St. Padre Pio

On September 23 the Church honors Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968), the Capuchin friar best known as Padre Pio — the most venerated Italian Catholic saint of the twentieth century, and the first priest in the Church's history to bear the stigmata. Born Francesco Forgione in the small Campanian town of Pietrelcina, he took the Franciscan habit at fifteen, was ordained in 1910, and in 1916 was sent to the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Rotondo on the Gargano peninsula — the house where he would remain until his death, fifty-two years later.

On September 20, 1918, while hearing confessions, Padre Pio received the visible wounds of Christ on his hands, feet, and side. He bore the stigmata for fifty years, until the wounds closed without trace in the days before his death. The phenomenon drew pilgrims — and the suspicion of the Holy Office. From the 1920s the Vatican imposed severe restrictions: he was forbidden to say Mass in public, to hear confessions, to answer letters, to show his stigmata. The bans were reversed under Pius XI in 1933, and in the mid-1960s Paul VI dismissed all remaining accusations. Throughout, the line of pilgrims to San Giovanni Rotondo only grew. He celebrated his last Mass on September 22, 1968, for the fiftieth anniversary of the stigmata, and died at 2:30 the next morning, the feast that now keeps his memory.

Padre Pio's legacy is also institutional: he founded the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza — the "Home for the Relief of Suffering" — which opened in 1956 as one of the largest hospitals in southern Italy, financed by pilgrims' offerings. He famously summed up his spiritual counsel in seven words: Prega, spera e non preoccuparti — "Pray, hope, and don't worry." He was beatified on May 2, 1999, and canonized on June 16, 2002, both times by Pope John Paul II, who had himself come to confession to Padre Pio as a young priest in 1947.

The Sanctuary of St. Pio of Pietrelcina at San Giovanni Rotondo — a great modern basilica beside the old friary, consecrated in 2004 — keeps his relics exposed for veneration, and his cell and the ancient church of Santa Maria delle Grazie stand beside it. Pietrelcina, his birthplace, is the second goal of the Padre Pio pilgrimage: the house where he was born, the chapel of Sant'Anna where he was baptized and served as an altar boy, and the countryside of Piana Romana where he spent the years of illness that kept him from his friary before 1916.