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event · SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, September 1918 AD

The army hunts a deserter and finds St. Pio in his friary

Conscripted and sent home sick again and again, the Capuchin priest was listed as a deserter under a baptismal name no one on his mountain knew.

Edition of · 3 min read

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina
An ink-and-wash drawing of a stony mule track running up between dry-stone walls to a small whitewashed church with a bell over its door and a two-storey convent block beside it, with a hill town below and bare mountains behind; sheep graze by a wall and no person appears in it.
The mule track climbing from San Giovanni Rotondo to the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie on Monte Gargano, Apulia, where St. Pio of Pietrelcina was living in 1918 AD.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a brush-and-ink reportage drawing with grey wash.

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, September 1918 AD — The Italian army combed two towns for a deserter named Francesco Forgione and found him eighteen hundred feet up the Gargano, at the top of a mule track, in a Capuchin friary where everyone calls him Padre Pio. Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was discharged for good on March 16 of this year.

St. Pio is thirty-one, a Capuchin priest with tubercular lungs, and he goes by two names. He was baptised Francesco Forgione. When he took the Franciscan habit on January 22, 1903 AD he took the name Pio with it, and nobody who knows him as a friar has called him anything else since.

He was called up on November 6, 1915 AD, in the first winter of Italy’s war. The army gave him a uniform twice his size and put him in the medical corps. He served at the military hospital in Naples, and the army sent him home sick again and again — a few weeks the first time, six months the last, with orders to wait at home for further instructions. His Capuchin superiors sent him back to his community at San Giovanni Rotondo, and he settled there on September 4, 1916 AD.

The six months ran out and no soldier reported back. The army wrote him down as a deserter and sent a man to find him. The man went to the wrong address. The army still had St. Pio at Pietrelcina, in the hills of the Benevento country, where he was born and where he had lived with his family for years because his health would not stand life in community. He found no trace of him there, and nobody in the town could help him. He went on asking around the district and eventually reached one of St. Pio’s sisters. The sister told the messenger that Francesco Forgione was her brother and that he was living at San Giovanni Rotondo. A fresh set of inquiries went out there and came back empty: nobody in that town had heard of Francesco Forgione.

San Giovanni Rotondo is a poor mountain village halfway up Monte Gargano, on the barren promontory that looks over the Adriatic, eighteen hundred feet above the sea and reached by a rough road travelled mostly on foot or on mule-back. Foggia lies fourteen miles off and the port of Manfredonia twenty-five. The friary stands another mile and a half above the town, built against the rock.

The messenger climbed the track to a small square church with a blank front wall, its door not even in the middle of it and a single bell above the door the only sign of what the building was. He put his question to the friars, and this time he got an answer: Francesco Forgione was there, and he was called Padre Pio.

It was winter by then. St. Pio was brought before the captain of the district, who accused him outright of deserting. St. Pio had his leave papers with him and handed them over. The papers said he was to go home for six months and wait there for instructions. “My instructions did not come to me until today,” St. Pio told him. He was sent back to his unit and served about another month.

On March 16 of this year the army discharged him for good, entering the reason as bronco-alveolite doppia (double bronchoalveolitis). It offered him a pension and he turned it down, saying he had done nothing to earn it.

The war had thinned the friary he came back to. Seven friars were living there when he joined the community two years ago, and several have gone since into military service. Priests and friars are in uniform all over Italy. Official figures put the clergy called up at 24,446, and 15,000 of them are serving as soldiers.

The convent beside the church is two storeys with a row of tiny windows, and the friars draw their water from a stone well in the courtyard. St. Pio has cell number 1. He has been put in charge of the friary’s school, and he teaches the seminary students there and is their spiritual director.

On the farms below, conscription has taken the men and the army has requisitioned the draught animals. The mountain districts grow their own food, and they have been stripped first and hardest. Some have been left without even the seed to sow.

St. Pio has not gone down the mountain since the army let him go.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of a brush-and-ink reportage drawing with grey wash. .

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More on this saint

A black-and-white photograph of a single broad elm standing alone in a harvested field, a small straw-and-branch shelter built against its foot, with vines, a heap of cleared stones and a cart track running out to bare hills behind.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a 1910 black-and-white large-format plate photograph, reconstructed from the paper's dossier description of Piana Romana; no person appears and no reference likeness was used. The paper's reference photograph of St. Pio is Padre Pio da Pietrelcina — reproduction of an untouched 1947 portrait print (Federico Abresch, original photograph 1947; reproduction by Wikimedia user Muschio Di Quercia, 2019, Wikimedia Commons) — see the original: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Padre_Pio_da_Pietrelcina.jpg

event · PIANA ROMANA, Pietrelcina, September 7, 1910 AD

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

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin priest of twenty-three, received the wounds of Christ in his hands and his feet today, praying alone under an elm on his family's land outside this village. The wounds bled, and the pain was bad enough that he asked Jesus to take them away; they closed, and the pain stayed. He was ordained twenty-eight days ago, and he will say nothing of the morning to his spiritual director for a year and a day.

Edition of · 4 min read

A black-and-white photograph looking up a stony unmetalled mountain road to a small whitewashed church with a bell above its door and a two-storey convent block beside it, with a low stone-walled town on the bare limestone slope below and the sea on the far horizon.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a 1916 black-and-white large-format plate photograph, reconstructed from historical descriptions of the friary, the road and the mountain; no person appears and no reference likeness was used. The paper's reference portrait of St. Pio is Padre Pio showing the stigmata — detail of the sitting of 19 August 1919 (Placido (Ferdinando) Bux, 19 August 1919, Wikimedia Commons; from the Frati Minori Cappuccini di San Giovanni Rotondo).

place · SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, this week, September 1916 AD

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

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was assigned this week to the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a mile and a half above San Giovanni Rotondo on the flank of Monte Gargano. Seven friars live there, and he is to teach the seminary students and direct them. The permission was granted provisionally, but apart from the absences the army and his superiors force on him he will not spend a single day away from the building for the remaining fifty-two years of his life.

Edition of · 4 min read

Also in the edition of Sunday, 20 September 2026

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