An hour with St. Pio in his cell at San Giovanni Rotondo

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, September 4, 1916 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina is twenty-nine, a Capuchin friar and a priest of six years, and everyone in this house calls him Padre Pio. He came back up to the friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie today. The account kept at San Giovanni Rotondo by the Fondazione Voce di Padre Pio records that the arrangement was provisional, pending the Provincial’s visit at the end of the month. His own words below come from letters: one to Padre Benedetto da San Marco in Lamis, the Capuchin Provincial Minister who directs his soul and signs his permissions, the rest to spiritual children the letters do not name.

He was born Francesco Forgione at Pietrelcina, near Benevento, and was ordained at Benevento on August 10, 1910 AD. Then his health gave way. Doctors examined him and said it was tuberculosis. His superiors called him back into community more than once, and each time had to send him home again. For six years he did not live in a friary at all: he lived in his father’s house and prayed in a hut of saplings he had built at the back of the garden.

Italy is at war. St. Pio was called up on November 6, 1915 AD and put into the medical corps at the military hospital in Naples, in a uniform twice his size. He was sent home sick twice, the second time on a six months’ furlough, and he is on that furlough now, still a soldier on paper.

In February he was sent down to the Capuchin house at Foggia, out on the plain. In July the guardian of this friary, Padre Paolino da Casacalenda, was at Foggia and saw what the summer heat was doing to St. Pio. He brought him up here on July 28. That stay lasted nine days. He went back down to Foggia on August 5.

The house stands a mile and a half above the town, about 1,800 feet up the mountain. Foggia is fourteen miles off by a rough road people walk or ride on a mule. The church is a small square building without any facade. There are seven friars here. He is to teach in the seminary and direct the students.

Back in August you wrote to the Provincial asking to be sent here. What did you ask him for?

He wrote to Padre Benedetto on August 13. In the letter he asked for what he called la carità che desidero da voi (the charity I ask of you): “I am asking a charity, and I come to ask it all the more because Jesus compels me. He tells me the body must be given a little relief, to keep me ready for other trials to which he wishes to subject me. The charity I ask of you, my father, is to send me to spend some time at San Giovanni, where Jesus assures me I shall be better.” The Fondazione Voce di Padre Pio, at San Giovanni Rotondo, records how he closed the letter: “I beg you not to refuse me this charity… Other reasons still press me to ask it of you, which it is best to keep silent here.” Padre Benedetto said yes on August 17.

For six years you were a Capuchin without a cloister, a priest living in his father’s house. They kept trying to put you back into community, and the attempt at Morcone lasted days. What were those years?

He wrote to a spiritual child: “How sweet it is to live always in the shadow of the Lord in His holy cloister! Perhaps I am not worthy to rest in this holy enclosure and this is the reason why Our Lord is nearly forced to turn me out.” Of coming home from Morcone he wrote: “Yesterday I returned from Morcone where within a few days I was reduced to a state of extremity… I have become absolutely dry; weak to the extreme, I can hardly carry on for fear that Our Lord will reward me only in this life.”

Doctors have been examining you since you were a student friar, and the army’s doctors after them, and they have all come back with the same finding. What do you live on?

As a student friar he ran very high fevers that came and went suddenly, and for long stretches he could keep no food down at all. At Venafro he stayed forty days and ended by taking nothing but the Eucharist.

You direct souls by post. Last autumn a woman wrote to you frightened by her own low spirits, and by feeling nothing at all when she prayed. What did you write back?

On September 28, 1915 AD, to the low spirits: “Believe me, if I did not see you so dejected I would be less pleased because I would see you had been given fewer jewels by Our Lord.” To the feeling of nothing: “Be certain that the more a soul loves God, the less he feels it.” He ended by asking her to pray for him.

There are others like her — you have been answering these letters for years, from your father’s house at Pietrelcina and now from here. I want to ask you plainly, Padre, about the God you keep turning them towards. What is God like?

In that same letter he takes a line from the Office hymn for the dedication of a church and applies it to her: “With repeated blows of the salutary hammer and with diligent repolishing the Divine Artist prepares the stones that must enter into the composition of the eternal Edifice.”