St. Pio's sworn answer sat in Vatican files for 87 years

ROME, September 2008 AD — In June 1921 AD, Bishop Raffaele Rossi of Volterra arrived in San Giovanni Rotondo, a mountain town above the Adriatic Sea. He had come to find out where a friar’s wounds had come from. The friar was Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin. His wounds were in his hands, his feet and his side.

The bishop asked him 142 questions, and St. Pio answered them under oath. One of them was “Who gave you the stigmata?” Until then, St. Pio had never told anyone who gave him the wounds.

St. Pio’s answers stayed in a Vatican archive for 87 years. They could come out because Pope Benedict XVI asked for the archive’s files up to 1939 AD to be opened. This month a Church historian printed the bishop’s report in a book in Rome.

Bleeding in the friary church

St. Pio’s wounds first appeared on September 20, 1918 AD. He was found unconscious in the friary church, bleeding from five wounds. When he woke up, he begged the other friars to keep the wounds a secret.

A month later his superiors ordered him to explain what had happened, so he wrote to his spiritual director. St. Pio wrote that he had seen “a mysterious person” whose “hands and feet and side were dripping blood”. He wrote that the sight terrified him.

The news spread quickly through a mountain district with hardly any roads. People came to the friary in crowds. Doctors came to check St. Pio again and again. Some of them said he might have made the wounds himself with a chemical called carbolic acid.

A hand on the Gospels

The Holy Office had sent Bishop Rossi to San Giovanni Rotondo in secret, to look into St. Pio’s life. The bishop watched St. Pio spend ten to twelve hours a day hearing confessions. He also saw St. Pio say Mass with “extraordinary devotion”.

On June 15, 1921 AD, St. Pio put his hand on the Gospels and 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 person had no name. Under oath, St. Pio said it was Christ.

St. Pio said he felt full of compassion for the Lord’s pains, and he asked Christ what he could do. Then 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.”

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

Some doctors had said St. Pio might have made the wounds himself, but Bishop Rossi did not agree. He decided the wounds did not look as if anyone had made them. He wrote that they were not “the work of the devil”, and not the result of “deceit, fraud or a malicious or evil ability”.

Bishop Rossi wrote that St. Pio was “resplendent in particular with a profound humility and singular simplicity”.