St. Pio returns to the mountain friary he will never leave

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, this week, September 1916 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin priest of twenty-nine, was ordered back to community life this week and assigned to the friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The friary stands a mile and a half above this town on the flank of Monte Gargano. He is a soldier as well as a priest. The army called him up on November 6 of last year, put him in the medical corps and posted him to the military hospital at Naples, and tuberculosis keeps sending him home on furlough. Seven friars live here. He is to teach at the seminary and act as spiritual director to the students.

It began as a short visit, and it was made for his health. St. Pio had been living since February at the Capuchin convent of Sant’Anna in Foggia, down on the plain. Padre Paolino da Casacalenda, the guardian of this friary, saw how he was suffering in the summer heat there and brought him up the mountain on July 28. He was back down in Foggia at the beginning of August.

Then he wrote and asked to come back. The letter went on August 13 to the Provincial Minister, Padre Benedetto da San Marco in Lamis: “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.” Permission came on August 17.

The town is fourteen miles from Foggia and twenty-five from Manfredonia. The road up is rough, and people travel it on foot or on mule-back. San Giovanni Rotondo is a poor mountain village of a few thousand people, halfway up the Gargano at about 1,800 feet, on a barren promontory that looks out over the Adriatic. It takes its name from a round temple of Janus that once stood here and was succeeded by a church of St. John. The mountain has drawn pilgrims from the earliest times. According to longstanding Catholic tradition, the cave on its eastern slope is where the Archangel Michael routed the devil and afterwards appeared to shepherds, demanding a church; the Church keeps the feast of that apparition on May 8.

The friary stands on the bare rock above the last houses. The church is small and square, with no facade at all; the door is not even in the middle of the wall, and the bell above it is the only sign of what the building is. The two-storey convent, with its row of small windows, is built hard against one side. A stone well in the courtyard supplies the community’s water. An inscription over the narrow door records that the church, dedicated to Our Lady of Grace, was rebuilt in 1616 AD. The Capuchins have been on this hillside since 1540 AD, when they raised a cross on a rise at the foot of Montenero. St. Camillus de Lellis made his novitiate in this house. St. Pio has been given cell number 1.

Official estimates put the number of Italian clergy mobilised so far at 24,446, of whom about 15,000 are serving as soldiers and 2,400 as military chaplains. Several of the friars here have left for military service, and the college has been put in St. Pio’s charge.

The war has changed what people eat. The country now bakes one legal kind of wheat loaf, with more of the grain left in it. In March the government raised the required sifting rate to 85 per cent, a measure reckoned to save about six and a half million quintals of wheat a year. Last year’s harvest was poor and brought the first price controls. The army has taken men off the land and requisitioned the work animals, and it is the poor southern regions and the small family farms that have felt the requisitioning of wheat and livestock first and hardest. Districts that feed themselves, widespread in the South and in the mountains, have in many cases been left without even seed for sowing.

On paper this week’s permission is a small thing. According to longstanding tradition at San Giovanni Rotondo, the arrangement was meant to be provisional only, pending the visit of the Provincial expected at the end of the month. Apart from the absences the army and his superiors force on him, St. Pio will not spend a single day away from this building for the remaining fifty-two years of his life. The Holy See’s biographical profile of him gives the whole of it in one sentence: “In September of that year he was sent to the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo and remained there until his death.”

The small church of 1616 AD still stands. Next to it stands the much larger sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, consecrated on July 1, 1959 AD. Next to that stands the church designed by the architect Renzo Piano, begun on May 16, 1993 AD. The hospital St. Pio founded, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (the House for the Relief of Suffering), opened on May 5, 1956 AD. His remains lie in the crypt of the shrine, where Pope Benedict XVI prayed in June 2009 AD. At the beatification on May 2, 1999 AD, Pope John Paul II said of him: “If God’s Providence willed that he should be active without ever leaving his convent, as though he were ‘planted’ at the foot of the Cross, this is not without significance.”