St. Pio stays awake for surgery; the surgeon looks anyway

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, October 5, 1925 AD — Saint Pio of Pietrelcina lay on an operating table for about two hours, awake the whole time. He had refused chloroform, the medicine that would have put him to sleep for the operation. He didn’t want anyone looking at the wound in his side while he slept.

St. Pio was a 38-year-old Capuchin priest at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo. Since September 1918 AD he had had wounds in his hands, feet and side that bled. These wounds are called the stigmata. The surgeon, Dr. Giorgio Festa of Rome, already knew them well. He had studied them in October 1919 AD and again in July 1920 AD.

Trouble on the altar steps

Dr. Festa came to the friary at the end of September 1925 AD. On October 1 the two men were trading jokes in St. Pio’s cell. Then St. Pio stopped and asked the doctor to check him. For several years, he said, he’d had attacks of pain deep in his belly. The attacks were coming closer together. He told Dr. Festa that “especially when I ascend the altar steps, I must use extraordinary efforts to keep myself from fainting.”

Dr. Festa found a large hernia in St. Pio’s right groin. Part of the bowel had got stuck inside it and couldn’t be pushed back into place. Dr. Festa proposed an operation. That evening the friar in charge of the friary agreed it should be done as soon as possible.

The next morning Dr. Festa asked St. Pio to ask God whether Dr. Festa was the right surgeon. The other choice was to hand the case to a more skilled surgeon. St. Pio refused at once to pray about that. He told Dr. Festa to go ahead with his plan and to “be at ease, for the Lord will not fail to bless your hands.”

A question before the knife

On the day of the operation, October 5, St. Pio spent the whole morning in the church. He heard the confessions of many visitors. He also sang a Mass for his fellow friars who had died. It was noon before he could leave. Dr. Festa and the others watched him walk toward them very slowly. He was pale from the morning’s work and from the pain. When he reached the surgeon, St. Pio said: “Dear doctor, here I am in your hands, but please I do not want to be chloroformed.”

Dr. Festa argued hard and gave his medical reasons for putting him to sleep. St. Pio wouldn’t change his mind. He promised only that he wouldn’t move from whatever position he was put in. Then St. Pio asked the doctor: “Would you know how to refrain, after you chloroformed me, from inspecting the side wound which you studied once before?”

Dr. Festa answered honestly: “No, Padre, it would really be my first desire, to examine it again after all these years.”

St. Pio replied: “Although I have received no instructions, I know that an order was given to my superiors by the Vatican, and it is my duty to see that it is respected. So, that is why even during the operation I intend to remain the master of my acts and my will.”

The operation took about two hours. St. Pio didn’t complain once. Dr. Festa saw two tears run down St. Pio’s cheeks only once, and heard him say: “Oh, Jesus, pardon me if I do not know how to suffer as I should!”

When it was over, St. Pio was taken back to his cell. There he collapsed from exhaustion and lay unconscious for some time. While he lay there, Dr. Festa looked at the wound in his side. Later the doctor wrote: “I confess that during this period I took advantage of his condition and explored the wound over his heart which I had made a report on five years earlier. I was able to observe the same characteristics that I had made note of then.”