New York Presbyterian hears St. Pio's Mass, becomes a Catholic and stays

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, this year, 1922 AD — An American woman came up the rough road to the Capuchin friary above this town this year, watched St. Pio of Pietrelcina say the Mass he begins at five every morning, and became a Catholic. She has not gone home. Mary McAlpin Pyle, a Presbyterian from New York, has taken a villa in the shadow of the friary wall. She goes to confession to him every Wednesday, and she has put on the habit of a Franciscan Tertiary. Tertiaries are lay members of the order: they need not live in community, and they may wear the habit and share in the order’s good works. She wears hers every day.

People have been climbing this mountain to see St. Pio since the autumn of 1918 AD. On the morning of September 20 that year he was alone in the choir making his thanksgiving after Mass, and he received the visible wounds of Christ in his hands, his feet and his side. News of the wounds travelled a district with few roads and almost no telephones, and pilgrims have been climbing the Gargano ever since to be blessed by him and to go to confession.

They come to a very poor mountain village. San Giovanni Rotondo sits about 1,800 feet up the flank of Monte Gargano, on a barren promontory over the Adriatic, with Foggia fourteen miles off and Manfredonia twenty-five, and the road is rough enough that most people travel it on foot or on mule-back. The friary stands a mile and a half above the town, on the rocky hillside. Its church is a small square building with no facade, and the door is not even in the middle of the wall. The bell above it is the only sign of what the place is. A two-storey convent with a row of small windows is built hard against one side, and a stone well in the courtyard supplies the friars’ 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.

Mary Pyle came up for the five o’clock Mass and went in with the rest of them. St. Pio rises at half past three to say it. Anyone who wants a place near the altar has to be in the little square outside the church by two in the morning and stand there in whatever weather until the doors open, and then push for the confessional ahead of the others. He hears the women’s confessions in the morning and the men’s in the afternoon. The Mass ran an hour and ten minutes, and the people packed around the altar prayed in silence from the first minute of it to the last, without noticing how long it had gone on.

Mary Pyle is spending her whole fortune on a friary and a church at Pietrelcina, the village where St. Pio was born, on a patch of ground beside the road out of the village. Pietrelcina is a farming town of about five thousand people, six miles from Benevento by rail.

St. Pio pointed that ground out as a seminarian, when bad health kept him at Pietrelcina for long stretches. One evening he went out walking with his cousin, the archpriest Don Salvatore Pannullo, and some other seminarians, on the road that forks one way to Benevento and the other to Pesco Sannita. He stopped the others and called out: “What a beautiful odor of incense and what beautiful chanting of Friars. Some day there will arise a monastery on that spot” — and pointed his finger at the exact ground. The seminarians laughed it off. Pannullo said: “If it is the desire of Heaven, it would be the greatest fortune for Pietrelcina.”

The friary was finished in 1926 AD, its first stone blessed by Archbishop Luigi Lavitrano of Benevento. On May 24, 1928 AD Archbishop Lavitrano laid the first stone of the church beside it, dedicated to the Holy Family and to St. Francis of Assisi. Then the work stopped with the walls a few feet high and stood that way until 1949 AD, and the church was finished two years after that. Friars live in the monastery now, and their chanting fills the church on the ground St. Pio pointed at.