A month after ordination, Saint Pio receives the wounds of Christ

PIANA ROMANA, Pietrelcina, September 7, 1910 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin priest of twenty-three who was ordained twenty-eight days ago, received the wounds of Christ today in his hands and his feet. He was praying under an elm at Piana Romana, his family’s land two miles outside this village.

The wounds were visible and they bled. They hurt him badly, and he prayed that Jesus would take away what he called “the annoyance”. The wounds closed and could no longer be seen. The pain stayed. No account of the morning puts anyone else under that tree, and the only man St. Pio has told is the parish priest of Pietrelcina, whom the sources do not name.

The stigmata are the wounds of the crucified Christ appearing in the body of a living person: the hands, the feet, the side. St. Francis of Assisi bore them. The Capuchins keep his rule, and they have marked the feast of his stigmata on September 17 for centuries. St. Pio’s spiritual director is Padre Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis, the man to whom he owes an account of his interior life. Padre Benedetto is not at Pietrelcina and has had no word of any of this.

He was born in this village on May 25, 1887 AD and baptized the next day in the church of St Mary of the Angels, where he was given the name Francesco. He entered the Capuchins at Morcone, and on January 22, 1903 AD he took the habit and the name Pio. He was sent on to Sant’Elia a Pianisi, stayed four years, and made his solemn profession there on January 27, 1907 AD.

Illness has run through all of it: high fevers that arrived and left without warning, and long stretches when he could keep nothing down. The remedy his superiors have prescribed, over and over, is a change of air. The doctors who examined him before the ordination declared him tubercular. It did not stop the ordination.

Archbishop Paolo Schinosi ordained him priest in the cathedral of Benevento on August 10, six miles from here. His father was not there. Grazio Forgione had sailed for America again almost on the eve of it, looking for work, and kept the day among fellow immigrants at Jamaica, Long Island. St. Pio said his first Mass at Pietrelcina the next day. On Sunday, August 14 he sang his first Solemn High Mass at St Mary of the Angels, at the altar where he had been baptized twenty-three years before.

He has not joined a community since. He was stationed at Foggia after the ordination, but his health keeps sending him home, and he is living with his family here instead of in the friary. When he is not in the church, or in the house, or shut in the Torretta (the little tower) with his books, he walks out from Vico Storto Valle to Piana Romana.

The land out there is his father’s, bought with the wages Grazio Forgione sent home from his second crossing to America. St. Pio spends most of his days on it and, in summer, his nights as well, sitting in the elm’s shade to say the breviary and go on praying.

He has prayed under that tree since he was a boy, and it is where his spiritual trials began. His uncles and cousins built him a shelter at the foot of it, and he has described it in his own words: “In the summer season I was always in the country at Piana Romana, and my people, my uncles and cousins, built me a hut, a straw shelter, at the foot of this tree — leaning right against the tree. That is where I stayed night and day in the cool, to breathe pure and healthy air.” Of the hut he has also said: “In that hut, which had become a real little church for me, I did all my devotions and my prayers, night and day.”

He will tell no one for a year. The pain stays with him, worst on Fridays, and he says nothing of it to the man whose business it is. He will write to Padre Benedetto on September 8, 1911 AD, three hundred and sixty-six days from today, and he will write then because the same thing will have happened to him again the evening before.

That letter is the first account of these wounds he sets down on paper. He describes them to Padre Benedetto: “In the middle of the palm of my hands a little redness appeared, about the size of a cent, and with it a strong, sharp pain in the middle of that redness. This pain was more noticeable in the middle of the left hand, so much so that it is still there. Under my feet too I feel some pain.” He gives the reason for the year’s silence in three words: what held him back, he tells Padre Benedetto, was “quella maledetta vergogna” (that cursed shame).

The wounds went today, at his asking, but they did not go for good. They will come back visibly on the morning of September 20, 1918 AD, in the choir of the friary church at San Giovanni Rotondo, after he has said Mass. Those will not close. He will bear them, bleeding day and night, for the fifty years that remain to him.