St. Pio hid the wounds of Christ for 366 days

A hut of straw under an elm

PIANA ROMANA, Pietrelcina, September 7, 1910 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was twenty-three. He had been a priest for twenty-eight days. On this September morning he was praying by himself under an elm tree. It stood at Piana Romana, his family’s land two miles outside the village of Pietrelcina. He spent most of his days out there, and in summer his nights too. He sat in the elm’s shade to pray. His uncles and cousins had built him a hut of straw right up against the trunk. Of the hut he has said: “In that hut, which had become a real little church for me, I did all my devotions and my prayers, night and day.”

Then the wounds of Christ opened in his hands and in his feet. They could be seen, 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 not be seen any more. The pain stayed.

Nobody else was under the tree

No account of that morning puts anyone else there with him. The one person he told was the parish priest of Pietrelcina. The old records don’t give that priest’s name.

Wounds like these have a name: the stigmata. They 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 had them. St. Pio was a Capuchin, a member of the order that keeps St. Francis’s rule. For hundreds of years the Capuchins have marked the feast of his stigmata on September 17.

He was born in that same village on May 25, 1887 AD. He was baptized the next day in the church of St Mary of the Angels, and given the name Francesco. He joined the Capuchins at Morcone, and on January 22, 1903 AD he took a new name: Pio.

He had been ill for years. High fevers came and went without warning, and there were long stretches when he could keep no food down. The doctors who looked at him before he was made a priest said he had tuberculosis. It did not stop him being ordained. Archbishop Paolo Schinosi ordained him in the cathedral of Benevento on August 10, six miles away. His father wasn’t there. Grazio Forgione had sailed for America almost on the eve of it, looking for work.

Three words, and 366 days

St. Pio’s spiritual director was Padre Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis. He was the man St. Pio owed an account of his interior life to. Padre Benedetto was not at Pietrelcina, and he heard nothing at all about any of this. The pain stayed with St. Pio, worst on Fridays, and he said nothing to the man whose business it was.

He wrote to Padre Benedetto on September 8, 1911 AD. That was three hundred and sixty-six days after the morning under the elm. He wrote then because the same thing had happened to him again the evening before. That letter is the first account of the wounds he ever put on paper. He described 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.”

And he gave his reason for the whole year of silence in three words. What had held him back, he told Padre Benedetto, was “quella maledetta vergogna” (that cursed shame).

The wounds went that day, when he asked. They did not go for good. They came back where anyone could see them on the morning of September 20, 1918 AD. It happened in the choir of the friary church at San Giovanni Rotondo, after he had said Mass. Those ones never closed. He carried them, bleeding day and night, for the fifty years he had left.