St. Pio's gloves came off for only one thing: Mass

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy, October 1919 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina couldn’t make a fist. When someone asked him to close his hand, his fingers stopped partway. In the middle of each palm was a round wound about two centimetres across. That’s roughly the size of a small coin. Each hand had another wound on the back, a little to one side of the one in the palm. His hands looked as if something had gone right through them.

St. Pio was 32. He was a Capuchin friar at the friary above San Giovanni Rotondo, a mountain town in southern Italy. The wounds had appeared on September 20, 1918 AD, while he was praying in the friary church after Mass. The Church calls wounds like his the stigmata: wounds in the places where Jesus was wounded on the cross. St. Pio had them in his hands, his feet and his side.

A year later the wounds still hadn’t healed, and they had never become infected. This month, October 1919 AD, a doctor from Rome named Giorgio Festa came to examine them. He was the third doctor St. Pio’s superiors had sent. Dr. Festa found nothing in medicine that could explain the wounds.

Hiding them from the first day

St. Pio didn’t want anyone to see the wounds. In the first days he bandaged them as well as he could. He kept his hands pulled up inside the long sleeves of his habit. A month later he wrote to his spiritual director, Padre Benedetto: “Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment I feel deep in my soul.”

Pressing on a wound hurt him badly, and even touching the skin around one hurt. Writing was hard for him. For months he dabbed iodine on the wounds twice a week, hoping it would slow the bleeding. It didn’t work. He stopped using it after a doctor’s visit in July 1919 AD.

His feet had the same wounds, one on top and one underneath. His stockings were always stained with blood on both sides. The other Capuchins wore sandals. St. Pio wore soft shoes instead, partly made of cloth. They were a gift sent to him from Switzerland. He walked slowly, and he wasn’t steady on his feet.

Gloves everywhere but the altar

Once the doctors had sent in their reports, the men in charge of the whole Capuchin order made a rule. St. Pio had to wear gloves all the time, and he was forbidden to show his hands to anyone. He wore half gloves of dark wool over the wounds. They were gloves with the fingers cut off.

There was one exception, and it was Mass. St. Pio took the gloves off to say it. At the altar his bare hands were in front of everyone in the church.

Before Mass a priest puts on an alb, a long white robe, and ties a cord around his waist. St. Pio tied his cord slowly, and only loosely, because his hands couldn’t grip it tight. Even with the gloves off, he tried to cover his hands with the long sleeves of the alb. To give people Communion, he had to come down the altar steps. He turned around and went down them backwards, because that hurt his feet less.

By the 1950s St. Pio had worn the half gloves for thirty-five years. He still took them off every morning to say Mass at five o’clock in the little friary church. Someone once asked him whether the wounds hurt. St. Pio answered lightly: “Do you think that the Lord gave them to me for a decoration?”

In those years, men crowded around St. Pio when he walked back into the sacristy after Mass. They tried to kiss his wounded hands before he pulled the gloves back on.