Sworn account of how St. Pio received the stigmata is published in Rome

ROME, September 2008 AD — A book published in Rome this month prints the sworn statement Saint Pio of Pietrelcina made in June 1921 AD about how he received the stigmata, the wounds in his hands, feet and side. A bishop sent in secret by the Holy See put the question to him, and St. Pio answered with his hand on the Gospels. Until that day St. Pio had never told anyone who gave him the wounds. The bishop’s report, with the friar’s sworn answers, stayed for eighty-seven years in the archives of the Holy Office. The Holy Office is the Vatican department now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The book is Padre Pio Sotto Inchiesta: l’Autobiografia Segreta (Padre Pio Under Investigation: The Secret Autobiography), edited by Father Francesco Castelli, a Church historian. It could be printed because the archives of the former Holy Office up to 1939 AD have been opened at the request of Pope Benedict XVI.

St. Pio was a Capuchin friar in San Giovanni Rotondo, a mountain town above the Adriatic. On September 20, 1918 AD he was found unconscious in the choir of the friary church, bleeding from five wounds. When he came to, he begged the friars to keep the wounds secret. A month later his superiors ordered him, under his vow of obedience, to explain what had happened. He wrote to his spiritual director, Father Benedetto da San Marco in Lamis. St. Pio wrote to Father Benedetto: “I saw before me a mysterious person similar to the one I had seen on the evening of 5th August. The only difference was that his hands and feet and side were dripping blood. This sight terrified me and what I felt at that moment is indescribable.”

The news spread quickly through a mountain district with hardly any roads, and people came to the friary in crowds. Doctors came to examine him again and again, and some of them said he might have made the wounds himself with carbolic acid.

In 1921 AD the Holy Office sent Bishop Raffaele Rossi of Volterra to San Giovanni Rotondo to investigate St. Pio’s life and the origin of his stigmata. He went as its apostolic visitor, a bishop sent by the Holy See to look into a case and report back to Rome. He watched St. Pio spend ten to twelve hours a day in the confessional and say Mass with “extraordinary devotion”, and wrote that the friar “held his head high and was serene, his look lively and sweet, his words gleamed with kindness and sincerity”. St. Pio answered 142 questions under oath. Among the questions were these: “Who gave you the stigmata? For what reason? Were you given a specific mission?”

On June 15, sworn on the Gospels, St. Pio answered. He told Bishop Rossi: “On Sept. 20, 1918, I was in the choir of the church after celebrating Mass, making the thanksgiving when I was suddenly overtaken by powerful trembling and then there came calm and I saw Our Lord in his crucified form.” In the letter of 1918 AD the figure had no name; under oath St. Pio said it was Christ.

St. Pio said of Christ: “He was lamenting the ingratitude of men, especially those consecrated to him and favored by him.”

“Then,” St. Pio continued, “his suffering was apparent as was his desire to join souls to his Passion. He invited me to let his pains enter into me and to meditate on them and at the same time concern myself with the salvation of others. Following this, I felt full of compassion for the Lord’s pains and I asked him what I could do.”

St. Pio told the bishop: “I heard this voice: ‘I will unite you with my Passion.’ And after this the vision disappeared, I came back to myself, my reason returned and I saw these signs here from which blood flowed. Before this I did not have these.”

Father Castelli told the Rome news agency ZENIT: “What is decisive is that Padre Pio made no request for the stigmata. This helps us to understand the freedom and the humility of the Capuchin who is clearly completely uninterested in making a show of the wounds.”

Bishop Rossi reported that the wounds did not fester, did not close and did not heal. They stayed open and bleeding although St. Pio had tried to stop the blood with iodine.

Against what some doctors had said, Bishop Rossi concluded that the wounds did not appear to have been inflicted from outside. He wrote that they were not “the work of the devil”, nor the result of “deceit, fraud or a malicious or evil ability”, and that the distinctive elements of true stigmata were found in them. Of the friar who had sworn to him, Bishop Rossi wrote that he was “resplendent in particular with a profound humility and singular simplicity”.