The army looked for a soldier who had two names

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, September 1918 AD — For months the Italian army hunted a missing soldier named Francesco Forgione, and it could not find him anywhere. He was up Monte Gargano the whole time, at the top of a mule track, in a Capuchin friary.

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was baptised Francesco Forgione, and the two names belong to one man. When he became a Franciscan friar on January 22, 1903 AD, he took the name Pio with it.

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 worked at the army hospital in Naples, and more than once the army sent him home ill. The first time he was home for a few weeks. The last time he was given six months, and his orders were to stay at home and wait to be told what to do next.

His Capuchin superiors sent him back to the friars at San Giovanni Rotondo. He settled there on September 4, 1916 AD.

The army’s papers still had him at Pietrelcina, the village where he was born. He had lived in his family’s house there for years, because he was too ill to live with the other friars.

Looking in the wrong town

When the six months ran out, no soldier reported back. The army wrote him down as a deserter and sent a messenger to Pietrelcina. He found no trace of him there, and nobody in the town could help. Then he reached one of St. Pio’s sisters. She told him that Francesco Forgione was her brother, and that he was living at San Giovanni Rotondo. So the army asked in San Giovanni Rotondo, and nobody there had heard of Francesco Forgione either.

San Giovanni Rotondo is a poor mountain village halfway up Monte Gargano, eighteen hundred feet above the sea. The rough road to it is travelled mostly on foot or on mule-back. 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. Its front wall was bare, and its door was not even in the middle of it. The one bell above the door was the only sign that the building was a church at all. He asked the friars, and this time one of them knew the name. Francesco Forgione was there, and everyone called him Padre Pio.

In front of the captain

It was winter. 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 he 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. It offered him a pension, and he turned it down. He said he had done nothing to earn it.

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