St. Pio pointed at a patch of ground. They laughed.

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, this year, 1922 AD — Mary McAlpin Pyle was a Presbyterian from New York, and she had a fortune. This year she went up the rough road to the Capuchin friary above San Giovanni Rotondo. The town sits high on the side of Monte Gargano. She came to watch one Mass, and she never went home.

People had been climbing that mountain since the autumn of 1918 AD. On the morning of September 20 that year, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin friar, was alone after Mass. That was when he received the visible wounds of Christ in his hands, his feet and his side. The news spread through a district with few roads and hardly a telephone anywhere. Ever since, pilgrims have climbed the Gargano to be blessed by him and to go to confession.

The village they climbed to was very poor. It sits about 1,800 feet up the mountain. The road is so rough that most people travel it on foot or on the back of a mule. The friary stands a mile and a half above the town on the rocky hillside. Its church is a small square building with nothing at all on the front of it. The door isn’t even in the middle of the wall. The bell above the door is the only thing that shows the place is a church.

St. Pio got up at half past three in the morning to say the five o’clock Mass. Anyone who wanted a place near the altar had to be standing in the little square outside the church by two in the morning. They waited there in whatever weather until the doors opened, and then pushed ahead of everyone else to reach him for confession. Mary Pyle came up for that Mass and went in with the rest of them. It ran an hour and ten minutes. The people packed around the altar prayed in silence the whole time, without noticing how long it had gone on. She watched that Mass, and she became a Catholic.

Then she stayed: she moved into a villa just below the friary wall. She goes to confession to St. Pio every Wednesday, and she wears the habit of a Franciscan Tertiary every day.

Everything she has, on one building

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

Years earlier, St. Pio was a student training to be a priest. He was often ill, and that kept him at Pietrelcina for long stretches. One evening he went out walking with some of the other students and with his cousin, Don Salvatore Pannullo. They took the road that forks one way to Benevento and the other to Pesco Sannita. He stopped them 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 he pointed his finger at the exact ground.

The other students laughed it off. Pannullo said: “If it is the desire of Heaven, it would be the greatest fortune for Pietrelcina.”

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