Rome doctor finds nothing in medicine to explain St. Pio's stigmata

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, October 1919 AD — Dr. Giorgio Festa, a physician from Rome, examined the stigmata of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina at the Capuchin friary of San Giovanni Rotondo this month and found nothing in medical science to account for them. The wounds in the friar’s hands, feet and side have been bleeding for more than a year, and they have neither healed nor become infected.

St. Pio is 32, a Capuchin priest at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, on the Gargano promontory in the Italian region of Apulia.

The stigmata appeared on September 20, 1918 AD, while St. Pio was praying in the choir of the friary church after Mass. The friars carried him, unconscious, to his cell. When he came to, he begged them to keep the wounds secret. A month later his superiors ordered him to write an account of what had happened, and St. Pio began it: “What can I tell you regarding my crucifixion? My God! What embarrassment and humiliation I suffer by being obliged to explain what you have done to this wretched creature!”

The provincial superior of the Capuchins at Foggia, who governs the order’s friaries in the region, had the wounds photographed and sent the photographs to the Vatican for the record and for instructions.

St. Pio’s superiors then ordered doctors to examine the wounds and report on the medical side of the case. Three examined him between 1919 and 1920 AD, and Dr. Festa was the third.

Dr. Festa began with the hands. In the centre of each palm he found a round wound about two centimetres across, with clear edges, under a reddish-brown scab. On the back of each hand he found a similar wound with a smaller, shallower scab, set slightly to one side so that it did not line up exactly with the wound in the palm. While he examined them, small drops of blood ran steadily from their edges.

The scab made the depth hard to judge. The provincial superior had seen the wounds soon after they appeared. He told Dr. Festa that if the higher authorities ever asked him, he “would have to answer and confirm under oath… that, if one fixed one’s glance on the wounds in the palms of his hands, it would be easy to recognize in its detail written matter or an object previously placed in the side opposite or back of the hands.”

Even under a magnifying glass, the skin around the wounds in St. Pio’s palms showed no swelling, no redness and not a single trace of inflammation. Pressing on any of the wounds caused St. Pio very intense pain, and touching the skin around them hurt him too.

Dr. Festa then turned to the feet. He wrote: “I myself helped him remove his stockings, which I immediately observed were abundantly stained with bloody serum.” On the top of each foot Dr. Festa found a round wound like those in the hands, a little smaller, and a matching wound on each sole, also bleeding. Around the wounds in the feet, too, the skin showed no swelling and no trace of inflammation. The pain in his feet made St. Pio walk slowly and unsteadily.

Asked to close his fist, St. Pio could not close it completely. When he put on his vestments for Mass, he tied the cord of his alb slowly and loosely, because his hands could not pull it tight. When he came down the altar steps to give Communion, he turned round and stepped down backwards, because that hurt his feet less.

Dr. Festa found the wound in St. Pio’s left side two fingers below the nipple. It had the shape of an upside-down cross, about seven centimetres long, with a short arm four centimetres across. It was the shallowest of the five wounds, yet it bled the most. St. Pio told him he lost about a cup of blood a day from it.

Once, Dr. Festa laid a clean white handkerchief on the wound in St. Pio’s side at nine in the evening. During the night St. Pio put a second cloth of the same size over it. At seven the next morning Dr. Festa found both soaked through with blood and serum.

A perfume, most often like violets, came from St. Pio, and doctors who examined him found that the blood of his wounds gave it off too. Dr. Festa could not smell it, because he had no sense of smell. He took a small bloodstained cloth from the wound in the side back to Rome, to look at under a microscope. An official and others riding back with him in the car did not know he was carrying the cloth, shut in a case, and Dr. Festa said they “smelled the fragrance very distinctly and assured me that it precisely corresponded to the perfume which emanates from the person of Padre Pio.”

In July 1920 AD Dr. Festa came back to the friary, examined St. Pio again and found the wounds unchanged since October. He testified that the wounds “could not be the product of a traumatism of an external origin or due to chemical substances that are powerfully irritant.”