Johnson, trying not to grin, stared at Padre Pio who still feigned innocence.
When the meal had ended and the friars all rose to leave, most of Padre Pio’s meal, as usual, was still on his plate. He had eaten the Bread of Life that morning at 5 a.m. Mass, and for him that was more than enough. The two soldiers followed him out the refectory door, and he couldn’t help but hear Sergeant Morgan sniff loudly and say to Sergeant Johnson, “Do you smell that aroma, like something from Heaven?”
“Yes, like flowers, and I think it’s coming from Padre Pio. Remember how the other soldiers told us about that?”
“Sure, and did you hear the Padre recall the time I was two years old and almost drowned in the lake on our farm in Minnesota?”
“Yes,” said Johnson, “but you had never even mentioned it to him! He really can read souls, just like they told us back at the base in Foggia.”
“Padre Pio is everything they told us he was,” said Johnson.
“And more; he’s a saint. Il Monoca Santo, I believe the Italians call him.”
Before Pio could hear any further praise, all of which he knew belonged only to his God, he limped toward the church and his confessional and away from the direction in which the soldiers would head to return to their vehicle and the military base. Before Pio reached the confessional, another American solider fell to his knees before him and pleaded, “Please pray for my wife, Father Pio, she was supposed to give birth to our first child this month and she’s been sick and I’m so worried and I’m not allowed to return home for the birth and. . . .”
Pio bent over and gently halted the soldier’s tumble of words by placing a finger on his lips. The priest shook his head up and down at the clean-shaven face marred only by a deep war-scar across the one cheek. Pio had seen too many soldiers whose bodies bore the horrifying proof of the war’s violence: missing limbs and eyes, ripped-open flesh, painfully scarred hearts, souls, and minds. “Don’t worry, my son,” he said, smiling tenderly. “E non senti piangere nulla? Don’t you hear a crying voice? A tiny voice so hungry for his mama’s milk?”
“Forgive me, Padre Pio, but I don’t understand. What tiny voice?”
Motioning for the soldier to stand, Pio said, “The tiny voice of your first child, a healthy baby boy, born yesterday.” Grinning at the soldier’s shocked stare, Pio assured him, “And your wife is fine too.”
Relief washed over the soldier’s face and tears streamed down his cheeks, highlighting the scar. With difficulty he choked out, “I believe you, Padre, because the others at the base told me that Jesus tells you everything.”
Knowing the soldier wanted, more than ever, to be with his wife and baby, Pio embraced the young man and said, “E su questo tuo Calvario, anche se non ci puoi portare l’allegria—cerca almeno di portarci un po piu di rassegnazione.”
When the soldier just stared at Pio with a questioning gaze, the priest explained, “Even though you can’t be with your family right now, you must accept this as your particular Calvary and try to be resigned to it. Jesus is with you, and He will never forsake you or your family. Go now. Iddio ti benedice, figlio mio; God blesses you, my son.”
Since September 20, 1918, Padre Pio’s own Calvario had never ceased. In fact, it had only increased. On October 19, 1945, after his usual few bites of food during the noon meal with his confreres, Pio stood beside the friary window overlooking the adjacent field where the crowds waited for him twice each day, once at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. Having by now accepted the fact that Jesus was not going to answer his prayers and remove the visible signs of the stigmata, but was, instead, going to continue to use the stigmata and other spiritual gifts He had given Pio to draw souls to Himself through the stigmatic, Pio faithfully showed up twice a day at the window overlooking the field. He knew that the thousands of pilgrims who ventured to San Giovanni Rotondo to see him were in reality actually longed to see Jesus, to known without a doubt that He lived and that He cared about them and loved them unconditionally. So many people were like St. Thomas who, after Christ rose from the dead, refused to believe unless he saw and touched the wounds of Our Lord. Many pilgrims, like St. Thomas, needed to see, if not touch, the wounds of Christ replicated in Pio’s hands, feet, and side in order to put their faith in Christ or even to have their faith renewed. Pio had finally accepted all of that, but yet he knew, too, that he himself was merely a vessel, a miserable sinner who, like St. John the Baptist, was unworthy to even carry the Lord’s sandals, let alone do His work among His people. “I’m just a chutcho, a little donkey doing God’s bidding,” he would often say when someone would praise him. “Give the praise to Jesus, not to me. I’m just an instrument in God’s hands; an instrument that if left to my own devices would merely sin—and sin again.”
And yet now, much to Pio’s chagrin and embarrassment, as soon as his head appeared in the window, the praise surged upward to him. “Eccolo il Padre, there’s the Padre! Il Monaco Santo, the Holy Friar!”
Resigned to God’s will, Pio gazed lovingly down at the crowd of pilgrims. The sea of faces lifted up toward him, expecting his blessing, never failed to tear at his heart. He saw their pain, their longing, their loneliness. He wanted to help each of them, heal them all—and their families too. But he could only do what Jesus willed to do through him. Nevertheless, Pio now did what he could; he raised the large white cloth Padre Vigilio always kept at the window for this purpose and waved it out the window.
“Padre Pio, we love you! You’re our Saint.”
“Pray for us, Padre Pio; we belong to you.”
After two minutes, his arm tired, Pio stopped waving the cloth and began to bless the crowd. They continued to wave their own handkerchiefs and cloths. Drawing his Rosary out of his pocket, Pio held it up to the crowd and shouted, “Pray, my children; pray the Rosary. It is your weapon against the devil.” Then he turned away from the window.
“Viva Padre Pio, long live Padre Pio!” he could hear from the crowd as he disappeared from their sight and hobbled in the direction of the confessional to resume hearing the sins of the world.
As Pio limped down the corridor that led to the church, the Father Guardian, Padre Agostino, hobbled toward him and said, “Figlio mio, my son, stop.” Gasping for breath, the sixty-five-year-old Agostino leaned over, trying to replenish his lungs.
Padre Pio frowned. Tatone, or Big Daddy as the friars called Agostino behind his back, had grown heavier and wider over the years and it was obviously damaging his health. But Pio knew something most did not: Agostino’s greatest hindrance to walking was the condition of his legs; he suffered from ulcers that completely covered them, causing them to swell with painful inflammation. Most people, even most of the friars, did not know about these ulcers and the agony they caused Agostino, because he, like Pio, desired to suffer in silence and offer himself as a victim to God for the salvation of souls. Both priests wanted to honor the request made by Christ’s mother at Fatima in 1917.
“Figlio mio,” Agostino said to Pio as soon as the Father Guardian could again speak, “it is your papa. He . . . .”
Pio’s sharp cry of protest interrupted Agostino’s sentence. “No! Not Papa.” Pio had read Agostino’s worried face and had glimpsed the message in his mind and knew the grim news the Father Guardian had to say to him. “No!” Pio cried once more before the tears choked off further speech.
After the death of his wife Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione in January 1929, Orazio Forgione had longed to live near his priest-son. So for the past eight years, Orazio had done just that in the same first-floor room at Mary Pyle’s villa in which his wife had died. Mary Pyle treated him as an honored guest, as if he were her own father. Now as Padre Pio lumbered toward her house as fast as he could, considering the pains constantly shooting upward from his swollen feet through his legs, he prayed for his father. Don’t let him die, dear Jesus. Not yet. Please. Pio recalled how during the past eight years every time bright-eyed Orazio would see his son he would refuse to address Pio with the familiar term “tu,” but would instead use the formal “voi.” He remembered how his lean-physiqued Papa, who had once been so physically strong, had sacrificed so much to emigrate twice to America—once staying in “Brook-o-lino” as the illiterate Orazio called Brooklyn—so that he could work for the wealthier Americans and send home nine dollars every week to his wife. With that she was able to clothe and feed their children and send Francesco to school so that the boy could fulfill his dream of becoming a Capuchin priest. Pio now smiled, recalling how he had, at age seven, told his rough-mannered, yet always-loving father, “I want to be a Capuchin because they wear beards and I want to wear one too.”
Now, as Pio hobbled toward the exit so he could begin the trek downhill to Mary’s villa to see his father, he refused to believe Orazio was dying, even though Pio had moments ago read the truth on Tatone’s bearded face. Not Orazio, not Papa, not the man who only yesterday morning after 5 a.m. Mass had kissed his son’s stigmatized hand before Pio could stop him. “Che? What?” Pio had said to him as Orazio had knelt on the hard floor in front of his son. “A father should not kiss the hand of his son,” said Pio, “the son should kiss the hand of the father.” Pio had tried to force the thin, frail, eighty-six-year-old Orazio to stand, but was unsuccessful.
In defiance and reverence, Orazio had kissed Pio’s hand one more time, gazed up at him with love and pride, and said, “I’m not kissing the hand of my son Francesco Forgione; I’m kissing the hand of the priest Padre Pio who bears the wounds of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Sobbing, Orazio had finally allowed Pio to draw him to his feet with the help of the other men waiting to speak to the famous stigmatic. Struggling with his own emotions, Pio barely noticed that the dozen men around him had also begun to cry at the display of devotion from Orazio, whom everyone who knew him affectionately called “Nonno;Grandfather.” Papa, always happy, active, and cordial, was loved by all.
By now, the beautiful memories of his father had forced Pio to weep. He stopped just before the door of the church and leaned against the wall beside it. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he didn’t know how he could manage the rocky 100-yard downhill descent to Mary’s house, but he didn’t have to worry because when he opened the door and stepped out into the October-afternoon sunlight, Padre Vigilio was waiting with the friary donkey to cart Pio down to the villa.
“Tatone’s orders,” Vigilio explained as he helped the Padre mount the low-backed beast. Obviously unaware of the reason for the journey to the villa, Pio’s bodyguard said, “I just heard that your dream to build a huge hospital here is going to come true, Padre. The Provincial told us you’ve even got shareholders who’ve renounced any personal profit and are going to raise one million lire to help get the hospital started.”
“Si, my son, it’s true.” Padre Pio had for decades dreamed of building—in spite of the doubts of many around him—a modern hospital on the remote and rocky mountainside beside Our Lady of Grace friary and church. He wanted to name the expansive facility La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, The Home for the Relief of Suffering. In it, each patient would be treated with honor and respect because Jesus was present in every human being on earth, especially in the sick. Pio held no doubts about the veracity of Jesus’ statement, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people. . . .” But now, as he arrived at Mary’s villa and Vigilio helped him slide off the donkey, Padre Pio’s joy of knowing his hospital would one day rise up to help heal bodies, minds, and souls was overshadowed by the knowledge that his beloved father would soon die.
In the first-floor villa room where Orazio had chosen to spend his last days, the same room in which his wife had died in 1929, his priest-son spent the next few hours at his father’s side, trying to spoon-feed him some potato soup Mary had made just for Orazio. When Pio finally admitted defeat, he sent for Holy Communion to be brought from the church for himself and his father. After administering the Last Rites to Orazio, the priest-son held him in his arms and whispered goodbye as the man breathed for the last time.
As after the death of his mother, it took Pio a week to recover from the death of his father and to return full-time to his ministry. Whenever the friars would catch him weeping over his loss, he would whisper, “But don’t you understand? I’ve lost a father.”
As The Home for the Relief of Suffering rose on the mountainside, so, too, did a new and bigger church. But along with the joys came the inevitable heartaches, least of which involved Mary Pyle.
BUILD MY CRYPT
Chapter 13
1956–1968
Almost seventy years old in 1956, Padre Pio’s body was deteriorating rapidly, and even though he tried not to pay any attention to its complaints, the frequent and intense attacks of asthma and other bronchial ailments threatened to suffocate him. Dizzy spells sometimes made him lose his balance and fall to the hard floor, and in spite of his relentless sense of duty, sometimes once a month he would be forced to stay in bed and not say his usual 5 a.m. Mass. One March morning, unable to even stand, he said to two of his fellow friars who had poked their heads inside his cell to ask if he needed anything, “Please, my sons, come and help me get this lazy body out of bed so I can go hear confessions.”
On May 5 of that year, in spite of his declining health, Padre Pio attended the inauguration of his dream-hospital, La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering. In spite of all the criticism and doubt that had been thrown at him over the years as he worked to build the hospital, it now stood as a beautiful testimony of faith with its colorful marble floors and tiles, its spacious chapel, its modern kitchen, its state-of-the-art operating rooms and laboratories, and even its air conditioning which was a rarity in Italy at that time. Now sitting in a chair on a platform in front of the mammoth hospital, Pio gazed lovingly down at the crowd of more than 15,000 people. Glancing to either side of him, Pio smiled at the numerous dignitaries on the platform who had come for the occasion.
Minutes later when a fellow friar helped Pio to hobble to the microphone, Pio struggled to hold back tears of gratitude as he said, “Here at La Casa, patients will not only find health for their bodies; they will find health for their souls. Here they will find God.” Turning to the newly hired doctors seated on the platform Pio said, “You must bring God to each sick person. More than medicine, more than surgery, more than any medical treatment, God will be more effective in healing the entire person. And never forget,” he added, scanning the crowd below, “that when we see a sick person, we see Jesus. Whatever you do to the least of His people, you do to Jesus Himself. So remember that nothing is too good for those who are sick and suffering.”
While the United States flag fluttered in the warm May breeze next to the waving Italian flag on La Casa’s roof, Padre Pio relinquished the microphone to a dignitary and hobbled back to his seat, finally allowing the tears of joy and gratitude to flow down his cheeks and into his beard.
When the Father Guardian on May 8 told Pio that Pope Pius XII, from the Vatican, had praised La Casa and called it a “magnificent success” due to Padre Pio’s hard work and foresight, Pio reminded the Guardian, “We must give all the praise to Jesus, not to me. I’m just an instrument in His hands, and if left to my own devices I can merely sin—and sin again.” And when a few days later the New York Times praised the successful completion of La Casa, Pio reminded his confreres who patted him on the back and praised him, “I’m just a chutcho, a little donkey doing God’s bidding.”
Pio knew that donations from all over the world had helped make the hospital a reality. He also trusted that donations would continue to keep La Casa functioning and bringing health of mind, body, and soul to its patients. With gratitude he accepted, on behalf of the hospital, all gifts, such as the one made by the American teacher Dorothy Gaudiose. “Padre,” she promised him one day after Mass before heading to Mary Pyle’s to help answer the flood of mail Pio received every day from devotees asking for his prayers and intercession, “I’m going to write a biography of you and donate all the proceeds to your hospital.”
“Si, la porta s’aprira; yes, the door will open for you to do that, my daughter, and God will richly bless you for it, as He blesses all those who give to His work.”
Near death on August 5, 1957, Pio refused to be left at his hospital; he wanted to be in the friary when he died, so his confreres carried him back to his cell and to his own bed. Diagnosed with a lung tumor, Pio had been given little chance of survival. But that August day, the famous statue of the Pilgrim Madonna from Fatima, Portugal, was flown by helicopter, as part of its pre-arranged European pilgrimage, to Our Lady of Grace and placed in the old church in which Pio had received the stigmata. Though now he had to remain in bed, he communicated with Christ and His mother by constant prayer, moving his lips as he fingered his well-worn Rosary beads.
The next day, in spite of the doctor’s warnings, Pio asked his fellow friars to take him to the ancient little church to attend the farewell Mass in honor of the Our Lady of Fatima’s statue. In the sacristy after Mass, Pio sat in a chair into which the friars had gently placed him, and he wept when the statue was carried into the room. Padre Alessio Parente, his new bodyguard whom Pio lovingly referred to as his “faithful puppy,” helped the stigmatic to hobble over to the statue. Reverently Pio kissed her head and allowed fresh tears of devotion to spill onto it. “My Mother,” he whispered. From the time he had been five years old, Pio had experienced visions of the Mother of God, and his faith in her prayers and intercession had never wavered. Now he pulled from his habit pocket an expensive Rosary a wealthy devotee had given him, and he placed the beads in the statue’s prayerful hands.
As Padre Pio began to waver from exhaustion, Alessio grabbed him and with the help of another friar carried him back to Pio’s cell where he collapsed onto his narrow bed. But before the helicopter was to fly the statue to its next stop on the itinerary, Padre Pio begged Alessio to take him to a window so he could salute the Madonna’s statue as it circled above the friary. Sitting in a chair beside the window, Pio could hear the shouts of the people below as they waved to the helicopter and prayed together the Rosary: “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus. . . . ora pro nobis peccatoribus. . . . Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you . . . blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. . . . Pray for us sinners . . . .”
Fingering his own Rosary beads, Pio watched as the helicopter carrying the Madonna rose above the crowd. “Dear Mother Mary, my Mother, why have you come all the way to Italy, found me dying, and not done anything about it? Now you’re leaving,” he muttered through tears, his head bowed in sorrow. At that moment, as the helicopter circled above the friary in honor of Padre Pio, he shuddered from the top of his head all the way down to his toes as a mysterious power surged through him, instantly healing him of the lung tumor, as was later confirmed by the doctors. His tears of sorrow now turned to tears of thanksgiving and joy, and he knew he would be saying Mass as usual the next morning.
By 1959, the number of pilgrims journeying up the mountainside to Our Lady of Grace church and friary had increased so much—from hundreds in the first decade after Padre Pio received the stigmata, to the now-ten-of-thousands that flooded into San Giovanni from all over the world—the friars had to build a new and larger church adjacent to the tiny ancient one in which Pio had received the wounds of Christ in 1918. “But this new church eventually won’t be big enough,” Pio had warned his confreres before its completion. “Even after my death,” he prophesied to the startled friars, “so many pilgrims will come here, that you’ll be forced to build an even larger church, so mammoth that you can’t even imagine its size right now.”
In spite of the miraculous healing of Padre Pio’s lung tumor, his energy level continued to plummet, and his other health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, gnawed away at him. By 1962, his eyesight was so bad, his Superiors had to dispense Pio from daily recitation of the Divine Office. His legs deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t feel them. By 1966, he was given special permission to celebrate his daily Mass seated. The next year found him using a wheelchair to move within the friary and church. But even with the constant care of Padre Alessio and the others, including his devoted doctors, Pio suffered asthma attacks that caused him excruciating pain; his heart would sometimes race for no reason; he suffered cold sweats and insomnia; and his knees and back were crippled with painful arthritis.
Age also did not spare Pio from the all-too-familiar darkness caused by his uncertainty about his sanctity. “I’m so afraid of offending God,” he told Alessio one day as he gazed out his cell window. “And look at all those poor souls who come to see me. Don’t they know I’m just a miserable sinner?”
Age also did not spare Padre Pio from the heartbreak of losing those dearest to him. 1963 brought the death of his closest and oldest friend Padre Agostino; the next year Pio lost Padre Paolino; and on May 9, 1967, Pio’s older brother Michele died, leaving Pio with only one living sibling, Suor Pia, Sister Pia who had grieved Pio when she left the Brigittines and joined a relaxed community in Rome. After having suffered a number of strokes, Padre Pio’s beloved helper Mary Pyle, on April 26, 1968, suffered the final fatal one and died. Too weak to attend the funeral, from his bed in his cell Pio asked Jesus, “Please take her soul to Paradise, because she always treated everyone with love, as if each person were You, dear Lord.”
Now that most of his closest friends and relatives had departed for Heaven, Padre Pio told is confreres, “As soon as you finish building my crypt in the new church, I’ll die too.”
When one of his devotees overheard him say that, she asked, “But what will I do after you die, Padre, and I need you?”
“Go to the tabernacle in the nearest church, and you’ll find me there with Jesus.” Smiling at her Pio added, “Never forget that I’ll be able to do more for everybody after I die than I’ve been able to do while on this earth. Just send me your Guardian Angel with your messages, and he’ll bring them to me, and I’ll do what I can for you.” But even as he spoke those words, he still harbored doubts about his sanctity. I’m the greatest sinner on earth, he thought, echoing the belief St. Paul always held about himself.
Then the fiftieth anniversary of his stigmatization arrived, and with it the final drama.
DON’T LEAVE US, PADRE
Chapter 14
September 22–23, 1968
September 22, 1968: Tens of thousands of Padre Pio’s devotees had invaded San Giovanni, filling up every hotel, boarding house, and inn, even resorting to sleeping in their cars and in the buses in which they had arrived. “Look at them,” Padre Pio told Padre Alessio Parente from a friary window. “All of them are here to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of my stigmatization. If they only knew how unworthy I am of their praise.”
“Forgive me, Padre, but I’ve never seen you do anything but pray, suffer, and help everyone who ever came to you. Just yesterday one of the new friars came up to me after your Mass and said, ‘Credo nella potenza redentrice della sofferenza e della preghiera di Padre Pio; I believe in the redeeming force of the sufferings and prayers of Padre Pio.’ We all believe that!”
Ignoring the praise, Pio coughed and allowed a few silent tears to creep into his beard. The fever was back, and with it the pain, but for that he rejoiced and thanked God. To his faithful bodyguard and friend he whispered, “Voglio i’ a la chiesa; I want to go to church now, my son.”
As gently as he could, the strong, young Alessio, his dark, well-scrubbed, angular face so serious above his short black beard, led Pio away from the window and toward the sacristy to prepare for Mass. “You seem so weak and sick today, Padre,” said Alessio. “Do you really think you should say Mass? Certainly one of us could do it for you.”
Trying not to sound harsh, Pio stared up at the tall bodyguard who had so faithfully helped care for him these past eight years and said, “No, mio diletto, my dear friend.” He coughed into a white handkerchief and noticed some blood in his phlegm, but said nothing about it. “Don’t worry about today; tomorrow Padre Pellegrino will be saying Mass for me.”
Alessio peered down at the frail and hunched-over man hobbling beside him. “Che? What do you mean? Surely you’ll be here to say your own Mass, Padre.”
Smiling weakly, Pio seemed to penetrate Alessio’s soul with his eyes bloodshot from debilitating insomnia and illness. “Today I’ll celebrate my last Mass, figlio mio, my son. In a few days, all of you will attend my funeral and then lay me in my crypt which the brothers just finished in the new church.”
Shaking his head back and forth, making his beard jiggle, Alessio said, “No, Padre; you’re mistaken. You’re not finished with the work God has set out for you to do.”
Through eyes clouded with mucous from his illness, Pio just smiled tenderly up at Alessio’s handsome face and said, “Coraggio! Courage!”
Before Alessio could argue further, they were joined in the corridor by Padre Joseph Martin, a strapping American who had, at age twenty-one, visited Padre Pio and decided to settle at Our Lady of Grace at Pio’s request. Now Alessio and Joseph helped Pio to vest for Mass and then positioned him between them so they could help him out to the altar area.
“You’re not eating enough,” Joseph said to Pio in a mildly scolding tone. “I can barely feel your weight on my arm.” Joseph shot a concerned look at Alessio over the head of the hunched-over priest.
“And from sitting beside your bed every night, I can verify you’re not getting enough sleep either,” Alessio said, yawning as he glanced down in concern at the silent stigmatic. “You’re so light, you’re wasting away to nothing, Padre Pio. You. . . .”
At that moment Alessio had caught sight of Pio’s sandaled feet which were not even touching the floor. Levitaion! Alessio glanced over at Joseph who had also begun to stare down at the Padre’s feet. As the three priests proceeded toward the entrance to the church’s altar area, both Alessio and Joseph remained speechless as Pio glided between them six inches off the ground.
Padre Pio’s last Mass. He had prophesied it. He had no doubts about it. When he reached the altar, he had already entered into Christ’s passion, His crucifixion, and as always during Mass, the blood began to freely flow from the wounds in his hands. Only during Mass did he remove the fingerless gloves. Only during Mass did he find the culmination of the purpose of his life: the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world; for Pio’s sins; for everyone’s sins. And in the Mass, more than at any other moment in his days and nights, Padre Pio lived what St. Paul said, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” The church; God’s people; all His children; everyone; everywhere. “Yes, give me their pain, Lord,” Pio had whispered, had begged the Lord so many times. “Give me the pain of their sufferings, their miseries, their sorrows. Heal them, Lord; save their souls. Nothing else matters but souls.”
Alessio and Joseph helped Pio to sit in the raised chair at the altar so he could begin the Mass. Pio glanced out at the sea of faces, all silent, all beaming with filial devotion to their beloved spiritual father. People were kneeling in the aisles, in the choir loft, wherever there were enough square inches of space to occupy. Pio knew that thousands more had to remain outside the church for lack of room, but the friars had set up loudspeakers so that all could hear and participate in the Mass, this Mass to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the reception of the stigmata. Fifty years of blood flowing from the five wounds Christ had pierced into Pio’s hands, feet, and side. Fifty years of blood represented by fifty vases of dozens of red roses placed on the altar, in the choir loft, on every stand and every side altar—wherever the friars had been able to place a vase.
Now, as Pio began the Mass, he gazed out at his “spiritual children” with paternal sweetness and blessed them with his hand, but to the amazement of those near him on the altar, the stigmata had disappeared and left not even a scar. But then as always during Padre Pio’s Masses, time seemed to disappear and God’s eternity descended upon all in that remote mountain church as Pio began his last Sacrifice of Calvary. Though bent and haggard, his eyes cloudy with mucous, Pio thought of nothing but Christ as he offered up the bread and wine at Consecration; the living sacrifice of Christ offered by a living person who had born the bleeding marks of the Crucified One on his own body for fifty years. As Padre Pio relived Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden and on the Cross, tears coursed down his pale cheeks and into his beard. And even though they had to strain to hear his feeble voice that quavered with pain, age, and illness, everyone present breathlessly watched the intense suffering that seemed to transfigure their spiritual father’s still-handsome face that now glowed with The Light.
At the end of Mass, Padres Joseph, Alessio, and Pellegrino helped Pio into a wheelchair and wheeled him toward the sacristy while the people thundered, “Viva Padre Pio! Long live Padre Pio!”
Glancing over his shoulder at the congregation, Pio, trembling from exhaustion, struggled to raise his thin arm, wasted away from illness like the rest of his body, and wave to the people whose faces glistened with tears of joy and gratitude. “God bless you, my children,” he said with the little strength he had left. “Sii buona e santa; be good and saintly. . . my children.” White-faced, his body so cold he felt as if all his blood had seeped out, he could say no more.
At 9 p.m. Padre Pellegrino entered Pio’s cell to take care of him, as usual. Six times during the next three hours, the dying Padre Pio called out to Pellegrino, “Please don’t leave me, my son. The devils don’t leave me alone for a minute.” Since receiving the stigmata fifty years ago, those “devils” had harassed Pio, trying to derail him from his chosen path, the path of suffering Jesus had laid out for the priest. But as he so often said to his followers, and as he wrote to a spiritual daughter in 1915, “Satan’s fury, by which you sometimes feel yourself to be threatened, must neither frighten nor surprise you. He persecutes all those who don’t wish to listen to his dreadful insinuations, and his hate increases all the more, in accordance with the extent to which he sees his hope of possessing the soul disappear into thin air. Pay no attention to him; fortify yourself with prayer, humility, and unlimited trust in divine help. Abandon yourself as a beloved child of the heavenly Father, in His most loving arms, and do not fear the war waged against you by Satan. He is powerless against the soul that places all its trust in God alone. He will wage war in so far as he is permitted to do so from above, and God will never permit you to be tempted beyond your strength.”
Shortly before midnight, Padre Pio, feverish and unable to sleep, called to Pellegrino who was dozing in the chair next to Pio’s bed. “What time is it, figlio mio, my son?” When Pellegrino told him, Pio whispered between coughs, “This morning you will say Mass for me. Now, please hear my confession.”
After confessing, Pio said, “When the Lord takes me, please ask our brothers to forgive me for all the trouble I’ve caused them for the past fifty years. The crowds, the extra work, the loss of solitude. Such trouble I’ve caused for you and for all of the friars. Unwanted publicity, investigations. Not only have thousands of sincere penitents come here, but so too have maligni; malicious persons, thieves, swindlers, and people drawn merely by their own vulgar curiosity.”
“Don’t worry about any of that,” Pellegrino said in a soft tone. “All of us consider it an honor to work with you—and for you.”
Pio lifted a deathly white, ungloved hand to his lips to stifle a cough. “Molte grazie, thank you very much, my son, for trying to comfort me in my last moments.”
“Do you have the strength to give a last blessing for all of your confreres and spiritual children, Padre Pio?”
“Of course, I bless them all, and I ask that you have the Father Guardian give it to them for me tomorrow, after I’m gone. Now, please let me renew my vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, my son.”
At 1:30 a.m. that same morning, Padre Pio asked Pellegrino to help him out of bed and out to the small piazza adjacent to his cell. There Pellegrino helped him to sit in a chair and turn on the light, but within five minutes, Pio asked to be helped back to his cell. Though Pio had surprised Pellegrino with the vigorous way in which he had hobbled from his cell to the piazza, now the dying man shocked him with a sudden inability to rise from the chair. After fetching a wheelchair kept outside Pio’s room, Pellegrino wheeled him back to his cell and helped him collapse into his armchair.
Sighing, Pio weakly patted the arm of the chair. “Mia poltrona, my armchair. If only it could talk,” he said to Pellegrino, trying to smile. “How many tales it would tell about the past fifty years.” Then Pio’s gaze lifted upward toward the ceiling, and the other priest could barely hear him as he said, “Two mothers; there are two mothers.” Pio’s voice, suddenly raspy from the tears choking him, whispered, “I see two mothers, my son.”
Not seeing what the Padre saw, but nevertheless mesmerized by the scene before him, Pellegrino shook his head up and down, acknowledging what he knew had to be the truth, because no one had ever known Padre Pio, this humble, always-self-effacing man they called Il Monaco Santo, The Holy Friar, to lie. Pellegrino whispered in awe, “Your own mother Giuseppa De Nunzio and the Immaculate Mother of God. Si, yes, I believe you, Padre; they are here with you.”
But as much as he didn’t want to leave the Padre alone even for a moment lest Pio’s health suddenly deteriorate even further, Pellegrino noticed his lips had turned blue and his breathing had become labored, so he said, “I’m going to get the doctor.” As Pellegrino raced from the cell, Pio weakly cried out for him to stop, that a doctor was not necessary, but the younger priest ignored him and disappeared out the door.
Within minutes, Pellegrino had alerted Padres Alessio and Joseph and others who immediately raced to Pio’s cell only to find the dying priest slumped in his “poltrona” and soaked from the fever that raged through his wasting body. “Gesu, Maria, Jesus, Mary,” was all Pio could say as Padre Joseph used a towel to soak up the perspiration from his haggard, deathly pale face.
Dr. Sala arrived moments later and diagnosed Pio with a heart attack and began injecting him with stimulants, but to no avail. At 2:30 a.m., after having received the Last Rites, Pio continued to whisper, “Gesu, Maria, Jesus, Mary,” and stopped breathing.
But as during Padre Pio’s eighty-one years on earth, after death the Lord did not stop using him to help souls. Almost as soon as Pio’s body was laid to rest in the new crypt built just for him, reports of miraculous healings and events through his intercession began to pour into Our Lady of Grace friary. In fact, with every succeeding year, thousands more testimonies flooded the friars’ mailbox and hundreds of thousands more pilgrims journeyed to Pio’s tomb to pray and beg for his intercession. It was obvious to Padre Pio’s confreres that their famous brother was keeping his promise to “do more after death” for people than he had done while alive on earth.
I CAN DO MORE FOR YOU AFTER DEATH
Chapter 15
1983
Pennsylvania, United States
December 2, 1983, near Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, seventeen-year-old high school senior Paul Walsh and his parents began to live a nightmare when at 10:30 that night Paul, driving his car at high speeds along an icy road, crashed. After being rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital, Paul was found to have sustained injuries so severe that doctors transferred him to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center. Ten hours of surgery led to his regaining consciousness, but the day after Christmas his health plummeted when doctors discovered fluid leaking from the bones in his skull which had been shattered during the car crash.
More surgery was required but did nothing to heal the hydrocephalus or spinal meningitis, and Paul’s pituitary gland, damaged during the crash, now caused him to develop diabetes insipidus which doctors could only control, in Paul’s case, with intravenous injections.
Weeks passed without Paul aware of anything as he lay helpless in his hospital bed in a coma and burning with fevers. The doctors couldn’t keep his heartbeat or breathing regulated, and the meningitis, hydrocephalus, and diabetes continued to plague the teenager’s battered body. As devout Catholics and parents of ten children, Paul’s parents asked every Saint they could think of to beg God to heal their son Paul. When Paul’s condition failed to improve, someone recommended the parents turn to Padre Pio for his intercession because the Church was considering him for sainthood.
Having heard about the National Centre for Padre Pio, Inc., in Barto, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, Paul’s parents called the center’s directeress Vera Calandra, whose daughter had been healed through Padre Pio’s intercession while he was still living, and told Vera about the plight of their son. Taking one of Padre Pio’s gloves he had worn while alive from its locked case at the center, Vera sent it with her husband Harry to the Medical Center where Harry proceeded to use it to bless Paul, still in a coma.
Only a few days later Paul’s diabetese insipidus—which the doctors had warned his parents would plague him until he died—had completely disappeared. Amazed and puzzled, the doctors stopped Paul’s intravenous injections.
Still, by March 21, 1984, doctors had discovered that Paul’s frontal lobe had collapsed and that he would suffer permanent brain damage for the rest of his life which, according to doctors, would be spent in a vegetative state. Paul’s condition seemed to be racing downhill as he suffered an epileptic seizure, stopped breathing, and had to be put on a respirator. In the meantime, Vera and Harry Calandra took a photo of Paul to San Giovanni Rotondo and touched it to Padre Pio’s crypt. On April 6, Harry returned with Pio’s glove to Paul’s bedside and again blessed the boy with it. For only a moment, Paul’s eyes opened as if a healing of some sort were beginning to take effect in him, but then his eyes closed once more.
By the time his parents arrived the next day to visit their comatose son, they found him wide awake and talking for the first time since the night of the crash. Paul was moved out of intensive care and into a semiprivate room, and that’s when the boy’s condition took an even more mysterious route. Early Easter Sunday morning, a strange man visited Paul in his hospital room. Paul had assumed it was his Uncle Charlie who was a priest.
“It can’t be your uncle,” said Paul’s mother. “He’s out of town and couldn’t possibly have come to visit you, especially on Easter Sunday when he has his own parish responsibilities to fulfill.”
Paul’s roommate had seen the stranger too. “He was wearing a brown robe,” he told Paul’s mother, “and he was overweight. Oh yeah, and I remember he wore a beard and sure looked to me like a priest of some sort.”
Shaking her head back and forth and staring first at the roommate and then at her son, Mrs. Walsh said, “That does sound like your Uncle Charley, Paul, but it just can’t be because he doesn’t live in Pennsylvania and I know for a fact that today, Easter Sunday, he’s not anywhere near here and hasn’t been for months.”
“But, Mom,” said Paul, “whoever the man was, he seemed to know me. His dark eyes seemed to penetrate right through me while he just stood silently beside my bed, smiling as if he knew a wonderful secret about me.”
When Mrs. Walsh told her sister about the incident, the sister suggested that the stranger could very well have been Padre Pio. The next day, armed with a photo of Pio, Mrs. Walsh marched into Paul’s hospital room and showed him only the face on the photo. “Who is this?”
“Uncle Charley?” Paul said, blinking at the face on the picture.
Barely able to see through the tears that had suddenly begun to spill down her cheeks, Mrs. Walsh whispered hoarsely, “No, it’s Padre Pio.”
“Well, that is the man who visited me, but it can’t possibly be Padre Pio, Mom; he’s dead!” Paul shivered from the thought.
“Didn’t the man say anything at all to you when he stood there beside your bed?” asked Mrs. Walsh.
Sighing, Paul struggled to remember that Easter morning and finally said, “Yes, he told me I was finally looking healthy.”
And Paul’s health continued to improve through Padre Pio’s intercession until he was discharged from the Medical Center, graduated from high school that spring, eventually graduated from community college, and began studying to become a teacher at West Chester University in 1991. Even though the car crash had taken away the vision in one of Paul’s eyes, when Lutheran Pastor and Padre Pio’s biographer C. Bernard Ruffin twice saw Paul a decade or so after the teenager’s accident, Paul could see perfectly from both eyes and nothing about the young man—not the way he walked or talked or appeared—revealed any signs of brain damage or loss of vision.
“Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” Padre Pio repeated over and over to those who came to him for help and prayers while he lived on earth. “When you can’t come to me, send me your Guardian Angel with a message, and he’ll bring it to me, and I’ll do for you whatever I can, by God’s grace. And remember, I’ll be able to do more for you after I die than when I was alive. Basta pregare, prayer is enough.”
With your own needs, don’t hesitate to give them to your own Guardian Angel—and you do have one, never fear—ask him to take them to Padre Pio, and then wait for the answer. It will come. Indeed, it will come, mio diletto, my dear friend. Simply “pray,
hope, and don’t worry.”
___________________________________________________________________________
♪♪♪♪Here is some publishing news about the author so that you can know her better:
Nonfiction Saints Books by Eileen Dunn Bertanzetti:
Published by Our Sunday Visitor—Padre Pio's Words of Hope and Praying In the Presence of Our Lord with St. Padre Pio and Praying the Psalms with St. Padre Pio (http://www.osv.com/)
Published by Pauline Books & Media—Saint Pio of Pietrelcina: Rich In Love (http://www.pauline.org/)
Published by The Word Among Us Press—Praying with Padre Pio and Praying with Faustina (http://wau.org)
Published by Hard Shell Word Factory—Poor Pio, a picture book for children, and two Christian historical novels, Katie’s Song and Katie’s Tomorrows (http://www.hardshell.com/)
Another Nonfiction Book by Eileen:
Published by Chelsea House Publishers—Molly Pitcher (http://www.chelseahouse.com/)
Fiction Books by Eileen:
Published by Hard Shell Word Factory—two Christian historical novels, Katie’s Song and Katie’s Tomorrows (http://www.hardshell.com/)
Published Online at Facebook and Blogger.com: Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
Also see Eileen’s Website: www.kcnet.org/~edbertanAlso see Eileen’s Blog: http://www.eileendunnbertanzetti.blogspot.com/
Chapter 12
February 19, 1944–October 14, 1945
Alone in the corridor outside the refectory, Padre Pio’s hands shook as he read the note from his older brother Michele. A week before writing to Pio, Michele had received word that Pellegrina, living in Chieti near the Adriatic Sea where she worked as a seamstress, had sometime during the previous month suffered serious injuries when the Allies bombed the city and caused mounds of rubble to fall on her house. “Our sister was rescued from the debris,” Michele wrote, “but she is horribly injured. When I went to visit her at the hospital, Francesco, I found her in great pain and so alone and afraid.” Michele’s next sentence shot slivers of ice into Pio’s heart: “The doctors say she has only a few weeks to live.”
Too stunned to even cry, Pio now recalled the promise he’d made to his Mammella before she died. Knowing her son could, by God’s grace, spiritually “travel” to help others without ever leaving San Giovanni Rotondo, she had peered at her priest-son, her eyes flashing with determination, and said, “Go to Pellegrina and convince her she must return to God before it’s too late.”
With the promise he’d made to his mother reverberating in his mind, he now sighed in resignation and glanced upward. A sob finally escaped his throat as the image of his saintly mother arose in his mind. Pio could almost see Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione’s intense light-blue eyes, her dark brown hair always neatly tucked behind her neck, the beautiful features of her face, always wrinkled by the constant fatigue and worry due to raising a family, and now he whispered up at the ceiling, “Mama, I promise you, I’ll go to Pellegrina, trusting the Holy Spirit to use me to help her.”
That night alone in his cell, as he prepared to catch a few hours of sleep, Padre Pio suddenly found himself in a strange hospital room illuminated only by moonlight filtering through the one window. In that pale light he discerned the sleeping form of a woman, her face highlighted by a few short white strips of bandaging material. Padding over to her side, he gazed down at her still form and flicked on the table lamp on her nightstand. The click of the lamp switch must have awakened the woman because her eyes opened and, at the same time, Pio gasped. He recognized those dark eyes and the long dark hair that spilled over her shoulders as she lay there.
“Pellegrina,” he breathed as guilt stabbed his heart. Here lay the sister he had slapped across the face when he had first found out about her scandalous behavior with her first lover. And now she lay dying. “My sweet Pellegrina,” he whispered, gently brushing a strand of hair from her face. He forgot the pain in his own heart and body when he saw the hopelessness and fear in those familiar dark eyes. Fearing he might cause her more pain, he resisted the urge to embrace her, and instead he gently held her thin, badly bruised hand in his stigmatized one and finally allowed his tears to fall unashamedly onto the crisp, white sheet covering her body. He wanted to hold her and let her rest in his arms, just like she had done so many times as a child when she had come to him for help and comfort. Oh my Jesus, somehow use me to comfort her now, to lead her to You, Lord, before it’s too late. Please.
“Francesco, you’ve come.” Pellegrina’s lips, almost white as if all the blood and life were slowly seeping from her body, struggled to rise into a smile, but failed. With the small reserve of energy she had left in her dying body, she whispered hoarsely, “I wanted you to come so much, Francesco, but I knew you never left the friary.” Staring at him, she finally smiled. “But here you are.”
Hope hummed in Pio’s heart. She wanted me to come? “Si, here I am,” he said tenderly, “and now what is it you want to say to me, nenne, my little one?” He knew she’d always be his dear little sister, even beyond death, and the thought choked him as he gazed down at this one who had broken their mother’s heart by getting pregnant out of wedlock, not just once, but twice, to two different men. Though Pio had always thought Pellegrina was outwardly the most beautiful of his three sisters, after her first affair he knew that inwardly Pellegrina’s soul was still shrouded by sin because she had continually refused his plea for her to turn to the unfathomable merciful Jesus and receive forgiveness. But now? Hope not only hummed in his heart, it flooded his soul.
And Pio’s hope gave birth to joy and gratitude that filled his heart and soul as Pellegrina finally, through her priest-brother, turned to Jesus, confessed her sins, and asked for forgiveness. “Ego te absolve a peccatis tuis; I absolve you of your sins, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Moments later, holding his sister’s hand, Pio gazed through a hazy veil of tears as Pellegrina’s dark eyes closed in death, but the peace he had seen in those eyes just before they closed would remain in his memory forever, bringing him joy and making him eternally grateful that the Lord had used him to save the soul of his sister.
During World War Two, word of Padre Pio’s holiness and spiritual gifts spread among the American soldiers stationed in nearby Foggia. Whenever they had “leave,” many of them would pile into a military vehicle and travel for three long rough uphill miles to reach the mountainside friary and church of Our Lady of Grace. God never disappointed them once they arrived and met Padre Pio or heard him say Mass. Never. One day the visiting Sergeants Johnson and Morgan were given the special privilege of eating the noon meal in the refectory. Sitting at the long table drinking a light-brown liquid that was supposed to taste like coffee but didn’t, the two American soldiers stopped chatting with the friars at their table when Padre Pio appeared in the doorway of the refectory. Out of respect, the soldiers stood up along with the others as the Padre limped on swollen feet to the table where the Provincial and the Father Guardian sat. Ignoring the signs of respect given him by his confreres who were still standing, Pio, out of his profound humility and sense of lowliness, slowly knelt and kissed the sandaled feet of his two superiors. With great effort, he rose and padded slowly to the table of the two soldiers, sat down in the seat across from them, and spent the entire meal enjoying their stories about their home and families that they missed so much.
While Padre Pio pretended not to listen, Sergeant Morgan said, “One day while I was on the battlefield and we were experiencing heavy enemy fire, I saw a brown-robed, bearded monk suddenly appear a few yards from me.” Morgan glanced over at Pio who pretended great interest in the peas on his plate. Then Morgan continued, “The monk was very pale but had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. He hollered out to me above the deafening noise of artillery and told me to get away immediately from where I was standing and come to him. I trudged toward the monk, but just before I reached him he disappeared. When I turned around and looked at where I had been when he had called out to me, I watched in horror as a grenade exploded in the exact place where I’d been standing.”
Now both Sergeants Morgan and Johnson, trying not to grin, stared at Padre Pio who still feigned innocence.
When the meal had ended and the friars all rose to leave, most of Padre Pio’s meal, as usual, was still on his plate. He had eaten the Bread of Life that morning at 5 a.m. Mass, and for him that was more than enough. The two soldiers followed him out the refectory door, and he couldn’t help but hear Sergeant Morgan sniff loudly and say to Sergeant Johnson, “Do you smell that aroma, like something from Heaven?”
“Yes, like flowers, and I think it’s coming from Padre Pio. Remember how the other soldiers told us about that?”
“Sure, and did you hear the Padre recall the time I was two years old and almost drowned in the lake on our farm in Minnesota?”
“Yes,” said Johnson, “but you had never even mentioned it to him! He really can read souls, just like they told us back at the base in Foggia.”
“Padre Pio is everything they told us he was,” said Johnson.
“And more; he’s a saint. Il Monoca Santo, I believe the Italians call him.”
Before Pio could hear any further praise, all of which he knew belonged only to his God, he limped toward the church and his confessional and away from the direction in which the soldiers would head to return to their vehicle and the military base. Before Pio reached the confessional, another American solider fell to his knees before him and pleaded, “Please pray for my wife, Father Pio, she was supposed to give birth to our first child this month and she’s been sick and I’m so worried and I’m not allowed to return home for the birth and. . . .”
Pio bent over and gently halted the soldier’s tumble of words by placing a finger on his lips. The priest shook his head up and down at the clean-shaven face marred only by a deep war-scar across the one cheek. Pio had seen too many soldiers whose bodies bore the horrifying proof of the war’s violence: missing limbs and eyes, ripped-open flesh, painfully scarred hearts, souls, and minds. “Don’t worry, my son,” he said, smiling tenderly. “E non senti piangere nulla? Don’t you hear a crying voice? A tiny voice so hungry for his mama’s milk?”
“Forgive me, Padre Pio, but I don’t understand. What tiny voice?”
Motioning for the soldier to stand, Pio said, “The tiny voice of your first child, a healthy baby boy, born yesterday.” Grinning at the soldier’s shocked stare, Pio assured him, “And your wife is fine too.”
Relief washed over the soldier’s face and tears streamed down his cheeks, highlighting the scar. With difficulty he choked out, “I believe you, Padre, because the others at the base told me that Jesus tells you everything.”
Knowing the soldier wanted, more than ever, to be with his wife and baby, Pio embraced the young man and said, “E su questo tuo Calvario, anche se non ci puoi portare l’allegria—cerca almeno di portarci un po piu di rassegnazione.”
When the soldier just stared at Pio with a questioning gaze, the priest explained, “Even though you can’t be with your family right now, you must accept this as your particular Calvary and try to be resigned to it. Jesus is with you, and He will never forsake you or your family. Go now. Iddio ti benedice, figlio mio; God blesses you, my son.”
Since September 20, 1918, Padre Pio’s own Calvario had never ceased. In fact, it had only increased. On October 19, 1945, after his usual few bites of food during the noon meal with his confreres, Pio stood beside the friary window overlooking the adjacent field where the crowds waited for him twice each day, once at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. Having by now accepted the fact that Jesus was not going to answer his prayers and remove the visible signs of the stigmata, but was, instead, going to continue to use the stigmata and other spiritual gifts He had given Pio to draw souls to Himself through the stigmatic, Pio faithfully showed up twice a day at the window overlooking the field. He knew that the thousands of pilgrims who ventured to San Giovanni Rotondo to see him were in reality actually longed to see Jesus, to known without a doubt that He lived and that He cared about them and loved them unconditionally. So many people were like St. Thomas who, after Christ rose from the dead, refused to believe unless he saw and touched the wounds of Our Lord. Many pilgrims, like St. Thomas, needed to see, if not touch, the wounds of Christ replicated in Pio’s hands, feet, and side in order to put their faith in Christ or even to have their faith renewed. Pio had finally accepted all of that, but yet he knew, too, that he himself was merely a vessel, a miserable sinner who, like St. John the Baptist, was unworthy to even carry the Lord’s sandals, let alone do His work among His people. “I’m just a chutcho, a little donkey doing God’s bidding,” he would often say when someone would praise him. “Give the praise to Jesus, not to me. I’m just an instrument in God’s hands; an instrument that if left to my own devices would merely sin—and sin again.”
And yet now, much to Pio’s chagrin and embarrassment, as soon as his head appeared in the window, the praise surged upward to him. “Eccolo il Padre, there’s the Padre! Il Monaco Santo, the Holy Friar!”
Resigned to God’s will, Pio gazed lovingly down at the crowd of pilgrims. The sea of faces lifted up toward him, expecting his blessing, never failed to tear at his heart. He saw their pain, their longing, their loneliness. He wanted to help each of them, heal them all—and their families too. But he could only do what Jesus willed to do through him. Nevertheless, Pio now did what he could; he raised the large white cloth Padre Vigilio always kept at the window for this purpose and waved it out the window.
“Padre Pio, we love you! You’re our Saint.”
“Pray for us, Padre Pio; we belong to you.”
After two minutes, his arm tired, Pio stopped waving the cloth and began to bless the crowd. They continued to wave their own handkerchiefs and cloths. Drawing his Rosary out of his pocket, Pio held it up to the crowd and shouted, “Pray, my children; pray the Rosary. It is your weapon against the devil.” Then he turned away from the window.
“Viva Padre Pio, long live Padre Pio!” he could hear from the crowd as he disappeared from their sight and hobbled in the direction of the confessional to resume hearing the sins of the world.
As Pio limped down the corridor that led to the church, the Father Guardian, Padre Agostino, hobbled toward him and said, “Figlio mio, my son, stop.” Gasping for breath, the sixty-five-year-old Agostino leaned over, trying to replenish his lungs.
Padre Pio frowned. Tatone, or Big Daddy as the friars called Agostino behind his back, had grown heavier and wider over the years and it was obviously damaging his health. But Pio knew something most did not: Agostino’s greatest hindrance to walking was the condition of his legs; he suffered from ulcers that completely covered them, causing them to swell with painful inflammation. Most people, even most of the friars, did not know about these ulcers and the agony they caused Agostino, because he, like Pio, desired to suffer in silence and offer himself as a victim to God for the salvation of souls. Both priests wanted to honor the request made by Christ’s mother at Fatima in 1917.
“Figlio mio,” Agostino said to Pio as soon as the Father Guardian could again speak, “it is your papa. He . . . .”
Pio’s sharp cry of protest interrupted Agostino’s sentence. “No! Not Papa.” Pio had read Agostino’s worried face and had glimpsed the message in his mind and knew the grim news the Father Guardian had to say to him. “No!” Pio cried once more before the tears choked off further speech.
After the death of his wife Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione in January 1929, Orazio Forgione had longed to live near his priest-son. So for the past eight years, Orazio had done just that in the same first-floor room at Mary Pyle’s villa in which his wife had died. Mary Pyle treated him as an honored guest, as if he were her own father. Now as Padre Pio lumbered toward her house as fast as he could, considering the pains constantly shooting upward from his swollen feet through his legs, he prayed for his father. Don’t let him die, dear Jesus. Not yet. Please. Pio recalled how during the past eight years every time bright-eyed Orazio would see his son he would refuse to address Pio with the familiar term “tu,” but would instead use the formal “voi.” He remembered how his lean-physiqued Papa, who had once been so physically strong, had sacrificed so much to emigrate twice to America—once staying in “Brook-o-lino” as the illiterate Orazio called Brooklyn—so that he could work for the wealthier Americans and send home nine dollars every week to his wife. With that she was able to clothe and feed their children and send Francesco to school so that the boy could fulfill his dream of becoming a Capuchin priest. Pio now smiled, recalling how he had, at age seven, told his rough-mannered, yet always-loving father, “I want to be a Capuchin because they wear beards and I want to wear one too.”
Now, as Pio hobbled toward the exit so he could begin the trek downhill to Mary’s villa to see his father, he refused to believe Orazio was dying, even though Pio had moments ago read the truth on Tatone’s bearded face. Not Orazio, not Papa, not the man who only yesterday morning after 5 a.m. Mass had kissed his son’s stigmatized hand before Pio could stop him. “Che? What?” Pio had said to him as Orazio had knelt on the hard floor in front of his son. “A father should not kiss the hand of his son,” said Pio, “the son should kiss the hand of the father.” Pio had tried to force the thin, frail, eighty-six-year-old Orazio to stand, but was unsuccessful.
In defiance and reverence, Orazio had kissed Pio’s hand one more time, gazed up at him with love and pride, and said, “I’m not kissing the hand of my son Francesco Forgione; I’m kissing the hand of the priest Padre Pio who bears the wounds of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Sobbing, Orazio had finally allowed Pio to draw him to his feet with the help of the other men waiting to speak to the famous stigmatic. Struggling with his own emotions, Pio barely noticed that the dozen men around him had also begun to cry at the display of devotion from Orazio, whom everyone who knew him affectionately called “Nonno;Grandfather.” Papa, always happy, active, and cordial, was loved by all.
By now, the beautiful memories of his father had forced Pio to weep. He stopped just before the door of the church and leaned against the wall beside it. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he didn’t know how he could manage the rocky 100-yard downhill descent to Mary’s house, but he didn’t have to worry because when he opened the door and stepped out into the October-afternoon sunlight, Padre Vigilio was waiting with the friary donkey to cart Pio down to the villa.
“Tatone’s orders,” Vigilio explained as he helped the Padre mount the low-backed beast. Obviously unaware of the reason for the journey to the villa, Pio’s bodyguard said, “I just heard that your dream to build a huge hospital here is going to come true, Padre. The Provincial told us you’ve even got shareholders who’ve renounced any personal profit and are going to raise one million lire to help get the hospital started.”
“Si, my son, it’s true.” Padre Pio had for decades dreamed of building—in spite of the doubts of many around him—a modern hospital on the remote and rocky mountainside beside Our Lady of Grace friary and church. He wanted to name the expansive facility La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, The Home for the Relief of Suffering. In it, each patient would be treated with honor and respect because Jesus was present in every human being on earth, especially in the sick. Pio held no doubts about the veracity of Jesus’ statement, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people. . . .” But now, as he arrived at Mary’s villa and Vigilio helped him slide off the donkey, Padre Pio’s joy of knowing his hospital would one day rise up to help heal bodies, minds, and souls was overshadowed by the knowledge that his beloved father would soon die.
In the first-floor villa room where Orazio had chosen to spend his last days, the same room in which his wife had died in 1929, his priest-son spent the next few hours at his father’s side, trying to spoon-feed him some potato soup Mary had made just for Orazio. When Pio finally admitted defeat, he sent for Holy Communion to be brought from the church for himself and his father. After administering the Last Rites to Orazio, the priest-son held him in his arms and whispered goodbye as the man breathed for the last time.
As after the death of his mother, it took Pio a week to recover from the death of his father and to return full-time to his ministry. Whenever the friars would catch him weeping over his loss, he would whisper, “But don’t you understand? I’ve lost a father.”
As The Home for the Relief of Suffering rose on the mountainside, so, too, did a new and bigger church. But along with the joys came the inevitable heartaches, least of which involved Mary Pyle.
BUILD MY CRYPT
Chapter 13
1956–1968
Almost seventy years old in 1956, Padre Pio’s body was deteriorating rapidly, and even though he tried not to pay any attention to its complaints, the frequent and intense attacks of asthma and other bronchial ailments threatened to suffocate him. Dizzy spells sometimes made him lose his balance and fall to the hard floor, and in spite of his relentless sense of duty, sometimes once a month he would be forced to stay in bed and not say his usual 5 a.m. Mass. One March morning, unable to even stand, he said to two of his fellow friars who had poked their heads inside his cell to ask if he needed anything, “Please, my sons, come and help me get this lazy body out of bed so I can go hear confessions.”
On May 5 of that year, in spite of his declining health, Padre Pio attended the inauguration of his dream-hospital, La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering. In spite of all the criticism and doubt that had been thrown at him over the years as he worked to build the hospital, it now stood as a beautiful testimony of faith with its colorful marble floors and tiles, its spacious chapel, its modern kitchen, its state-of-the-art operating rooms and laboratories, and even its air conditioning which was a rarity in Italy at that time. Now sitting in a chair on a platform in front of the mammoth hospital, Pio gazed lovingly down at the crowd of more than 15,000 people. Glancing to either side of him, Pio smiled at the numerous dignitaries on the platform who had come for the occasion.
Minutes later when a fellow friar helped Pio to hobble to the microphone, Pio struggled to hold back tears of gratitude as he said, “Here at La Casa, patients will not only find health for their bodies; they will find health for their souls. Here they will find God.” Turning to the newly hired doctors seated on the platform Pio said, “You must bring God to each sick person. More than medicine, more than surgery, more than any medical treatment, God will be more effective in healing the entire person. And never forget,” he added, scanning the crowd below, “that when we see a sick person, we see Jesus. Whatever you do to the least of His people, you do to Jesus Himself. So remember that nothing is too good for those who are sick and suffering.”
While the United States flag fluttered in the warm May breeze next to the waving Italian flag on La Casa’s roof, Padre Pio relinquished the microphone to a dignitary and hobbled back to his seat, finally allowing the tears of joy and gratitude to flow down his cheeks and into his beard.
When the Father Guardian on May 8 told Pio that Pope Pius XII, from the Vatican, had praised La Casa and called it a “magnificent success” due to Padre Pio’s hard work and foresight, Pio reminded the Guardian, “We must give all the praise to Jesus, not to me. I’m just an instrument in His hands, and if left to my own devices I can merely sin—and sin again.” And when a few days later the New York Times praised the successful completion of La Casa, Pio reminded his confreres who patted him on the back and praised him, “I’m just a chutcho, a little donkey doing God’s bidding.”
Pio knew that donations from all over the world had helped make the hospital a reality. He also trusted that donations would continue to keep La Casa functioning and bringing health of mind, body, and soul to its patients. With gratitude he accepted, on behalf of the hospital, all gifts, such as the one made by the American teacher Dorothy Gaudiose. “Padre,” she promised him one day after Mass before heading to Mary Pyle’s to help answer the flood of mail Pio received every day from devotees asking for his prayers and intercession, “I’m going to write a biography of you and donate all the proceeds to your hospital.”
“Si, la porta s’aprira; yes, the door will open for you to do that, my daughter, and God will richly bless you for it, as He blesses all those who give to His work.”
Near death on August 5, 1957, Pio refused to be left at his hospital; he wanted to be in the friary when he died, so his confreres carried him back to his cell and to his own bed. Diagnosed with a lung tumor, Pio had been given little chance of survival. But that August day, the famous statue of the Pilgrim Madonna from Fatima, Portugal, was flown by helicopter, as part of its pre-arranged European pilgrimage, to Our Lady of Grace and placed in the old church in which Pio had received the stigmata. Though now he had to remain in bed, he communicated with Christ and His mother by constant prayer, moving his lips as he fingered his well-worn Rosary beads.
The next day, in spite of the doctor’s warnings, Pio asked his fellow friars to take him to the ancient little church to attend the farewell Mass in honor of the Our Lady of Fatima’s statue. In the sacristy after Mass, Pio sat in a chair into which the friars had gently placed him, and he wept when the statue was carried into the room. Padre Alessio Parente, his new bodyguard whom Pio lovingly referred to as his “faithful puppy,” helped the stigmatic to hobble over to the statue. Reverently Pio kissed her head and allowed fresh tears of devotion to spill onto it. “My Mother,” he whispered. From the time he had been five years old, Pio had experienced visions of the Mother of God, and his faith in her prayers and intercession had never wavered. Now he pulled from his habit pocket an expensive Rosary a wealthy devotee had given him, and he placed the beads in the statue’s prayerful hands.
As Padre Pio began to waver from exhaustion, Alessio grabbed him and with the help of another friar carried him back to Pio’s cell where he collapsed onto his narrow bed. But before the helicopter was to fly the statue to its next stop on the itinerary, Padre Pio begged Alessio to take him to a window so he could salute the Madonna’s statue as it circled above the friary. Sitting in a chair beside the window, Pio could hear the shouts of the people below as they waved to the helicopter and prayed together the Rosary: “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus. . . . ora pro nobis peccatoribus. . . . Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you . . . blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. . . . Pray for us sinners . . . .”
Fingering his own Rosary beads, Pio watched as the helicopter carrying the Madonna rose above the crowd. “Dear Mother Mary, my Mother, why have you come all the way to Italy, found me dying, and not done anything about it? Now you’re leaving,” he muttered through tears, his head bowed in sorrow. At that moment, as the helicopter circled above the friary in honor of Padre Pio, he shuddered from the top of his head all the way down to his toes as a mysterious power surged through him, instantly healing him of the lung tumor, as was later confirmed by the doctors. His tears of sorrow now turned to tears of thanksgiving and joy, and he knew he would be saying Mass as usual the next morning.
By 1959, the number of pilgrims journeying up the mountainside to Our Lady of Grace church and friary had increased so much—from hundreds in the first decade after Padre Pio received the stigmata, to the now-ten-of-thousands that flooded into San Giovanni from all over the world—the friars had to build a new and larger church adjacent to the tiny ancient one in which Pio had received the wounds of Christ in 1918. “But this new church eventually won’t be big enough,” Pio had warned his confreres before its completion. “Even after my death,” he prophesied to the startled friars, “so many pilgrims will come here, that you’ll be forced to build an even larger church, so mammoth that you can’t even imagine its size right now.”
In spite of the miraculous healing of Padre Pio’s lung tumor, his energy level continued to plummet, and his other health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, gnawed away at him. By 1962, his eyesight was so bad, his Superiors had to dispense Pio from daily recitation of the Divine Office. His legs deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t feel them. By 1966, he was given special permission to celebrate his daily Mass seated. The next year found him using a wheelchair to move within the friary and church. But even with the constant care of Padre Alessio and the others, including his devoted doctors, Pio suffered asthma attacks that caused him excruciating pain; his heart would sometimes race for no reason; he suffered cold sweats and insomnia; and his knees and back were crippled with painful arthritis.
Age also did not spare Pio from the all-too-familiar darkness caused by his uncertainty about his sanctity. “I’m so afraid of offending God,” he told Alessio one day as he gazed out his cell window. “And look at all those poor souls who come to see me. Don’t they know I’m just a miserable sinner?”
Age also did not spare Padre Pio from the heartbreak of losing those dearest to him. 1963 brought the death of his closest and oldest friend Padre Agostino; the next year Pio lost Padre Paolino; and on May 9, 1967, Pio’s older brother Michele died, leaving Pio with only one living sibling, Suor Pia, Sister Pia who had grieved Pio when she left the Brigittines and joined a relaxed community in Rome. After having suffered a number of strokes, Padre Pio’s beloved helper Mary Pyle, on April 26, 1968, suffered the final fatal one and died. Too weak to attend the funeral, from his bed in his cell Pio asked Jesus, “Please take her soul to Paradise, because she always treated everyone with love, as if each person were You, dear Lord.”
Now that most of his closest friends and relatives had departed for Heaven, Padre Pio told is confreres, “As soon as you finish building my crypt in the new church, I’ll die too.”
When one of his devotees overheard him say that, she asked, “But what will I do after you die, Padre, and I need you?”
“Go to the tabernacle in the nearest church, and you’ll find me there with Jesus.” Smiling at her Pio added, “Never forget that I’ll be able to do more for everybody after I die than I’ve been able to do while on this earth. Just send me your Guardian Angel with your messages, and he’ll bring them to me, and I’ll do what I can for you.” But even as he spoke those words, he still harbored doubts about his sanctity. I’m the greatest sinner on earth, he thought, echoing the belief St. Paul always held about himself.
Then the fiftieth anniversary of his stigmatization arrived, and with it the final drama.
DON’T LEAVE US, PADRE
Chapter 14
September 22–23, 1968
September 22, 1968: Tens of thousands of Padre Pio’s devotees had invaded San Giovanni, filling up every hotel, boarding house, and inn, even resorting to sleeping in their cars and in the buses in which they had arrived. “Look at them,” Padre Pio told Padre Alessio Parente from a friary window. “All of them are here to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of my stigmatization. If they only knew how unworthy I am of their praise.”
“Forgive me, Padre, but I’ve never seen you do anything but pray, suffer, and help everyone who ever came to you. Just yesterday one of the new friars came up to me after your Mass and said, ‘Credo nella potenza redentrice della sofferenza e della preghiera di Padre Pio; I believe in the redeeming force of the sufferings and prayers of Padre Pio.’ We all believe that!”
Ignoring the praise, Pio coughed and allowed a few silent tears to creep into his beard. The fever was back, and with it the pain, but for that he rejoiced and thanked God. To his faithful bodyguard and friend he whispered, “Voglio i’ a la chiesa; I want to go to church now, my son.”
As gently as he could, the strong, young Alessio, his dark, well-scrubbed, angular face so serious above his short black beard, led Pio away from the window and toward the sacristy to prepare for Mass. “You seem so weak and sick today, Padre,” said Alessio. “Do you really think you should say Mass? Certainly one of us could do it for you.”
Trying not to sound harsh, Pio stared up at the tall bodyguard who had so faithfully helped care for him these past eight years and said, “No, mio diletto, my dear friend.” He coughed into a white handkerchief and noticed some blood in his phlegm, but said nothing about it. “Don’t worry about today; tomorrow Padre Pellegrino will be saying Mass for me.”
Alessio peered down at the frail and hunched-over man hobbling beside him. “Che? What do you mean? Surely you’ll be here to say your own Mass, Padre.”
Smiling weakly, Pio seemed to penetrate Alessio’s soul with his eyes bloodshot from debilitating insomnia and illness. “Today I’ll celebrate my last Mass, figlio mio, my son. In a few days, all of you will attend my funeral and then lay me in my crypt which the brothers just finished in the new church.”
Shaking his head back and forth, making his beard jiggle, Alessio said, “No, Padre; you’re mistaken. You’re not finished with the work God has set out for you to do.”
Through eyes clouded with mucous from his illness, Pio just smiled tenderly up at Alessio’s handsome face and said, “Coraggio! Courage!”
Before Alessio could argue further, they were joined in the corridor by Padre Joseph Martin, a strapping American who had, at age twenty-one, visited Padre Pio and decided to settle at Our Lady of Grace at Pio’s request. Now Alessio and Joseph helped Pio to vest for Mass and then positioned him between them so they could help him out to the altar area.
“You’re not eating enough,” Joseph said to Pio in a mildly scolding tone. “I can barely feel your weight on my arm.” Joseph shot a concerned look at Alessio over the head of the hunched-over priest.
“And from sitting beside your bed every night, I can verify you’re not getting enough sleep either,” Alessio said, yawning as he glanced down in concern at the silent stigmatic. “You’re so light, you’re wasting away to nothing, Padre Pio. You. . . .”
At that moment Alessio had caught sight of Pio’s sandaled feet which were not even touching the floor. Levitaion! Alessio glanced over at Joseph who had also begun to stare down at the Padre’s feet. As the three priests proceeded toward the entrance to the church’s altar area, both Alessio and Joseph remained speechless as Pio glided between them six inches off the ground.
Padre Pio’s last Mass. He had prophesied it. He had no doubts about it. When he reached the altar, he had already entered into Christ’s passion, His crucifixion, and as always during Mass, the blood began to freely flow from the wounds in his hands. Only during Mass did he remove the fingerless gloves. Only during Mass did he find the culmination of the purpose of his life: the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world; for Pio’s sins; for everyone’s sins. And in the Mass, more than at any other moment in his days and nights, Padre Pio lived what St. Paul said, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” The church; God’s people; all His children; everyone; everywhere. “Yes, give me their pain, Lord,” Pio had whispered, had begged the Lord so many times. “Give me the pain of their sufferings, their miseries, their sorrows. Heal them, Lord; save their souls. Nothing else matters but souls.”
Alessio and Joseph helped Pio to sit in the raised chair at the altar so he could begin the Mass. Pio glanced out at the sea of faces, all silent, all beaming with filial devotion to their beloved spiritual father. People were kneeling in the aisles, in the choir loft, wherever there were enough square inches of space to occupy. Pio knew that thousands more had to remain outside the church for lack of room, but the friars had set up loudspeakers so that all could hear and participate in the Mass, this Mass to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the reception of the stigmata. Fifty years of blood flowing from the five wounds Christ had pierced into Pio’s hands, feet, and side. Fifty years of blood represented by fifty vases of dozens of red roses placed on the altar, in the choir loft, on every stand and every side altar—wherever the friars had been able to place a vase.
Now, as Pio began the Mass, he gazed out at his “spiritual children” with paternal sweetness and blessed them with his hand, but to the amazement of those near him on the altar, the stigmata had disappeared and left not even a scar. But then as always during Padre Pio’s Masses, time seemed to disappear and God’s eternity descended upon all in that remote mountain church as Pio began his last Sacrifice of Calvary. Though bent and haggard, his eyes cloudy with mucous, Pio thought of nothing but Christ as he offered up the bread and wine at Consecration; the living sacrifice of Christ offered by a living person who had born the bleeding marks of the Crucified One on his own body for fifty years. As Padre Pio relived Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden and on the Cross, tears coursed down his pale cheeks and into his beard. And even though they had to strain to hear his feeble voice that quavered with pain, age, and illness, everyone present breathlessly watched the intense suffering that seemed to transfigure their spiritual father’s still-handsome face that now glowed with The Light.
At the end of Mass, Padres Joseph, Alessio, and Pellegrino helped Pio into a wheelchair and wheeled him toward the sacristy while the people thundered, “Viva Padre Pio! Long live Padre Pio!”
Glancing over his shoulder at the congregation, Pio, trembling from exhaustion, struggled to raise his thin arm, wasted away from illness like the rest of his body, and wave to the people whose faces glistened with tears of joy and gratitude. “God bless you, my children,” he said with the little strength he had left. “Sii buona e santa; be good and saintly. . . my children.” White-faced, his body so cold he felt as if all his blood had seeped out, he could say no more.
At 9 p.m. Padre Pellegrino entered Pio’s cell to take care of him, as usual. Six times during the next three hours, the dying Padre Pio called out to Pellegrino, “Please don’t leave me, my son. The devils don’t leave me alone for a minute.” Since receiving the stigmata fifty years ago, those “devils” had harassed Pio, trying to derail him from his chosen path, the path of suffering Jesus had laid out for the priest. But as he so often said to his followers, and as he wrote to a spiritual daughter in 1915, “Satan’s fury, by which you sometimes feel yourself to be threatened, must neither frighten nor surprise you. He persecutes all those who don’t wish to listen to his dreadful insinuations, and his hate increases all the more, in accordance with the extent to which he sees his hope of possessing the soul disappear into thin air. Pay no attention to him; fortify yourself with prayer, humility, and unlimited trust in divine help. Abandon yourself as a beloved child of the heavenly Father, in His most loving arms, and do not fear the war waged against you by Satan. He is powerless against the soul that places all its trust in God alone. He will wage war in so far as he is permitted to do so from above, and God will never permit you to be tempted beyond your strength.”
Shortly before midnight, Padre Pio, feverish and unable to sleep, called to Pellegrino who was dozing in the chair next to Pio’s bed. “What time is it, figlio mio, my son?” When Pellegrino told him, Pio whispered between coughs, “This morning you will say Mass for me. Now, please hear my confession.”
After confessing, Pio said, “When the Lord takes me, please ask our brothers to forgive me for all the trouble I’ve caused them for the past fifty years. The crowds, the extra work, the loss of solitude. Such trouble I’ve caused for you and for all of the friars. Unwanted publicity, investigations. Not only have thousands of sincere penitents come here, but so too have maligni; malicious persons, thieves, swindlers, and people drawn merely by their own vulgar curiosity.”
“Don’t worry about any of that,” Pellegrino said in a soft tone. “All of us consider it an honor to work with you—and for you.”
Pio lifted a deathly white, ungloved hand to his lips to stifle a cough. “Molte grazie, thank you very much, my son, for trying to comfort me in my last moments.”
“Do you have the strength to give a last blessing for all of your confreres and spiritual children, Padre Pio?”
“Of course, I bless them all, and I ask that you have the Father Guardian give it to them for me tomorrow, after I’m gone. Now, please let me renew my vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, my son.”
At 1:30 a.m. that same morning, Padre Pio asked Pellegrino to help him out of bed and out to the small piazza adjacent to his cell. There Pellegrino helped him to sit in a chair and turn on the light, but within five minutes, Pio asked to be helped back to his cell. Though Pio had surprised Pellegrino with the vigorous way in which he had hobbled from his cell to the piazza, now the dying man shocked him with a sudden inability to rise from the chair. After fetching a wheelchair kept outside Pio’s room, Pellegrino wheeled him back to his cell and helped him collapse into his armchair.
Sighing, Pio weakly patted the arm of the chair. “Mia poltrona, my armchair. If only it could talk,” he said to Pellegrino, trying to smile. “How many tales it would tell about the past fifty years.” Then Pio’s gaze lifted upward toward the ceiling, and the other priest could barely hear him as he said, “Two mothers; there are two mothers.” Pio’s voice, suddenly raspy from the tears choking him, whispered, “I see two mothers, my son.”
Not seeing what the Padre saw, but nevertheless mesmerized by the scene before him, Pellegrino shook his head up and down, acknowledging what he knew had to be the truth, because no one had ever known Padre Pio, this humble, always-self-effacing man they called Il Monaco Santo, The Holy Friar, to lie. Pellegrino whispered in awe, “Your own mother Giuseppa De Nunzio and the Immaculate Mother of God. Si, yes, I believe you, Padre; they are here with you.”
But as much as he didn’t want to leave the Padre alone even for a moment lest Pio’s health suddenly deteriorate even further, Pellegrino noticed his lips had turned blue and his breathing had become labored, so he said, “I’m going to get the doctor.” As Pellegrino raced from the cell, Pio weakly cried out for him to stop, that a doctor was not necessary, but the younger priest ignored him and disappeared out the door.
Within minutes, Pellegrino had alerted Padres Alessio and Joseph and others who immediately raced to Pio’s cell only to find the dying priest slumped in his “poltrona” and soaked from the fever that raged through his wasting body. “Gesu, Maria, Jesus, Mary,” was all Pio could say as Padre Joseph used a towel to soak up the perspiration from his haggard, deathly pale face.
Dr. Sala arrived moments later and diagnosed Pio with a heart attack and began injecting him with stimulants, but to no avail. At 2:30 a.m., after having received the Last Rites, Pio continued to whisper, “Gesu, Maria, Jesus, Mary,” and stopped breathing.
But as during Padre Pio’s eighty-one years on earth, after death the Lord did not stop using him to help souls. Almost as soon as Pio’s body was laid to rest in the new crypt built just for him, reports of miraculous healings and events through his intercession began to pour into Our Lady of Grace friary. In fact, with every succeeding year, thousands more testimonies flooded the friars’ mailbox and hundreds of thousands more pilgrims journeyed to Pio’s tomb to pray and beg for his intercession. It was obvious to Padre Pio’s confreres that their famous brother was keeping his promise to “do more after death” for people than he had done while alive on earth.
I CAN DO MORE FOR YOU AFTER DEATH
Chapter 15
1983
Pennsylvania, United States
December 2, 1983, near Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, seventeen-year-old high school senior Paul Walsh and his parents began to live a nightmare when at 10:30 that night Paul, driving his car at high speeds along an icy road, crashed. After being rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital, Paul was found to have sustained injuries so severe that doctors transferred him to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center. Ten hours of surgery led to his regaining consciousness, but the day after Christmas his health plummeted when doctors discovered fluid leaking from the bones in his skull which had been shattered during the car crash.
More surgery was required but did nothing to heal the hydrocephalus or spinal meningitis, and Paul’s pituitary gland, damaged during the crash, now caused him to develop diabetes insipidus which doctors could only control, in Paul’s case, with intravenous injections.
Weeks passed without Paul aware of anything as he lay helpless in his hospital bed in a coma and burning with fevers. The doctors couldn’t keep his heartbeat or breathing regulated, and the meningitis, hydrocephalus, and diabetes continued to plague the teenager’s battered body. As devout Catholics and parents of ten children, Paul’s parents asked every Saint they could think of to beg God to heal their son Paul. When Paul’s condition failed to improve, someone recommended the parents turn to Padre Pio for his intercession because the Church was considering him for sainthood.
Having heard about the National Centre for Padre Pio, Inc., in Barto, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, Paul’s parents called the center’s directeress Vera Calandra, whose daughter had been healed through Padre Pio’s intercession while he was still living, and told Vera about the plight of their son. Taking one of Padre Pio’s gloves he had worn while alive from its locked case at the center, Vera sent it with her husband Harry to the Medical Center where Harry proceeded to use it to bless Paul, still in a coma.
Only a few days later Paul’s diabetese insipidus—which the doctors had warned his parents would plague him until he died—had completely disappeared. Amazed and puzzled, the doctors stopped Paul’s intravenous injections.
Still, by March 21, 1984, doctors had discovered that Paul’s frontal lobe had collapsed and that he would suffer permanent brain damage for the rest of his life which, according to doctors, would be spent in a vegetative state. Paul’s condition seemed to be racing downhill as he suffered an epileptic seizure, stopped breathing, and had to be put on a respirator. In the meantime, Vera and Harry Calandra took a photo of Paul to San Giovanni Rotondo and touched it to Padre Pio’s crypt. On April 6, Harry returned with Pio’s glove to Paul’s bedside and again blessed the boy with it. For only a moment, Paul’s eyes opened as if a healing of some sort were beginning to take effect in him, but then his eyes closed once more.
By the time his parents arrived the next day to visit their comatose son, they found him wide awake and talking for the first time since the night of the crash. Paul was moved out of intensive care and into a semiprivate room, and that’s when the boy’s condition took an even more mysterious route. Early Easter Sunday morning, a strange man visited Paul in his hospital room. Paul had assumed it was his Uncle Charlie who was a priest.
“It can’t be your uncle,” said Paul’s mother. “He’s out of town and couldn’t possibly have come to visit you, especially on Easter Sunday when he has his own parish responsibilities to fulfill.”
Paul’s roommate had seen the stranger too. “He was wearing a brown robe,” he told Paul’s mother, “and he was overweight. Oh yeah, and I remember he wore a beard and sure looked to me like a priest of some sort.”
Shaking her head back and forth and staring first at the roommate and then at her son, Mrs. Walsh said, “That does sound like your Uncle Charley, Paul, but it just can’t be because he doesn’t live in Pennsylvania and I know for a fact that today, Easter Sunday, he’s not anywhere near here and hasn’t been for months.”
“But, Mom,” said Paul, “whoever the man was, he seemed to know me. His dark eyes seemed to penetrate right through me while he just stood silently beside my bed, smiling as if he knew a wonderful secret about me.”
When Mrs. Walsh told her sister about the incident, the sister suggested that the stranger could very well have been Padre Pio. The next day, armed with a photo of Pio, Mrs. Walsh marched into Paul’s hospital room and showed him only the face on the photo. “Who is this?”
“Uncle Charley?” Paul said, blinking at the face on the picture.
Barely able to see through the tears that had suddenly begun to spill down her cheeks, Mrs. Walsh whispered hoarsely, “No, it’s Padre Pio.”
“Well, that is the man who visited me, but it can’t possibly be Padre Pio, Mom; he’s dead!” Paul shivered from the thought.
“Didn’t the man say anything at all to you when he stood there beside your bed?” asked Mrs. Walsh.
Sighing, Paul struggled to remember that Easter morning and finally said, “Yes, he told me I was finally looking healthy.”
And Paul’s health continued to improve through Padre Pio’s intercession until he was discharged from the Medical Center, graduated from high school that spring, eventually graduated from community college, and began studying to become a teacher at West Chester University in 1991. Even though the car crash had taken away the vision in one of Paul’s eyes, when Lutheran Pastor and Padre Pio’s biographer C. Bernard Ruffin twice saw Paul a decade or so after the teenager’s accident, Paul could see perfectly from both eyes and nothing about the young man—not the way he walked or talked or appeared—revealed any signs of brain damage or loss of vision.
“Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” Padre Pio repeated over and over to those who came to him for help and prayers while he lived on earth. “When you can’t come to me, send me your Guardian Angel with a message, and he’ll bring it to me, and I’ll do for you whatever I can, by God’s grace. And remember, I’ll be able to do more for you after I die than when I was alive. Basta pregare, prayer is enough.”
With your own needs, don’t hesitate to give them to your own Guardian Angel—and you do have one, never fear—ask him to take them to Padre Pio, and then wait for the answer. It will come. Indeed, it will come, mio diletto, my dear friend. Simply “pray,
hope, and don’t worry.”
___________________________________________________________________________
♪♪♪♪Here is some publishing news about the author so that you can know her better:
Nonfiction Saints Books by Eileen Dunn Bertanzetti:
Published by Our Sunday Visitor—Padre Pio's Words of Hope and Praying In the Presence of Our Lord with St. Padre Pio and Praying the Psalms with St. Padre Pio (http://www.osv.com/)
Published by Pauline Books & Media—Saint Pio of Pietrelcina: Rich In Love (http://www.pauline.org/)
Published by The Word Among Us Press—Praying with Padre Pio and Praying with Faustina (http://wau.org)
Published by Hard Shell Word Factory—Poor Pio, a picture book for children, and two Christian historical novels, Katie’s Song and Katie’s Tomorrows (http://www.hardshell.com/)
Another Nonfiction Book by Eileen:
Published by Chelsea House Publishers—Molly Pitcher (http://www.chelseahouse.com/)
Fiction Books by Eileen:
Published by Hard Shell Word Factory—two Christian historical novels, Katie’s Song and Katie’s Tomorrows (http://www.hardshell.com/)
Published Online at Facebook and Blogger.com: Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
Also see Eileen’s Website: www.kcnet.org/~edbertanAlso see Eileen’s Blog: http://www.eileendunnbertanzetti.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Chapter 11 of Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
IMPRISONMENT
Chapter 11
1929–1944
Though Archbishop Gagliardi had taken a forced retirement, he had left behind him many priests and bishops who continued, out of jealousy and hatred, to propagate the lies about Padre Pio. Their reports reached the Vatican saying, “Padre Pio is possessed, and the friars of Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo are using his fame to make their fortune. Padre Pio uses makeup, and the friars put pomade on their hair. To make people think he has the ‘aroma of sanctity,’ Padre Pio douses himself with cologne every day, and we even have evidence that he keeps nitric acid in his cell to put on his hands, feet, and side to create the stigmata. In addition, he regularly has intimate relationships with some of the women who come to him for confession. His friars condone all of this and are, themselves, nothing but a pack of thieves, preying on the thousands of naïve and gullible pilgrims who travel from all over the world to see and hear their famous ‘holy saint’ whom we, in all due respect, declare to be anything but holy.”
One evening in the refectory while Pio shared a meal with his confreres, his friend Padre Peppino, seated next to him, leaned toward him and whispered, “Your enemies are accusing you of a lot of terrible things, but the worst is that you’re disobedient to your superiors.”
His friend’s statement pierced Padre Pio’s heart, causing him to almost faint from grief. He dropped his fork and barely noticed the clatter it caused as it bounced onto the plate and then onto the wooden table. Staring in disbelief at his friend, Pio struggled to force out the words, “How can they say that?”
Brushing a piece of freshly baked bread from his straw-colored beard, Peppino said, “Unfortunately they can say anything they want, my friend.” He glanced around the room crowded with tables full of friars eating. “Rest assured that no one here believes their lies.” Peppino focused his dark-blue eyes at Pio. “I especially do not believe them, my friend.”
Comforted not one bit by his friend’s attempt to ease his mind, Pio said, choking back tears, “You know, Peppino, that if my superiors told me to do it, I would even leave San Giovanni Rotondo and work at another friary of their choice just so that I would not be so much bother for everyone. For me, the voices of my Superiors and the Church represent the voice of God.” Tears blinded Pio, and he could no longer even think about eating. “Mi skusi, Peppino, I need to return to my cell.”
Five minutes later after trudging on swollen feet to his cell, Pio eased himself onto the chair at his small table and opened his Bible to the spot in the fourth chapter of the first book of St. Peter where Peter speaks about suffering. Dear Jesus, Pio prayed before beginning to read, so often when my enemies have persecuted me—as they continue to do so now—You have comforted and strengthened me with Your holy Word. Please again do so. With confidence in his God, Padre Pio read St. Peter’s words, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or as a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him glorify God. . . . Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will do right and entrust their souls to a faithful Creator.”
Leaving the Bible open, Pio stood up, turned, hobbled ten steps toward his bed and knelt before the crucifix on the wall above it. Barely able to speak because of the tears that choked him, Pio whispered, “My Jesus, thank You for speaking to me through Your holy Word. You know that I have done nothing wrong to warrant the accusations hurled against me. Therefore, as St. Peter says, let me suffer according to God’s will. I entrust my soul to You, my faithful Creator, and You will never fail me.”
With Peppino’s news still fresh in his mind, and wincing from pains shooting upward from his wounded feet through his legs, Pio smiled through his tears. “You have answered my prayers, Jesus, and attached me to Your cross so that I can suffer with You, my Lord and my God.” Silently Pio repeated with St. Paul, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” The church; God’s people; all His children; everyone; everywhere. “Yes, give me the pain, Lord, any kind of pain,” Pio whispered up at the cracked and peeling ceiling of his cell.
And the pain came.
Ignoring the splendors of spring in May of 1931, Padre Pio’s enemies’ stealth and deception finally won out over the seventy-four-year-old Pope Pius XI, and the Vatican issued an order of isolation to be applied to Pio. On June 11, along with the warm breezes blowing up from the Gulf of Manfredonia, the new Superior of Our Lady of Grace friary, Padre Raffaele received a mandate from the Holy Office. The Superior called Pio into his office and read the Vatican’s announcement to him. “Padre Pio will hereby be deprived of all his priestly faculties. He will hear no confessions and he will keep himself entirely away from the public. He will say Mass each day, but only within the friary’s private inner chapel and with none of the public present.”
Refusing to allow the new Superior to know of the agonizing darkness in which the Vatican’s decree had shrouded his heart, Pio straightened his back as much as possible, considering the great pain in his body, stoically stared at the Superior and said, “God’s will be done.” Then lowering his head and placing his gloved hands over his eyes, he added, “To me, the will of the Church and my superiors is the will of God. So it has always been, and so it will be until I die.”
As if struggling with his own emotions, Raffaele gently said, “Si, my son. I am well aware of your obedience and your sanctity. And I am well aware of the lies that have forced the Holy Father to condemn you to isolation. But please don’t worry; the Holy Office is a victim of cattivi e peccaminosi, bad and sinful people—but only for the moment. The Holy Father’s advisors have even listened to the mangiapreti, the vile ‘priest-eater,’ the rabid anticlerical faction which, unfortunately, permeates the Church throughout Italy and the world. But remember, my son, that Jesus is the Truth, and He will bring his Truth to light. So take heart, sei in grazia di Dio, you are in the grace of God.”
For weeks, Pio managed to hide the relentless grief stabbing his heart and soul. Even when questioned by his confreres about the Vatican’s decree, Padre Pio fought back tears and merely said, “God’s will be done.” But on July 1 when his dear friend Padre Agostino traveled the rough mountainous miles just to reach Pio, the latter collapsed into Agostino’s arms and cried, “I didn’t expect any of this to happen!”
As he had in November 1919, Agostino again made a prediction: “But you always pray for God’s will to be done, mio diletto, my dear friend, and you always trust Him, and He is always true to His promises, so you must now trust that He is in control, even of this most-agonizing of circumstances. How many times have I heard you tell me you’ve asked Jesus to nail you to the cross with Him? Hasn’t He done so with the Vatican’s decree?” Agostino helped Pio to sit in the nearest chair. “You must accept His will, just as you’ve always done.”
Through his tears, Pio could only look up in silence at his friend and spiritual director.
“You will see,” Agostino continued, “that God will bring great good out of all of this. It will be not only for His glory, but also for your good and the salvation of souls.”
Padre Pio shook his head in agreement, and for the next two long years—which he called his “imprisonment”—he offered up, in his isolation, all of his sufferings for God’s purposes and in response to the Mother of God’s plea at Fatima the year before Pio’s stigmatization. And as always, Pio’s soul continually prayed, Fiat voluntas tua. Thy will be done.
March of 1933 arrived, bringing with it the sounds of farmers tilling their fields, the tinkling of bells on the necks of the sheep and goats grazing near the friary, and the cacophony of voices of the hundreds of pilgrims who still swarmed up the mountain to be near their “saint,” even though the Vatican still kept Padre Pio isolated from them. Pio spent the long lonely hours in prayer, saying countless Rosaries every day. He studied Scripture and the Church Fathers, and his daily Mass sometimes lasted three or four hours since he didn’t have to worry about any impatient pilgrims and so he could remain in ecstasy for as long as God willed. But two years of too much time alone gave Padre Pio too much time to dwell on his perennial uncertainty of whether or not he pleased the Lord.
The Pope’s new secretary of state Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who would one day become Pope Pius XII, convinced Pius XI to send a delegation to San Giovanni Rotondo to evaluate Padre Pio and the situation there. When the delegation reported to the Pope, they told him that the stigmatic was a humble, holy friar, always obedient to his superiors and the Church, and who was exactly the “saint” that his fedelissimi, his extremely devoted followers, claimed. In June, 1933, because of that report, the Pope removed from office one of the prelates closest to him who had, according to the report, been lying to Pius XI about Pio.
In July, the Vatican released Pio from his “imprisonment.” At age forty-six, his health had deteriorated. His feet and ankles were almost always badly swollen. Whenever he walked, he had to drag his aching feet as he struggled along. Trying to move quickly did no good; he felt old and tired from the time he woke up until he collapsed into bed at night for a few hours of fitful sleep. When an old friend came to visit him one day that summer, he said to Pio, “I’m worried about you, Padre. Since the last time I saw you, before Rome isolated you, you walk slower; you seem so stiff. Is it your wounds?”
“Si, yes, but it is God’s will, so don’t worry, my son.”
“But you’re so stooped over now, and I can see the pain in your eyes.”
Padre Pio just smiled and changed the subject, not wanting his friend to worry about him. Nevertheless, Pio knew that he’d never feel young again, but neither did he want to return to his youth, except in his thoughts when he recalled the joys of his childhood and family. Just this morning, when he briefly looked in the mirror as he washed his face and combed his beard, he noticed his face was fuller from the weight he had gained while in isolation; his hair had thinned and receded at the hairline; his beard, which he was wearing longer and fuller, was sprouting some grey hairs.
But nothing could keep Padre Pio from saying Mass every day. At 5 a.m. on July 16, 1933, while the newly budded daisies and the swallows slept in the garden, for the first time in two years Padre Pio appeared in public, inside the main church of Our Lady of Grace. As he plodded out onto the presbytery at the front, in spite of the packed church, a reverent hush fell over the crowd, broken only by the weeping of some who were overcome with gratitude to God for returning their Padre to them.
How did they all know I’d be here? Pio wondered as he gazed out at the interior of the church and saw that every square inch of floor and pew were taken up by worshippers, some kneeling in the aisle, some kneeling at their pews. The Provincial. Yes, he obviously hadn’t been able to keep it a secret. And now Pio couldn’t help but grin. I have no words with which to thank You, dear Jesus, for bringing me back to them. May You always reach out to them and minister to them through me, even beyond my death.
During that morning’s Holy Communion, the communicants, before receiving Jesus from Pio’s hand, would kneel and kiss the ground. With tears streaming down their faces, they would open their mouths and receive their Lord from the hands of their “saint.” Pio’s tears matched theirs, but still he had to remind some of them to “calm down; all is well now.”
After Mass, greeting the crowd in the corridor, Pio overheard a visiting priest from Bavaria say to someone, “When I saw Padre Pio remove his gloves and allow the blood to drip from his hands throughout Mass; when I heard his voice overflowing with love for God; when I saw his deep brown eyes, so intense and clear, focused solely on Christ in the Eucharist as he consecrated the bread and wine; when I saw the tears roll down the cheeks of his still-handsome face, I saw Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus had come to life again on earth through this holy man.” The Bavarian priest brushed the tears from his eyes, and in a voice hoarse with emotion continued, “I feel as if all my life I’ve been like the Apostle Thomas who doubted it was really Christ who had appeared to the disciples after the resurrection. All those years before today, had I really truly believed? I don’t know, but I do know that today I began to truly believe that Christ is alive, Christ has risen, Christ is working through this holy, saintly priest.”
Padre Pio had heard similar testimonies before, and he refused to allow the praise to effect him. Still, he felt he needed to say something to the priest, so gently he insisted, “Grazie, thank you, but I’m not a saint. And I deserve no thanks or praise. I’m just a poor friar who suffers and prays. Jesus is the Source of all goodness. He is Goodness itself.” Pio glanced upward and then back at the Bavarian. “Go now, my brother, and give your thanks to Jesus in the Tabernacle for what He has done for you in renewing your faith in Him.”
In spite of the Vatican’s release of Padre Pio from exile, trouble continued to haunt him. In 1939 World War Two brought its horrors of death, destruction of property, and horrific disruption of lives and governments. And one year before the war ended, a letter arrived at the friary for Padre Pio. The letter’s words grabbed hold of his heart and mind, threatening to squeeze the life out of them.
Pellegrina!
______________________________________________________________________
Chapter 11
1929–1944
Though Archbishop Gagliardi had taken a forced retirement, he had left behind him many priests and bishops who continued, out of jealousy and hatred, to propagate the lies about Padre Pio. Their reports reached the Vatican saying, “Padre Pio is possessed, and the friars of Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo are using his fame to make their fortune. Padre Pio uses makeup, and the friars put pomade on their hair. To make people think he has the ‘aroma of sanctity,’ Padre Pio douses himself with cologne every day, and we even have evidence that he keeps nitric acid in his cell to put on his hands, feet, and side to create the stigmata. In addition, he regularly has intimate relationships with some of the women who come to him for confession. His friars condone all of this and are, themselves, nothing but a pack of thieves, preying on the thousands of naïve and gullible pilgrims who travel from all over the world to see and hear their famous ‘holy saint’ whom we, in all due respect, declare to be anything but holy.”
One evening in the refectory while Pio shared a meal with his confreres, his friend Padre Peppino, seated next to him, leaned toward him and whispered, “Your enemies are accusing you of a lot of terrible things, but the worst is that you’re disobedient to your superiors.”
His friend’s statement pierced Padre Pio’s heart, causing him to almost faint from grief. He dropped his fork and barely noticed the clatter it caused as it bounced onto the plate and then onto the wooden table. Staring in disbelief at his friend, Pio struggled to force out the words, “How can they say that?”
Brushing a piece of freshly baked bread from his straw-colored beard, Peppino said, “Unfortunately they can say anything they want, my friend.” He glanced around the room crowded with tables full of friars eating. “Rest assured that no one here believes their lies.” Peppino focused his dark-blue eyes at Pio. “I especially do not believe them, my friend.”
Comforted not one bit by his friend’s attempt to ease his mind, Pio said, choking back tears, “You know, Peppino, that if my superiors told me to do it, I would even leave San Giovanni Rotondo and work at another friary of their choice just so that I would not be so much bother for everyone. For me, the voices of my Superiors and the Church represent the voice of God.” Tears blinded Pio, and he could no longer even think about eating. “Mi skusi, Peppino, I need to return to my cell.”
Five minutes later after trudging on swollen feet to his cell, Pio eased himself onto the chair at his small table and opened his Bible to the spot in the fourth chapter of the first book of St. Peter where Peter speaks about suffering. Dear Jesus, Pio prayed before beginning to read, so often when my enemies have persecuted me—as they continue to do so now—You have comforted and strengthened me with Your holy Word. Please again do so. With confidence in his God, Padre Pio read St. Peter’s words, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or as a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him glorify God. . . . Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will do right and entrust their souls to a faithful Creator.”
Leaving the Bible open, Pio stood up, turned, hobbled ten steps toward his bed and knelt before the crucifix on the wall above it. Barely able to speak because of the tears that choked him, Pio whispered, “My Jesus, thank You for speaking to me through Your holy Word. You know that I have done nothing wrong to warrant the accusations hurled against me. Therefore, as St. Peter says, let me suffer according to God’s will. I entrust my soul to You, my faithful Creator, and You will never fail me.”
With Peppino’s news still fresh in his mind, and wincing from pains shooting upward from his wounded feet through his legs, Pio smiled through his tears. “You have answered my prayers, Jesus, and attached me to Your cross so that I can suffer with You, my Lord and my God.” Silently Pio repeated with St. Paul, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” The church; God’s people; all His children; everyone; everywhere. “Yes, give me the pain, Lord, any kind of pain,” Pio whispered up at the cracked and peeling ceiling of his cell.
And the pain came.
Ignoring the splendors of spring in May of 1931, Padre Pio’s enemies’ stealth and deception finally won out over the seventy-four-year-old Pope Pius XI, and the Vatican issued an order of isolation to be applied to Pio. On June 11, along with the warm breezes blowing up from the Gulf of Manfredonia, the new Superior of Our Lady of Grace friary, Padre Raffaele received a mandate from the Holy Office. The Superior called Pio into his office and read the Vatican’s announcement to him. “Padre Pio will hereby be deprived of all his priestly faculties. He will hear no confessions and he will keep himself entirely away from the public. He will say Mass each day, but only within the friary’s private inner chapel and with none of the public present.”
Refusing to allow the new Superior to know of the agonizing darkness in which the Vatican’s decree had shrouded his heart, Pio straightened his back as much as possible, considering the great pain in his body, stoically stared at the Superior and said, “God’s will be done.” Then lowering his head and placing his gloved hands over his eyes, he added, “To me, the will of the Church and my superiors is the will of God. So it has always been, and so it will be until I die.”
As if struggling with his own emotions, Raffaele gently said, “Si, my son. I am well aware of your obedience and your sanctity. And I am well aware of the lies that have forced the Holy Father to condemn you to isolation. But please don’t worry; the Holy Office is a victim of cattivi e peccaminosi, bad and sinful people—but only for the moment. The Holy Father’s advisors have even listened to the mangiapreti, the vile ‘priest-eater,’ the rabid anticlerical faction which, unfortunately, permeates the Church throughout Italy and the world. But remember, my son, that Jesus is the Truth, and He will bring his Truth to light. So take heart, sei in grazia di Dio, you are in the grace of God.”
For weeks, Pio managed to hide the relentless grief stabbing his heart and soul. Even when questioned by his confreres about the Vatican’s decree, Padre Pio fought back tears and merely said, “God’s will be done.” But on July 1 when his dear friend Padre Agostino traveled the rough mountainous miles just to reach Pio, the latter collapsed into Agostino’s arms and cried, “I didn’t expect any of this to happen!”
As he had in November 1919, Agostino again made a prediction: “But you always pray for God’s will to be done, mio diletto, my dear friend, and you always trust Him, and He is always true to His promises, so you must now trust that He is in control, even of this most-agonizing of circumstances. How many times have I heard you tell me you’ve asked Jesus to nail you to the cross with Him? Hasn’t He done so with the Vatican’s decree?” Agostino helped Pio to sit in the nearest chair. “You must accept His will, just as you’ve always done.”
Through his tears, Pio could only look up in silence at his friend and spiritual director.
“You will see,” Agostino continued, “that God will bring great good out of all of this. It will be not only for His glory, but also for your good and the salvation of souls.”
Padre Pio shook his head in agreement, and for the next two long years—which he called his “imprisonment”—he offered up, in his isolation, all of his sufferings for God’s purposes and in response to the Mother of God’s plea at Fatima the year before Pio’s stigmatization. And as always, Pio’s soul continually prayed, Fiat voluntas tua. Thy will be done.
March of 1933 arrived, bringing with it the sounds of farmers tilling their fields, the tinkling of bells on the necks of the sheep and goats grazing near the friary, and the cacophony of voices of the hundreds of pilgrims who still swarmed up the mountain to be near their “saint,” even though the Vatican still kept Padre Pio isolated from them. Pio spent the long lonely hours in prayer, saying countless Rosaries every day. He studied Scripture and the Church Fathers, and his daily Mass sometimes lasted three or four hours since he didn’t have to worry about any impatient pilgrims and so he could remain in ecstasy for as long as God willed. But two years of too much time alone gave Padre Pio too much time to dwell on his perennial uncertainty of whether or not he pleased the Lord.
The Pope’s new secretary of state Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who would one day become Pope Pius XII, convinced Pius XI to send a delegation to San Giovanni Rotondo to evaluate Padre Pio and the situation there. When the delegation reported to the Pope, they told him that the stigmatic was a humble, holy friar, always obedient to his superiors and the Church, and who was exactly the “saint” that his fedelissimi, his extremely devoted followers, claimed. In June, 1933, because of that report, the Pope removed from office one of the prelates closest to him who had, according to the report, been lying to Pius XI about Pio.
In July, the Vatican released Pio from his “imprisonment.” At age forty-six, his health had deteriorated. His feet and ankles were almost always badly swollen. Whenever he walked, he had to drag his aching feet as he struggled along. Trying to move quickly did no good; he felt old and tired from the time he woke up until he collapsed into bed at night for a few hours of fitful sleep. When an old friend came to visit him one day that summer, he said to Pio, “I’m worried about you, Padre. Since the last time I saw you, before Rome isolated you, you walk slower; you seem so stiff. Is it your wounds?”
“Si, yes, but it is God’s will, so don’t worry, my son.”
“But you’re so stooped over now, and I can see the pain in your eyes.”
Padre Pio just smiled and changed the subject, not wanting his friend to worry about him. Nevertheless, Pio knew that he’d never feel young again, but neither did he want to return to his youth, except in his thoughts when he recalled the joys of his childhood and family. Just this morning, when he briefly looked in the mirror as he washed his face and combed his beard, he noticed his face was fuller from the weight he had gained while in isolation; his hair had thinned and receded at the hairline; his beard, which he was wearing longer and fuller, was sprouting some grey hairs.
But nothing could keep Padre Pio from saying Mass every day. At 5 a.m. on July 16, 1933, while the newly budded daisies and the swallows slept in the garden, for the first time in two years Padre Pio appeared in public, inside the main church of Our Lady of Grace. As he plodded out onto the presbytery at the front, in spite of the packed church, a reverent hush fell over the crowd, broken only by the weeping of some who were overcome with gratitude to God for returning their Padre to them.
How did they all know I’d be here? Pio wondered as he gazed out at the interior of the church and saw that every square inch of floor and pew were taken up by worshippers, some kneeling in the aisle, some kneeling at their pews. The Provincial. Yes, he obviously hadn’t been able to keep it a secret. And now Pio couldn’t help but grin. I have no words with which to thank You, dear Jesus, for bringing me back to them. May You always reach out to them and minister to them through me, even beyond my death.
During that morning’s Holy Communion, the communicants, before receiving Jesus from Pio’s hand, would kneel and kiss the ground. With tears streaming down their faces, they would open their mouths and receive their Lord from the hands of their “saint.” Pio’s tears matched theirs, but still he had to remind some of them to “calm down; all is well now.”
After Mass, greeting the crowd in the corridor, Pio overheard a visiting priest from Bavaria say to someone, “When I saw Padre Pio remove his gloves and allow the blood to drip from his hands throughout Mass; when I heard his voice overflowing with love for God; when I saw his deep brown eyes, so intense and clear, focused solely on Christ in the Eucharist as he consecrated the bread and wine; when I saw the tears roll down the cheeks of his still-handsome face, I saw Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus had come to life again on earth through this holy man.” The Bavarian priest brushed the tears from his eyes, and in a voice hoarse with emotion continued, “I feel as if all my life I’ve been like the Apostle Thomas who doubted it was really Christ who had appeared to the disciples after the resurrection. All those years before today, had I really truly believed? I don’t know, but I do know that today I began to truly believe that Christ is alive, Christ has risen, Christ is working through this holy, saintly priest.”
Padre Pio had heard similar testimonies before, and he refused to allow the praise to effect him. Still, he felt he needed to say something to the priest, so gently he insisted, “Grazie, thank you, but I’m not a saint. And I deserve no thanks or praise. I’m just a poor friar who suffers and prays. Jesus is the Source of all goodness. He is Goodness itself.” Pio glanced upward and then back at the Bavarian. “Go now, my brother, and give your thanks to Jesus in the Tabernacle for what He has done for you in renewing your faith in Him.”
In spite of the Vatican’s release of Padre Pio from exile, trouble continued to haunt him. In 1939 World War Two brought its horrors of death, destruction of property, and horrific disruption of lives and governments. And one year before the war ended, a letter arrived at the friary for Padre Pio. The letter’s words grabbed hold of his heart and mind, threatening to squeeze the life out of them.
Pellegrina!
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Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Chapter 10 of Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
TEARS OF LOVE
Chapter 10
Christmas Eve, 1928–October 1, 1929
Christmas Eve, Mama begged Mary Pyle to help her climb the hill to the friary church. So in spite of the snowstorm that had swept up the mountain from the Gulf of Manfredonia, Maria l’Americana, clad in her long brown habit into which she had stuffed newspapers to protect her flesh from the biting winds, assisted Padre Pio’s mother as the older woman staggered the one-hundred yards up the hill, bravely pressing her weak body into the fierce wind.
Ten minutes before Mass, Padre Pio hobbled out of the sacristy to greet his mother whom Mary had found room for in the front right pew near the sacristy door, while Mary had to kneel in the aisle beside her since the rest of the pews were full and pilgrims had packed the sides and back of the tiny church too. Seeing his mother wearing only a thin coat, the Padre glared at Mary Pyle. “E pazza, are you crazy? First you bring my little mother all the way from Pietrelcina during the worst winter weather we’ve had in a decade, and now you let her come to church without a heavy coat.”
Before Mary could explain, Maria Giuseppa, her blue eyes softened by her great love for her son, said, “Don’t be upset with her, Francesco. It’s my fault, not hers. I insisted she bring me here.” A weak smile decorated Maria Giuseppa’s pale face.
Switching his glare from Mary to his mother, Pio couldn’t keep his heart and voice from softening. “But look at what you’re wearing, Mammella.” He sighed, shaking his head back and forth. “Fa cattivo tempo; it’s bad weather, to say the least. You’ll catch pneumonia wearing such a thin coat.”
With Mary Pyle, clad in her long, coarse-brown habit, kneeling beside her as she sat in the pew, Maria Giuseppa smiled weakly at her son. “That’s not Mary’s fault either, Francesco. She offered me a fur coat someone had left at her home.”
“And of course you refused to wear it, Mama.” Pio wanted to add, “Testarda, obstinate person!” but respectfully did not.
“Naturalmente, of course,” Maria replied with all the innocence of a child. “You want your mother to look like a rich and important lady?”
Pio let his shoulders slump. “No, Mama, but still, your health.”
“It’s too late to worry about my health,” she said, reaching out a gnarled hand to lovingly touch his cheek.
Pio steeled himself for the words he feared were next.
“I’ve come here to die.”
Even though he knew the futility of doing so, Pio argued, “No, Mama, we’ll get you to un medico tomorrow and he’ll give you some penicillina and . . . .”
Maria Giuseppa gently placed her finger against her son’s lips. “I’ve come here so I can die near you, my son. It will give me great comfort to have you by my side at the moment the angels and Our Lady come to take me to be with Our Lord.”
In spite of Padre Pio’s intense prayers the rest of that day and night for the return of good health for his mother, after attending her son’s 5 a.m. Christmas Mass the next morning and after returning through the blistering weather to Mary Pyle’s home, Maria Giuseppa collapsed. Mary carried the now-barely-ninety-pound woman to one of the guest rooms, placed her on the soft bed, and immediately sent one of her other guests to get Dr. DeNittis, in spite of the fact it was Christmas day. As soon as the elderly bald doctor left her villa, Mary sent another of her guests to Padre Pio to tell him that his mother was coughing up blood and had been diagnosed with double pneumonia.
During the next nine days, in spite of his heavy schedule and poor health, Pio spent every moment he could spare at his mother’s bedside. When he wasn’t in the church-like stillness of her room, where together they found it so natural to meditate and pray, people urged to him to ask God for un miracolo, a miracle, but Pio knew the only miracle God had earmarked for Maria Giuseppa was the greatest miracle of all: eternal life. “God’s will be done,” he would tell everyone, his heart heavy with sorrow.
Someone argued, “But you healed Dr. Ricciardi the aetheist; you healed the village beggar Francesco Santarello and countless others. Surely you can heal your own mother who is such a holy woman.”
Pio patiently reminded the individual, “I have no power to heal. Only God can heal and only when He chooses to do so. All I can do is pray, Pater Noster, fiat voluntas tua. Our Father, thy will be done.”
Before dawn on January 3, only nine days after her collapse in Mary Pyle’s villa, Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione received the last rites from her son. And on that bitterly cold morning, only one hour before Padre Pio was to begin his 5 a.m. Mass, Maria Giuseppa kissed the crucifix she held in her gnarled hands and, with a sweet smile on her thin, seemingly bloodless lips, died, her priest-son kneeling and praying beside her bed.
Slowly, reverently Pio kissed his mother’s forehead and, in the presence of Mary Pyle and two of his fellow friars, he collapsed on the floor. “Mama,” he muttered, “you loved me so much.” Between sobs he continued to mumble words of sorrow and devotion, “Mama mia, my beautiful mother, you sacrificed so much for me.”
The stout Padre Vigilio helped Pio to his feet but needed the assistance of the other friar to get the distraught stigmatic to a separate guest room on Mary Pyle’s first floor. “Mammella, my sweet and holy mother,” Pio muttered, tears streaming down his cheeks and into his dark beard, as the two friars eased him into bed. Trying to focus through his tears on the sorrowful face of Padre Vigilio above him, Pio said, “She loved me so much, you know.” A moan escaped Pio’s lips; he closed his eyes and continued to sob.
Shocked by the intensity of the stigmatic’s grief, Vigilio tucked the covers snugly against his friend’s neck and tried to console him. “Surely your saintly mother is in heaven now, so you don’t need to feel badly; try not to cry.”
Blinking back his tears, Padre Pio gazed tenderly at Vigilio. “I know, my son, I know, but you must understand that these are tears of love.”
“Tears of love” continued to flow from Padre Pio’s eyes for the next week. His heavy heart prevented him from even getting out of bed long enough to leave Mary’s house and return the one hundred yards uphill to the friary and church to fulfill his duties. During the next couple of days Pio couldn’t even attend his mother’s funeral. Instead, he mourned from his first-floor room at Mary’s house and watched from the two large windows as the cortege inched down the hill and toward the cemetery. He barely noticed Mary’s snow-covered front garden with its almond trees shrouded in white, the fields that months ago were ripe with grain, the horizon that led to the Gulf of Manfredonia, and the vast plains of the Pugliese. But Pio was with the cortege in prayer and in spirit, and his presence comforted them in their mourning, even though nothing seemed to ease his own grief.
Even when he was finally able to return to his duties, his confreres often heard Padre Pio quietly weeping and muttering, “Oh, Mama, my sweet and holy mama.” Often his thoughts would fly back to his childhood. He recalled how his mother Giuseppa had always showered kindness and care, not only on her family but on anyone in the village who needed her, and people had fondly called her “Mama Peppa.” Even now, weeks after her death, Pio could almost smell the bread she would bake before dawn for her family and he could almost taste the mellow cheese she would make from the milk of the family goat. Poor Mammella, he now thought, you worked so hard, even fetching water every day from the Madunnella Spring. How he had loved, as a little boy, to accompany her on those treks and to imitate his mother’s devotion as she knelt and prayed at the little shrine someone had erected near the Spring to honor the Queen of Heaven, St. Michael the Archangel, and St. Anthony.
During that cold winter of 1929, only weeks after his mother’s death, Padre Pio found a small measure of comfort in recalling his days as little Francesco Forgione. Such a hard life, he now thought, but our family was so full of love for each other and our neighbors and God. He remembered how, in spite of that hard life, Mama had always made sure the Forgiones properly celebrated the great feasts of the Church, especially Christmas and Easter. Pio could remember the Christmas zeppole which he used to eat until he could hold no more, and the Easter sweets his mother would make that even now made his mouth water just thinking about them. Every year he had hungrily watched as she used sugar, flour, rice, ricotta cheese, and eggs to make the traditional candies, breads, and the tortano, a cake-like dessert that embraced a whole egg in its center.
Now Pio recalled how, even though his parents seldom had ten lire in the house, Maria Giuseppa would share what food they had with the poorest families in Pietrelcina. Each year she would give some of the produce from their small rocky plot of ground as an offering for a novena of Masses to be said for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Thanks to his mother’s deep faith, the ever-increasing number of souls from Purgatory who continued to visit Pio and beg him for his prayers for their release into Heaven brought his fearless and unwavering cooperation and help.
Throughout the rest of that winter of 1929, as always, Pio never wavered in his service to all the souls—both from this earthly life and that of Purgatory—who sought his prayers, advice, and spiritual gifts. And finally the fierce winter winds that had relentlessly buffeted the friary and church from the Adriatic Sea and Gulf of Manfredonia, bringing with them heavy snows, changed to the soft, warm breezes of spring. March, 1929, witnessed the friary garden’s almond trees bursting with pink blossoms and the ancient cypress and pines sighing beneath the gentle caresses of the March breezes as if relieved that spring had finally arrived. Even the birds, like the goldfinch whose dull winter feathers were gradually turning bright yellow, seemed grateful for warmer weather.
Padre Pio’s period of mourning ended along with the icy winter, and he had returned to his usual heavy workload which allowed him little time for himself, including no more than four hours sleep each night. During those usual four hours, on the night of May 5, 1929, a powerful prophetic dream invaded Pio’s mind. In it, the late sixteenth-century Pope Pius V informed Pio that the stigmatic’s adversary, the local Archbishop Gagliardi, the “boss” of all of Manfredonia’s Catholics, including those of Our Lady of Grace church and friary—including Padre Pio—would soon be ousted. The shock of the prophecy startled Pio awake and triggered a coughing spell that forced him to sit up and stare into the pre-dawn darkness of his cell.
Gagliardi deposed? The archbishop had sent a continual stream of scathing accusations about Padre Pio and his friars to Rome, a stream that hadn’t stopped since it had begun early in 1919. Gagliardi had caused twenty years of trouble for Pio and his friars. And now the dream predicted the archbishop would be ousted. But he’s so powerful, even with the Vatican, Pio now thought. Then he recalled the letter he had sent to his beloved friend and spiritual director Padre Agostino shortly after the barrage of hate had begun to spew from Gagliardi toward Pio and his fellow friars: “Why are they doing this to me?” Padre Pio had written in that November 1919 letter. “I’ve done nothing to Archbishop Gagliardi—or to Rome.” Pio couldn’t help but now recall the vicious lies Gagliardi had promoted—and still was promoting—to the Vatican about him. It threw Pio into another coughing spasm as he sat alone on his narrow hard bed.
When the Padre recovered enough from coughing to continue thinking clearly about Gagliardi and the prophetic dream of this night of May 5, 1929, Pio wondered again how a prelate as powerful as the archbishop could suddenly be kicked out of office. And why?
Then Pio remembered Padre Agostino’s reply to his November 1919 letter and it made the dream of this night suddenly plausible: “The archbishop is jealous of you, my son,” Agostino had written. “He is a vile man, unworthy of the priesthood. One day his lies about you will come to light, and you will be exonerated. I have heard from trustworthy sources that the archbishop is hiding unspeakable sins concerning himself and a woman. Yes, my son, he is jealous of your sanctity. He is jealous of the crowds your gifts from God attract to your friary and church—to you, my son—and away from his own church and from the secular priests who serve under him. One day our Lord will reveal the truth.”
The truth? During the next five months, in spite of the usual controversary and rumors caused by Gagliardi’s lies which circulated throughout southern Italy and even at Our Lady of Grace friary and church, Padre Pio hung on, as always, to the “truth” he daily searched for and found in Scripture. Feeling a kinship with his favorite author St. Paul who, like Pio, willingly suffered for Christ and His church all the tribulation, distress, and persecutions God allowed to come into his life, Pio claimed the promise in St. Paul’s words inspired by the Holy Spirit: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
On October 1, 1929, Pio sat inside at one of the friary windows overlooking the garden, his coarse brown shawl pulled around his shoulders to protect him from the autumn chill that, without central heating in the friary, had free reign to roam the corridors and penetrate the flesh and bones of the residents of the friary. Even the friary’s aging mutt Berta seemed to mind the cold, and Pio often wanted to drape his brown shawl over the poor creature of God. But now, as the dying leaves fell from the garden’s deciduous trees and the last of summer’s heat-craving birds like the bee-eaters fled to warmer climates, he peacefully meditated on God’s wisdom in causing one season to follow the other and in giving a purpose to each. So deep in contemplation was he, Pio almost didn’t hear the timid voice of young Friar Tommaso speak his name. The tall, willowy new friar, silenced by awe in the presence of the famous Padre sitting before him, pressed a note into Pio’s hand. After one last glance at God’s handiwork in the garden outside his window, Pio sighed and smiled a welcome at the red-headed youth towering above him. Before Pio could thank him, Tommaso had kissed his gloved hand, bowed, turned, and dashed toward the friary office.
Padre Pio smiled at the retreating figure and hollered, “Molte grazie, thank you very much, my son!” Pio still grinned as he unfolded the note in his hand, but as he read it, his lips collapsed into a frown. He discovered that the “truth” Padre Agostino had predicted almost ten years ago had finally been revealed, and that Pio’s prophetic dream of only five months ago had come to pass. According to the note in his hand, the very note from the Provincial, Archbishop Gagliardi, indeed, had been ousted, forced into retirement! But instead of rejoicing that his persecutor had finally been silenced, Pio prayed for him, that Jesus would have mercy on Gagliardi and help him to now live a better, holier life, one where he could find the peace that had eluded him for so long. Jesus’ words echoed through Pio’s soul: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”
In his love for everyone, even Gagliardi, Padre Pio refused to allow himself to feel any relief or even any gratitude that his life would be less complicated without Gagliardi in the picture. And then something—Someone—whispered a warning in Pio’s soul, a warning declaring that his tribulations would not end with Gagliardi’s forced retirement. No, Pio would still have to deal with formidable enemies—even enemies that lived in Rome!
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Chapter 10
Christmas Eve, 1928–October 1, 1929
Christmas Eve, Mama begged Mary Pyle to help her climb the hill to the friary church. So in spite of the snowstorm that had swept up the mountain from the Gulf of Manfredonia, Maria l’Americana, clad in her long brown habit into which she had stuffed newspapers to protect her flesh from the biting winds, assisted Padre Pio’s mother as the older woman staggered the one-hundred yards up the hill, bravely pressing her weak body into the fierce wind.
Ten minutes before Mass, Padre Pio hobbled out of the sacristy to greet his mother whom Mary had found room for in the front right pew near the sacristy door, while Mary had to kneel in the aisle beside her since the rest of the pews were full and pilgrims had packed the sides and back of the tiny church too. Seeing his mother wearing only a thin coat, the Padre glared at Mary Pyle. “E pazza, are you crazy? First you bring my little mother all the way from Pietrelcina during the worst winter weather we’ve had in a decade, and now you let her come to church without a heavy coat.”
Before Mary could explain, Maria Giuseppa, her blue eyes softened by her great love for her son, said, “Don’t be upset with her, Francesco. It’s my fault, not hers. I insisted she bring me here.” A weak smile decorated Maria Giuseppa’s pale face.
Switching his glare from Mary to his mother, Pio couldn’t keep his heart and voice from softening. “But look at what you’re wearing, Mammella.” He sighed, shaking his head back and forth. “Fa cattivo tempo; it’s bad weather, to say the least. You’ll catch pneumonia wearing such a thin coat.”
With Mary Pyle, clad in her long, coarse-brown habit, kneeling beside her as she sat in the pew, Maria Giuseppa smiled weakly at her son. “That’s not Mary’s fault either, Francesco. She offered me a fur coat someone had left at her home.”
“And of course you refused to wear it, Mama.” Pio wanted to add, “Testarda, obstinate person!” but respectfully did not.
“Naturalmente, of course,” Maria replied with all the innocence of a child. “You want your mother to look like a rich and important lady?”
Pio let his shoulders slump. “No, Mama, but still, your health.”
“It’s too late to worry about my health,” she said, reaching out a gnarled hand to lovingly touch his cheek.
Pio steeled himself for the words he feared were next.
“I’ve come here to die.”
Even though he knew the futility of doing so, Pio argued, “No, Mama, we’ll get you to un medico tomorrow and he’ll give you some penicillina and . . . .”
Maria Giuseppa gently placed her finger against her son’s lips. “I’ve come here so I can die near you, my son. It will give me great comfort to have you by my side at the moment the angels and Our Lady come to take me to be with Our Lord.”
In spite of Padre Pio’s intense prayers the rest of that day and night for the return of good health for his mother, after attending her son’s 5 a.m. Christmas Mass the next morning and after returning through the blistering weather to Mary Pyle’s home, Maria Giuseppa collapsed. Mary carried the now-barely-ninety-pound woman to one of the guest rooms, placed her on the soft bed, and immediately sent one of her other guests to get Dr. DeNittis, in spite of the fact it was Christmas day. As soon as the elderly bald doctor left her villa, Mary sent another of her guests to Padre Pio to tell him that his mother was coughing up blood and had been diagnosed with double pneumonia.
During the next nine days, in spite of his heavy schedule and poor health, Pio spent every moment he could spare at his mother’s bedside. When he wasn’t in the church-like stillness of her room, where together they found it so natural to meditate and pray, people urged to him to ask God for un miracolo, a miracle, but Pio knew the only miracle God had earmarked for Maria Giuseppa was the greatest miracle of all: eternal life. “God’s will be done,” he would tell everyone, his heart heavy with sorrow.
Someone argued, “But you healed Dr. Ricciardi the aetheist; you healed the village beggar Francesco Santarello and countless others. Surely you can heal your own mother who is such a holy woman.”
Pio patiently reminded the individual, “I have no power to heal. Only God can heal and only when He chooses to do so. All I can do is pray, Pater Noster, fiat voluntas tua. Our Father, thy will be done.”
Before dawn on January 3, only nine days after her collapse in Mary Pyle’s villa, Maria Giuseppa de Nunzio Forgione received the last rites from her son. And on that bitterly cold morning, only one hour before Padre Pio was to begin his 5 a.m. Mass, Maria Giuseppa kissed the crucifix she held in her gnarled hands and, with a sweet smile on her thin, seemingly bloodless lips, died, her priest-son kneeling and praying beside her bed.
Slowly, reverently Pio kissed his mother’s forehead and, in the presence of Mary Pyle and two of his fellow friars, he collapsed on the floor. “Mama,” he muttered, “you loved me so much.” Between sobs he continued to mumble words of sorrow and devotion, “Mama mia, my beautiful mother, you sacrificed so much for me.”
The stout Padre Vigilio helped Pio to his feet but needed the assistance of the other friar to get the distraught stigmatic to a separate guest room on Mary Pyle’s first floor. “Mammella, my sweet and holy mother,” Pio muttered, tears streaming down his cheeks and into his dark beard, as the two friars eased him into bed. Trying to focus through his tears on the sorrowful face of Padre Vigilio above him, Pio said, “She loved me so much, you know.” A moan escaped Pio’s lips; he closed his eyes and continued to sob.
Shocked by the intensity of the stigmatic’s grief, Vigilio tucked the covers snugly against his friend’s neck and tried to console him. “Surely your saintly mother is in heaven now, so you don’t need to feel badly; try not to cry.”
Blinking back his tears, Padre Pio gazed tenderly at Vigilio. “I know, my son, I know, but you must understand that these are tears of love.”
“Tears of love” continued to flow from Padre Pio’s eyes for the next week. His heavy heart prevented him from even getting out of bed long enough to leave Mary’s house and return the one hundred yards uphill to the friary and church to fulfill his duties. During the next couple of days Pio couldn’t even attend his mother’s funeral. Instead, he mourned from his first-floor room at Mary’s house and watched from the two large windows as the cortege inched down the hill and toward the cemetery. He barely noticed Mary’s snow-covered front garden with its almond trees shrouded in white, the fields that months ago were ripe with grain, the horizon that led to the Gulf of Manfredonia, and the vast plains of the Pugliese. But Pio was with the cortege in prayer and in spirit, and his presence comforted them in their mourning, even though nothing seemed to ease his own grief.
Even when he was finally able to return to his duties, his confreres often heard Padre Pio quietly weeping and muttering, “Oh, Mama, my sweet and holy mama.” Often his thoughts would fly back to his childhood. He recalled how his mother Giuseppa had always showered kindness and care, not only on her family but on anyone in the village who needed her, and people had fondly called her “Mama Peppa.” Even now, weeks after her death, Pio could almost smell the bread she would bake before dawn for her family and he could almost taste the mellow cheese she would make from the milk of the family goat. Poor Mammella, he now thought, you worked so hard, even fetching water every day from the Madunnella Spring. How he had loved, as a little boy, to accompany her on those treks and to imitate his mother’s devotion as she knelt and prayed at the little shrine someone had erected near the Spring to honor the Queen of Heaven, St. Michael the Archangel, and St. Anthony.
During that cold winter of 1929, only weeks after his mother’s death, Padre Pio found a small measure of comfort in recalling his days as little Francesco Forgione. Such a hard life, he now thought, but our family was so full of love for each other and our neighbors and God. He remembered how, in spite of that hard life, Mama had always made sure the Forgiones properly celebrated the great feasts of the Church, especially Christmas and Easter. Pio could remember the Christmas zeppole which he used to eat until he could hold no more, and the Easter sweets his mother would make that even now made his mouth water just thinking about them. Every year he had hungrily watched as she used sugar, flour, rice, ricotta cheese, and eggs to make the traditional candies, breads, and the tortano, a cake-like dessert that embraced a whole egg in its center.
Now Pio recalled how, even though his parents seldom had ten lire in the house, Maria Giuseppa would share what food they had with the poorest families in Pietrelcina. Each year she would give some of the produce from their small rocky plot of ground as an offering for a novena of Masses to be said for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Thanks to his mother’s deep faith, the ever-increasing number of souls from Purgatory who continued to visit Pio and beg him for his prayers for their release into Heaven brought his fearless and unwavering cooperation and help.
Throughout the rest of that winter of 1929, as always, Pio never wavered in his service to all the souls—both from this earthly life and that of Purgatory—who sought his prayers, advice, and spiritual gifts. And finally the fierce winter winds that had relentlessly buffeted the friary and church from the Adriatic Sea and Gulf of Manfredonia, bringing with them heavy snows, changed to the soft, warm breezes of spring. March, 1929, witnessed the friary garden’s almond trees bursting with pink blossoms and the ancient cypress and pines sighing beneath the gentle caresses of the March breezes as if relieved that spring had finally arrived. Even the birds, like the goldfinch whose dull winter feathers were gradually turning bright yellow, seemed grateful for warmer weather.
Padre Pio’s period of mourning ended along with the icy winter, and he had returned to his usual heavy workload which allowed him little time for himself, including no more than four hours sleep each night. During those usual four hours, on the night of May 5, 1929, a powerful prophetic dream invaded Pio’s mind. In it, the late sixteenth-century Pope Pius V informed Pio that the stigmatic’s adversary, the local Archbishop Gagliardi, the “boss” of all of Manfredonia’s Catholics, including those of Our Lady of Grace church and friary—including Padre Pio—would soon be ousted. The shock of the prophecy startled Pio awake and triggered a coughing spell that forced him to sit up and stare into the pre-dawn darkness of his cell.
Gagliardi deposed? The archbishop had sent a continual stream of scathing accusations about Padre Pio and his friars to Rome, a stream that hadn’t stopped since it had begun early in 1919. Gagliardi had caused twenty years of trouble for Pio and his friars. And now the dream predicted the archbishop would be ousted. But he’s so powerful, even with the Vatican, Pio now thought. Then he recalled the letter he had sent to his beloved friend and spiritual director Padre Agostino shortly after the barrage of hate had begun to spew from Gagliardi toward Pio and his fellow friars: “Why are they doing this to me?” Padre Pio had written in that November 1919 letter. “I’ve done nothing to Archbishop Gagliardi—or to Rome.” Pio couldn’t help but now recall the vicious lies Gagliardi had promoted—and still was promoting—to the Vatican about him. It threw Pio into another coughing spasm as he sat alone on his narrow hard bed.
When the Padre recovered enough from coughing to continue thinking clearly about Gagliardi and the prophetic dream of this night of May 5, 1929, Pio wondered again how a prelate as powerful as the archbishop could suddenly be kicked out of office. And why?
Then Pio remembered Padre Agostino’s reply to his November 1919 letter and it made the dream of this night suddenly plausible: “The archbishop is jealous of you, my son,” Agostino had written. “He is a vile man, unworthy of the priesthood. One day his lies about you will come to light, and you will be exonerated. I have heard from trustworthy sources that the archbishop is hiding unspeakable sins concerning himself and a woman. Yes, my son, he is jealous of your sanctity. He is jealous of the crowds your gifts from God attract to your friary and church—to you, my son—and away from his own church and from the secular priests who serve under him. One day our Lord will reveal the truth.”
The truth? During the next five months, in spite of the usual controversary and rumors caused by Gagliardi’s lies which circulated throughout southern Italy and even at Our Lady of Grace friary and church, Padre Pio hung on, as always, to the “truth” he daily searched for and found in Scripture. Feeling a kinship with his favorite author St. Paul who, like Pio, willingly suffered for Christ and His church all the tribulation, distress, and persecutions God allowed to come into his life, Pio claimed the promise in St. Paul’s words inspired by the Holy Spirit: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
On October 1, 1929, Pio sat inside at one of the friary windows overlooking the garden, his coarse brown shawl pulled around his shoulders to protect him from the autumn chill that, without central heating in the friary, had free reign to roam the corridors and penetrate the flesh and bones of the residents of the friary. Even the friary’s aging mutt Berta seemed to mind the cold, and Pio often wanted to drape his brown shawl over the poor creature of God. But now, as the dying leaves fell from the garden’s deciduous trees and the last of summer’s heat-craving birds like the bee-eaters fled to warmer climates, he peacefully meditated on God’s wisdom in causing one season to follow the other and in giving a purpose to each. So deep in contemplation was he, Pio almost didn’t hear the timid voice of young Friar Tommaso speak his name. The tall, willowy new friar, silenced by awe in the presence of the famous Padre sitting before him, pressed a note into Pio’s hand. After one last glance at God’s handiwork in the garden outside his window, Pio sighed and smiled a welcome at the red-headed youth towering above him. Before Pio could thank him, Tommaso had kissed his gloved hand, bowed, turned, and dashed toward the friary office.
Padre Pio smiled at the retreating figure and hollered, “Molte grazie, thank you very much, my son!” Pio still grinned as he unfolded the note in his hand, but as he read it, his lips collapsed into a frown. He discovered that the “truth” Padre Agostino had predicted almost ten years ago had finally been revealed, and that Pio’s prophetic dream of only five months ago had come to pass. According to the note in his hand, the very note from the Provincial, Archbishop Gagliardi, indeed, had been ousted, forced into retirement! But instead of rejoicing that his persecutor had finally been silenced, Pio prayed for him, that Jesus would have mercy on Gagliardi and help him to now live a better, holier life, one where he could find the peace that had eluded him for so long. Jesus’ words echoed through Pio’s soul: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”
In his love for everyone, even Gagliardi, Padre Pio refused to allow himself to feel any relief or even any gratitude that his life would be less complicated without Gagliardi in the picture. And then something—Someone—whispered a warning in Pio’s soul, a warning declaring that his tribulations would not end with Gagliardi’s forced retirement. No, Pio would still have to deal with formidable enemies—even enemies that lived in Rome!
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Saturday, October 3, 2009
Chapter 9 of Pierced by Love: A Fictionalized Biography of St. Padre Pio
DON’T CRY, MAMMA
Chapter 9
“Mammella!” Pio cried again, finally releasing his mother from his embrace. Grinning, he eagerly studied the deeply wrinkled, still-beautiful-to-him face of the stooped-yet-stately peasant woman. But a sudden realization stabbed his heart, turning his smile into a frown: This always-intensely devout woman, Maria Giuseppa De Nunzio Forgione, had aged beyond her sixty-nine years since he had last seen her. Now she seemed so shrunken and frail—and so troubled. Lovingly studying the sharp features of her solemn face, her sad, blue eyes that betrayed exhaustion and anxiety, he asked, “How long has it been, Mama, since we last saw each other?”
“Too long, Francesco, my priest-son, too long,” she said in a voice that sounded weary and old.
Yes, too long, he thought, guilt stabbing him as he regretted his inability, since September 20, 1918, to travel the long, rocky, mountainous road that joined the friary to Pietrelcina, his childhood home. To banish the feelings of guilt, he now reminded himself of the impossibility of his traveling to that ancient village in a mule cart over the eighty-some tortuous miles, and then back again to the friary. Then once again he realized the frailty of the almost-seventy-year-old figure before him. “But how did you get here, Mama? You must be worn out.” He ushered her over to the wooden bench at the side of the huge wardrobe. As he helped his mother to ease onto the seat, he tried to lighten the mood with, “Did Papa bring you in that rickety old mule cart of his? The last time I saw his asino, his donkey, the poor decrepit animal looked about as capable of traveling up the mountain to this friary as la mia poltrona, my armchair.”
Her son’s humor succeeded in raising a smile from Mama’s thin, colorless lips as she replied, “Your friend, l’Americana Maria, Mary Pyle, when she last visited your papa and me and found out how badly I wanted to see you, my priest-son, she gave me enough money to take a stagecoach to see you, and she invited me to stay in her home.”
“Magnifico; great!”
Her cheeks tinged red with embarrassment, Mama added, “Please know that I didn’t want to accept her charity, but she was very persuasive, Francesco.”
“Ma si; but yes,” Pio agreed, shaking his head in agreement about the stubborn-yet-holy nature of Mary Pyle. But it pleased Pio to know that his dear mother was still as humble as ever, not wanting to accept charity, preferring ‘sister poverty,’ as St. Francis always called it—the poverty of the Holy Family of Nazareth.
And now Mary Pyle’s suggestion she had made to Pio weeks ago drifted into his consciousness: Mary Pyle—always almost too-generous with her inheritance money—had asked him to give her permission to pay for his mother to travel comfortably in a stagecoach to visit him. A sigh of relief and gratitude now escaped him as he smiled at his mother’s deeply wrinkled face weathered to an almost-leather-like quality after years of hard work in the southern Italian sun in the Forgione family’s rocky field. Life had never been easy for her or for her ruggedly handsome, devoted husband Grazio (Orazio) Forgione. Pio now recalled the many times he—the boy Francesco—had early each weekday morning accompanied his parents to the family field, praying the Rosary aloud with them and his siblings as they all plodded behind the one small brown donkey that carried their tools and other supplies for the day’s work ahead of them. Now Pio remembered how, during each late-afternoon rocky journey homeward, each family member’s face would be masked by dust and perspiration, and yet in spite of the endless hard work Maria Giuseppa would face once they all reached their one-story, two-room house in the poorest section of Pietrelicina, Mama always remained positive and eager to serve her family. He remembered the peaceful smile on her tired face as she balanced a basket of vegetables on her head. He now smiled as he recalled how her long brown hair would sometimes slip from its clasp and fall over her narrow shoulders which helped support the heavy burden of vegetables she had gathered that day.
“Mammella, my little holy mother,” Pio now whispered affectionately as he stood before her, happy that he could have at least offered her a brief rest, even though on the hard sacristy bench.
At his words, Maria Giuseppa seemed to call upon some hidden energy reserve and, with the sudden intensity of her light-blue eyes piercing her son’s dark ones, stood up. But to Pio’s surprise, she immediately fell to her knees before him. “You are wrong, Francesco.”
Embarrassed by her sudden act of meekness, Pio tried to pull her into a standing position, but she firmly resisted with what had to have been the last of her meager strength. Almost sharply, she said, “It is not I who am holy, Francesco, my priest-son; it is you! Everywhere, they are calling you ‘Saint,’ and I believe that is truly what you are; God’s chosen saint.”
Much to Pio’s chagrin, Maria Giuseppa, quickly and without warning, grasped his sandaled feet and kissed them. Tears glistened in her eyes as she stared up into her son’s dark ones and said in a voice heavy with sorrow, “How can we know God doesn’t look upon us as great sinners that are going to hell? We try to make a good confession, but what if we forget something that God will hold against us forever? Maybe we’ve done something we didn’t even know was a sin. What then?”
Surely this holy woman at his feet, her tearful eyes pleading with him, was not worried about having made a poor confession or about going to hell? He had never known his mother to utter one curse word or to criticize anyone unfairly or to refuse food to any beggar. Before him knelt the woman who, along with her devout husband Orazio, had, through their words and daily actions, instilled strong Christian values into the souls of each of their children. But now recognizing the anguish in her blue eyes, Pio gently said, “Don’t worry, my sweet Mammella. The mercy of God is unfathomable, so that even if you had committed the worst sin imaginable, as long as you sincerely turn to Him and ask pardon, He will not hesitate for even an instant to forgive you and to cleanse your soul, even of the sins you may have forgotten or not known as sin, making your soul as pure as at your baptism.”
Helping his frail, now-smiling mother to stand, Pio said, “Let’s go out to the garden, Mammella, where we can talk.”
Her son’s suggestion brought a smile to Maria Giuseppa’s weary face, and she wiped the tears away with a thin, gnarled hand.
On their slow journey to the friary garden, Pio enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine on his aching shoulders, and the warmth of the friars’ smiles as they greeted their famous Padre who hobbled on swollen feet beside his stooped and smiling mother whose labored gait perfectly matched his. Even the cackling and squabbling of a few of the friary’s chickens along the way gave Pio pleasure as he held his mother’s arm so she wouldn’t fall on the rocky path.
Once he and his mother reached the garden, Pio smiled as they passed a handful of friars playing bocce on a long, narrow expanse of soft grass. He knew that soon some of those same friars would be splitting wood in the garden and stacking it for winter’s use. Padre Pio led Giuseppa Forgione over to the nearest stone bench, brushed it off with his gloved hand to prevent her white skirt from soiling, and helped her to sit down. He pulled a piece of hard candy from his pocket. “Here, Mama, suck on this until you have a chance to get something more substantial in the refectory.”
“God bless you, my priest-son.” Graciously she accepted the sweet, but as if once again preoccupied by troublesome thoughts, she merely stared at it in her open palm. Finally she tucked the candy into the pocket of her skirt and peered up at her son who still stood before her. “Per favore, please sit beside me, Francesco. I need to tell you something.”
The sudden dark tone of his mother’s voice prompted Pio to quickly plant himself beside her and to silently wait for whatever she might say. Whatever it was, her eyes warned him that is wasn’t good. He pulled a checkered handkerchief from his pocket and coughed into it. The hot, dry air—made only slightly cooler by the shade of the almond trees hovering around the bench—irritated his always-troubled lungs. Worried about what his mother might say next, he barely noticed the evening songs of the nightingales or the chanting of an evening prayer of a fellow friar who was strolling along an adjacent path.
Before Pio could prompt his mother to speak, she said, “You must do something about your sister.”
“Which sister?” he asked, pretending he didn’t already know exactly who his mother meant.
“Pellegrina.” Maria Giuseppa spoke the name as if it scalded her throat.
Pellegrina. Pio recalled how his younger sister had broken their mother’s heart by getting pregnant out of wedlock, not just once, but twice, to two different men. But thank God, Pellegrina kept the babies! Though Pio thought she was outwardly the most beautiful of his three sisters, he knew that inwardly her sinful ways shrouded her soul and would do so forever if she didn’t turn from her sins before it was too late. Give me strength, Lord, Pio silently begged. “Tell me, Mammella, all about her and what it is that you want me to do.”
With tears coursing over the deep wrinkles of her face, Maria Giuseppa said, “Maybe it was a combination of her husband Antonio deserting her and the deaths of her two babies Maria and Alfredo that has driven Pellegrina to do the things she’s done, but Francesco, when is she going to turn to God and follow the path He has set before her?” In a hoarse whisper, Mama continued, “What have I done wrong, my priest-son, that has made this daughter of mine go astray? This is why God must surely want to condemn me. He surely cannot forgive whatever it is I did or did not do in raising Pellegrina that caused her to turn away from Him.”
The agony in his mother’s voice tore at Pio’s heart. He tenderly touched her cheek as he stared into her eyes. “Believe, Mammella, you did nothing wrong in raising Pellegrina. You treated her exactly the same way you treated all of us. Look, your son Michele is a hard-working husband and father; your daughter Felicita, before she died, lived an exemplary life with her family; your daughter Grazia lives a holy life as a nun; and the son before you, well, at least I’ve never been in jail!” His weak attempt to make his mother smile failed. “Mama, you’ve done nothing wrong; please believe me.”
Maria Giuseppa looked hopefully at her son through her tears. “If only I could,” she whispered.
“You can, Mama. Just remember Our Lord himself chose His disciples and taught them all the same things in the same way and ‘raised’ them, so to speak, to follow His divine example. But did they all do that? No. Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus.”
Shock registered on Maria’s face and in her voice as she said, “Grazie a Dio; good heavens! You’re saying Pellegrina is a Judas? She might be wayward, Francesco, but she certainly is not evil and certainly not to be compared to a scoundrel like Judas Iscariot!”
Padre Pio sighed. “No, Mama, you’re correct; she’s not a scoundrel or evil. She’s my sweet sister; I love her and want to help her; I’d even lay down my life for her, Mama. Tell me what you’d like me to do to help her. A letter?”
“No, Francesco; you must go to her,” Maria Giuseppa said without hesitation.
“But she lives hundreds of miles away in Chieti; and you know I can’t leave the friary! You know my wounds, health problems, and tremendous workload prevent me from traveling.”
With her thin, colorless lips pressed in a determined line, Maria Giuseppa Forgione shook her white-scarved head up and down in agreement. “Si, I know you can’t travel—in your body.”
Stunned by the realization that she somehow knew about him traveling in spirit, Pio just stared at her as she continued, “Don’t look at me that way, Francesco, as if you don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s well-known in Pietrelcina how you visited Orazio, your father, when he was working in America. He told me himself how you appeared to him and saved him from falling to his death at the place where he worked. And your brother Michele told us all how, when he too was working in America, you appeared at his sickbed where he was dying of influenza. He said you placed your bleeding hand on his forehead and healed him. We have heard many other stories, too, and we believe them, Francesco.”
Staring into her son’s eyes with the same fire he had seen flash in them during his childhood when she had ordered him to eat broccoli or to clean out the donkey’s stall, she said, “Go to Pellegrina and convince her she must return to God before it’s too late.”
Knowing it was futile to argue with this woman who had given him birth and all the love she could during his last forty-one years, Padre Pio sighed in resignation. “Mama, I promise, I’ll talk to Jesus about Pellegrina and then trust Him to use me to help her.”
The next day, in a comfortably padded stagecoach, Maria Giuseppa left the friary and headed back to Pietrelcina. Faithful to his promise, her stigmatized son pleaded with God to use him to help Pellegrina. By the power of Your Holy Spirit, Lord, You can take me to her in spirit and use me to influence her to return to You.
The following week, Pio’s spiritual “visit” to Pellegrina seemed to convince her that she needed to at least consider reconciling with the Lord, but God let Padre Pio know that it would be many more years before she actually repented. In the meantime, the priest was to pray, fast, and offer up sacrifices for her.
Not until early December of 1928 did Pio again see his beloved mother. By that time, heavy snows had blanketed the friary and church, forcing the friars and devoted volunteers to spend hours shoveling out the entrances. Fierce winds buffeted the ancient buildings, rattling the windows, seeping into every crack in the aged structures, and threatening to knock to the cold, hard ground anyone who dared venture out into the unfriendly weather. In spite of the cruel outside conditions at Our Lady of Grace, Mary Pyle took a stagecoach to Pietrelcina for a short visit with Padre Pio’s parents whom she had come to know and love through her service and devotion to Pio.
While Mary was at the Forgiones’, Padre Pio could not help but recall with joy and longing his birthplace. Lord, what a wonderful place; Your own home in Nazareth must have been just as humble. Pio chuckled, remembering how during the harsh Pietrelcina winters, the Forgiones sometimes would have to bring their donkey inside the house to keep the poor creature warm. You, too, had animals inside Your birthplace, Jesus. Even the moss-covered roof tiles had given the Forgiones’ two-room dwelling a humble, almost-stable-like appearance. Tears threatened to spill from Pio’s eyes as he recalled the sacrifices his parents had continually made for their children. Papa and Mama seldom had ten lire, but we never lacked anything we absolutely needed, especially love.
In spite of the harsh weather at Our Lady of Grace friary and church, on December 5, Mary Pyle brought back with her Maria Giuseppa Forgione to stay as a guest in her rose-colored villa nestled among the snow-covered olive trees. As soon as one of the friars relayed to Pio what Mary had done, he growled his displeasure about her actions, “Che sciocca; what a fool to bring poor Mama all the way up here in this miserable weather!”
Not until his 5 a.m. Mass the next morning did Padre Pio get the chance to see his beloved mother. When she hobbled toward him during Holy Communion to receive Jesus in the Host, her more-stooped-than-usual appearance and her obviously decaying health stunned him. In spite of the sudden tears that threatened to spill from his eyes, he reverently placed the “hidden” Jesus on Maria Giuseppa’s tongue. But before he could stop her, she fell to her knees before him and kissed the ground, as if to reverence the floor upon which her stigmatized son stood.
Mary Pyle who followed close behind Pio’s mother helped the frail woman to stand and to return to their pew after Mary, too, received the Host from Padre Pio’s bleeding hand.
After Mass, when Pio had finished his thanksgiving and hobbled into the corridor, flanked by his bodyguard Padre Vigilio, he searched the group of waiting pilgrims for one specific face. When he spotted it, he pushed his way through the clambering, noisy crowd, with the help of Vigilio, until he reached that one person: Maria Giuseppa. Ignoring even Mary Pyle who stood beside Maria, supporting the frail woman with her sturdy arms, Pio cried, “Mammella!” He took his mother gently into his arms in spite of the pain it caused his wounded hands. Her bony frame seemed more shrunken and frail than it had during her last visit. When he kissed her forehead, its heat startled him. “You must go to bed right away, Mama. You’re sick!”
Her only answer was her sudden coughing spell.
And then Pio knew. She had come here to die.
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Chapter 9
“Mammella!” Pio cried again, finally releasing his mother from his embrace. Grinning, he eagerly studied the deeply wrinkled, still-beautiful-to-him face of the stooped-yet-stately peasant woman. But a sudden realization stabbed his heart, turning his smile into a frown: This always-intensely devout woman, Maria Giuseppa De Nunzio Forgione, had aged beyond her sixty-nine years since he had last seen her. Now she seemed so shrunken and frail—and so troubled. Lovingly studying the sharp features of her solemn face, her sad, blue eyes that betrayed exhaustion and anxiety, he asked, “How long has it been, Mama, since we last saw each other?”
“Too long, Francesco, my priest-son, too long,” she said in a voice that sounded weary and old.
Yes, too long, he thought, guilt stabbing him as he regretted his inability, since September 20, 1918, to travel the long, rocky, mountainous road that joined the friary to Pietrelcina, his childhood home. To banish the feelings of guilt, he now reminded himself of the impossibility of his traveling to that ancient village in a mule cart over the eighty-some tortuous miles, and then back again to the friary. Then once again he realized the frailty of the almost-seventy-year-old figure before him. “But how did you get here, Mama? You must be worn out.” He ushered her over to the wooden bench at the side of the huge wardrobe. As he helped his mother to ease onto the seat, he tried to lighten the mood with, “Did Papa bring you in that rickety old mule cart of his? The last time I saw his asino, his donkey, the poor decrepit animal looked about as capable of traveling up the mountain to this friary as la mia poltrona, my armchair.”
Her son’s humor succeeded in raising a smile from Mama’s thin, colorless lips as she replied, “Your friend, l’Americana Maria, Mary Pyle, when she last visited your papa and me and found out how badly I wanted to see you, my priest-son, she gave me enough money to take a stagecoach to see you, and she invited me to stay in her home.”
“Magnifico; great!”
Her cheeks tinged red with embarrassment, Mama added, “Please know that I didn’t want to accept her charity, but she was very persuasive, Francesco.”
“Ma si; but yes,” Pio agreed, shaking his head in agreement about the stubborn-yet-holy nature of Mary Pyle. But it pleased Pio to know that his dear mother was still as humble as ever, not wanting to accept charity, preferring ‘sister poverty,’ as St. Francis always called it—the poverty of the Holy Family of Nazareth.
And now Mary Pyle’s suggestion she had made to Pio weeks ago drifted into his consciousness: Mary Pyle—always almost too-generous with her inheritance money—had asked him to give her permission to pay for his mother to travel comfortably in a stagecoach to visit him. A sigh of relief and gratitude now escaped him as he smiled at his mother’s deeply wrinkled face weathered to an almost-leather-like quality after years of hard work in the southern Italian sun in the Forgione family’s rocky field. Life had never been easy for her or for her ruggedly handsome, devoted husband Grazio (Orazio) Forgione. Pio now recalled the many times he—the boy Francesco—had early each weekday morning accompanied his parents to the family field, praying the Rosary aloud with them and his siblings as they all plodded behind the one small brown donkey that carried their tools and other supplies for the day’s work ahead of them. Now Pio remembered how, during each late-afternoon rocky journey homeward, each family member’s face would be masked by dust and perspiration, and yet in spite of the endless hard work Maria Giuseppa would face once they all reached their one-story, two-room house in the poorest section of Pietrelicina, Mama always remained positive and eager to serve her family. He remembered the peaceful smile on her tired face as she balanced a basket of vegetables on her head. He now smiled as he recalled how her long brown hair would sometimes slip from its clasp and fall over her narrow shoulders which helped support the heavy burden of vegetables she had gathered that day.
“Mammella, my little holy mother,” Pio now whispered affectionately as he stood before her, happy that he could have at least offered her a brief rest, even though on the hard sacristy bench.
At his words, Maria Giuseppa seemed to call upon some hidden energy reserve and, with the sudden intensity of her light-blue eyes piercing her son’s dark ones, stood up. But to Pio’s surprise, she immediately fell to her knees before him. “You are wrong, Francesco.”
Embarrassed by her sudden act of meekness, Pio tried to pull her into a standing position, but she firmly resisted with what had to have been the last of her meager strength. Almost sharply, she said, “It is not I who am holy, Francesco, my priest-son; it is you! Everywhere, they are calling you ‘Saint,’ and I believe that is truly what you are; God’s chosen saint.”
Much to Pio’s chagrin, Maria Giuseppa, quickly and without warning, grasped his sandaled feet and kissed them. Tears glistened in her eyes as she stared up into her son’s dark ones and said in a voice heavy with sorrow, “How can we know God doesn’t look upon us as great sinners that are going to hell? We try to make a good confession, but what if we forget something that God will hold against us forever? Maybe we’ve done something we didn’t even know was a sin. What then?”
Surely this holy woman at his feet, her tearful eyes pleading with him, was not worried about having made a poor confession or about going to hell? He had never known his mother to utter one curse word or to criticize anyone unfairly or to refuse food to any beggar. Before him knelt the woman who, along with her devout husband Orazio, had, through their words and daily actions, instilled strong Christian values into the souls of each of their children. But now recognizing the anguish in her blue eyes, Pio gently said, “Don’t worry, my sweet Mammella. The mercy of God is unfathomable, so that even if you had committed the worst sin imaginable, as long as you sincerely turn to Him and ask pardon, He will not hesitate for even an instant to forgive you and to cleanse your soul, even of the sins you may have forgotten or not known as sin, making your soul as pure as at your baptism.”
Helping his frail, now-smiling mother to stand, Pio said, “Let’s go out to the garden, Mammella, where we can talk.”
Her son’s suggestion brought a smile to Maria Giuseppa’s weary face, and she wiped the tears away with a thin, gnarled hand.
On their slow journey to the friary garden, Pio enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine on his aching shoulders, and the warmth of the friars’ smiles as they greeted their famous Padre who hobbled on swollen feet beside his stooped and smiling mother whose labored gait perfectly matched his. Even the cackling and squabbling of a few of the friary’s chickens along the way gave Pio pleasure as he held his mother’s arm so she wouldn’t fall on the rocky path.
Once he and his mother reached the garden, Pio smiled as they passed a handful of friars playing bocce on a long, narrow expanse of soft grass. He knew that soon some of those same friars would be splitting wood in the garden and stacking it for winter’s use. Padre Pio led Giuseppa Forgione over to the nearest stone bench, brushed it off with his gloved hand to prevent her white skirt from soiling, and helped her to sit down. He pulled a piece of hard candy from his pocket. “Here, Mama, suck on this until you have a chance to get something more substantial in the refectory.”
“God bless you, my priest-son.” Graciously she accepted the sweet, but as if once again preoccupied by troublesome thoughts, she merely stared at it in her open palm. Finally she tucked the candy into the pocket of her skirt and peered up at her son who still stood before her. “Per favore, please sit beside me, Francesco. I need to tell you something.”
The sudden dark tone of his mother’s voice prompted Pio to quickly plant himself beside her and to silently wait for whatever she might say. Whatever it was, her eyes warned him that is wasn’t good. He pulled a checkered handkerchief from his pocket and coughed into it. The hot, dry air—made only slightly cooler by the shade of the almond trees hovering around the bench—irritated his always-troubled lungs. Worried about what his mother might say next, he barely noticed the evening songs of the nightingales or the chanting of an evening prayer of a fellow friar who was strolling along an adjacent path.
Before Pio could prompt his mother to speak, she said, “You must do something about your sister.”
“Which sister?” he asked, pretending he didn’t already know exactly who his mother meant.
“Pellegrina.” Maria Giuseppa spoke the name as if it scalded her throat.
Pellegrina. Pio recalled how his younger sister had broken their mother’s heart by getting pregnant out of wedlock, not just once, but twice, to two different men. But thank God, Pellegrina kept the babies! Though Pio thought she was outwardly the most beautiful of his three sisters, he knew that inwardly her sinful ways shrouded her soul and would do so forever if she didn’t turn from her sins before it was too late. Give me strength, Lord, Pio silently begged. “Tell me, Mammella, all about her and what it is that you want me to do.”
With tears coursing over the deep wrinkles of her face, Maria Giuseppa said, “Maybe it was a combination of her husband Antonio deserting her and the deaths of her two babies Maria and Alfredo that has driven Pellegrina to do the things she’s done, but Francesco, when is she going to turn to God and follow the path He has set before her?” In a hoarse whisper, Mama continued, “What have I done wrong, my priest-son, that has made this daughter of mine go astray? This is why God must surely want to condemn me. He surely cannot forgive whatever it is I did or did not do in raising Pellegrina that caused her to turn away from Him.”
The agony in his mother’s voice tore at Pio’s heart. He tenderly touched her cheek as he stared into her eyes. “Believe, Mammella, you did nothing wrong in raising Pellegrina. You treated her exactly the same way you treated all of us. Look, your son Michele is a hard-working husband and father; your daughter Felicita, before she died, lived an exemplary life with her family; your daughter Grazia lives a holy life as a nun; and the son before you, well, at least I’ve never been in jail!” His weak attempt to make his mother smile failed. “Mama, you’ve done nothing wrong; please believe me.”
Maria Giuseppa looked hopefully at her son through her tears. “If only I could,” she whispered.
“You can, Mama. Just remember Our Lord himself chose His disciples and taught them all the same things in the same way and ‘raised’ them, so to speak, to follow His divine example. But did they all do that? No. Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus.”
Shock registered on Maria’s face and in her voice as she said, “Grazie a Dio; good heavens! You’re saying Pellegrina is a Judas? She might be wayward, Francesco, but she certainly is not evil and certainly not to be compared to a scoundrel like Judas Iscariot!”
Padre Pio sighed. “No, Mama, you’re correct; she’s not a scoundrel or evil. She’s my sweet sister; I love her and want to help her; I’d even lay down my life for her, Mama. Tell me what you’d like me to do to help her. A letter?”
“No, Francesco; you must go to her,” Maria Giuseppa said without hesitation.
“But she lives hundreds of miles away in Chieti; and you know I can’t leave the friary! You know my wounds, health problems, and tremendous workload prevent me from traveling.”
With her thin, colorless lips pressed in a determined line, Maria Giuseppa Forgione shook her white-scarved head up and down in agreement. “Si, I know you can’t travel—in your body.”
Stunned by the realization that she somehow knew about him traveling in spirit, Pio just stared at her as she continued, “Don’t look at me that way, Francesco, as if you don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s well-known in Pietrelcina how you visited Orazio, your father, when he was working in America. He told me himself how you appeared to him and saved him from falling to his death at the place where he worked. And your brother Michele told us all how, when he too was working in America, you appeared at his sickbed where he was dying of influenza. He said you placed your bleeding hand on his forehead and healed him. We have heard many other stories, too, and we believe them, Francesco.”
Staring into her son’s eyes with the same fire he had seen flash in them during his childhood when she had ordered him to eat broccoli or to clean out the donkey’s stall, she said, “Go to Pellegrina and convince her she must return to God before it’s too late.”
Knowing it was futile to argue with this woman who had given him birth and all the love she could during his last forty-one years, Padre Pio sighed in resignation. “Mama, I promise, I’ll talk to Jesus about Pellegrina and then trust Him to use me to help her.”
The next day, in a comfortably padded stagecoach, Maria Giuseppa left the friary and headed back to Pietrelcina. Faithful to his promise, her stigmatized son pleaded with God to use him to help Pellegrina. By the power of Your Holy Spirit, Lord, You can take me to her in spirit and use me to influence her to return to You.
The following week, Pio’s spiritual “visit” to Pellegrina seemed to convince her that she needed to at least consider reconciling with the Lord, but God let Padre Pio know that it would be many more years before she actually repented. In the meantime, the priest was to pray, fast, and offer up sacrifices for her.
Not until early December of 1928 did Pio again see his beloved mother. By that time, heavy snows had blanketed the friary and church, forcing the friars and devoted volunteers to spend hours shoveling out the entrances. Fierce winds buffeted the ancient buildings, rattling the windows, seeping into every crack in the aged structures, and threatening to knock to the cold, hard ground anyone who dared venture out into the unfriendly weather. In spite of the cruel outside conditions at Our Lady of Grace, Mary Pyle took a stagecoach to Pietrelcina for a short visit with Padre Pio’s parents whom she had come to know and love through her service and devotion to Pio.
While Mary was at the Forgiones’, Padre Pio could not help but recall with joy and longing his birthplace. Lord, what a wonderful place; Your own home in Nazareth must have been just as humble. Pio chuckled, remembering how during the harsh Pietrelcina winters, the Forgiones sometimes would have to bring their donkey inside the house to keep the poor creature warm. You, too, had animals inside Your birthplace, Jesus. Even the moss-covered roof tiles had given the Forgiones’ two-room dwelling a humble, almost-stable-like appearance. Tears threatened to spill from Pio’s eyes as he recalled the sacrifices his parents had continually made for their children. Papa and Mama seldom had ten lire, but we never lacked anything we absolutely needed, especially love.
In spite of the harsh weather at Our Lady of Grace friary and church, on December 5, Mary Pyle brought back with her Maria Giuseppa Forgione to stay as a guest in her rose-colored villa nestled among the snow-covered olive trees. As soon as one of the friars relayed to Pio what Mary had done, he growled his displeasure about her actions, “Che sciocca; what a fool to bring poor Mama all the way up here in this miserable weather!”
Not until his 5 a.m. Mass the next morning did Padre Pio get the chance to see his beloved mother. When she hobbled toward him during Holy Communion to receive Jesus in the Host, her more-stooped-than-usual appearance and her obviously decaying health stunned him. In spite of the sudden tears that threatened to spill from his eyes, he reverently placed the “hidden” Jesus on Maria Giuseppa’s tongue. But before he could stop her, she fell to her knees before him and kissed the ground, as if to reverence the floor upon which her stigmatized son stood.
Mary Pyle who followed close behind Pio’s mother helped the frail woman to stand and to return to their pew after Mary, too, received the Host from Padre Pio’s bleeding hand.
After Mass, when Pio had finished his thanksgiving and hobbled into the corridor, flanked by his bodyguard Padre Vigilio, he searched the group of waiting pilgrims for one specific face. When he spotted it, he pushed his way through the clambering, noisy crowd, with the help of Vigilio, until he reached that one person: Maria Giuseppa. Ignoring even Mary Pyle who stood beside Maria, supporting the frail woman with her sturdy arms, Pio cried, “Mammella!” He took his mother gently into his arms in spite of the pain it caused his wounded hands. Her bony frame seemed more shrunken and frail than it had during her last visit. When he kissed her forehead, its heat startled him. “You must go to bed right away, Mama. You’re sick!”
Her only answer was her sudden coughing spell.
And then Pio knew. She had come here to die.
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