Saint Pio of Pietrelcina

St. Pio was born Francesco Forgione, the son of peasant farmers in Pietrelcina. As a boy he could not bear to hear God's name taken in vain, and would run off to hide and pray. To pay for his schooling, his father, Grazio Forgione, twice crossed to the United States to work as a labourer on Long Island.

St. Pio entered the Capuchin novitiate at Morcone on January 6, 1903 AD, and took the name Brother Pio that month. A year later his parents found him so thin that they begged the Father Director to let them take him home, but he stayed and took his first vows. He was ordained a priest at Benevento on August 10, 1910 AD, while his father was working in America.

On September 7, 1910 AD, a month after his ordination, St. Pio received the stigmata for the first time, while praying under an elm at Piana Romana, outside Pietrelcina. The wounds bled and hurt him badly, and he prayed that Jesus would take them away. At his request they could no longer be seen, though the pain stayed, and he told his spiritual director about them only a year later, in a letter of September 8, 1911 AD.

Poor health kept him living with his family in Pietrelcina until 1916 AD. On September 4, 1916 AD, he settled at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, high on Monte Gargano. After a few early absences, among them service in the army medical corps during the First World War, he never left the friary again for a single day.

On the morning of September 20, 1918 AD, St. Pio was alone in the friary choir, giving thanks after Mass. He saw Christ crucified, and when the vision ended his own hands, feet and side were bleeding. A friar, Padre Leone, ran to the choir and found St. Pio on the floor, unconscious, bleeding from five deep wounds.

St. Pio begged the friars to keep his secret, bound up the wounds and hid his hands in his sleeves. Two or three days later the friary's superior came to his cell to confront him, and St. Pio wept and told the superior everything that had happened. The wounds bled every day and night for the next fifty years.

News of the wounds spread, and pilgrims began climbing the mountain to see St. Pio, receive his blessing and go to confession. Some claimed he might have made the wounds with carbolic acid. Bishop Raffaele Rossi, sent by the Holy See in 1921 AD, judged that the wounds did not appear to have been inflicted from outside and were not the result of fraud.

From 1923 AD St. Pio was forbidden to write letters, and he was not allowed to preach; in 1931 AD the Holy Office ordered him to give up all his work as a priest except Mass, said in private, without the faithful. The Holy See's account of his life says he accepted every restriction with humility and kept silent in the face of unjust accusations. Pope Pius XI had the ban reversed in 1933 AD, and on March 25, 1934 AD, St. Pio could hear men's confessions again.

St. Pio rose at 3:30 each morning and said Mass at five, and his Mass took an hour and ten minutes. By two in the morning the square before the church was usually full of people waiting for the doors to open. He heard women in the morning and men in the afternoon, and penitents registered and might wait ten days for their turn.

In early April 1948 AD, a young Polish priest, Karol Wojtyła, made his confession to St. Pio. Years later, as Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła said he had benefited in his young years from St. Pio's readiness to hear penitents.

On the evening of January 9, 1940 AD, St. Pio and three friends he guided spiritually made a start on a hospital, meeting in his room at the friary. He searched the pockets of his habit and handed them a small gold coin that had been given to him for his charities. A blind young man gave two lire the same evening.

The foundation stone was laid on the bare mountain slope on May 16, 1947 AD. The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the House for the Relief of Suffering, opened on May 5, 1956 AD. Poor patients were treated free and handed a receipt like everyone else, so that they would never be humiliated.

From 1966 AD St. Pio said Mass seated, and from March 1968 AD he used a wheelchair. On September 20, 1968 AD, fifty years after the stigmata, he said Mass for members of the prayer groups he had begun in 1940 AD, who had come from seven countries. Two days later, on September 22, he said his last Mass and gave his last public blessing.

St. Pio died at 2:30 the next morning in his friary at San Giovanni Rotondo, aged eighty-one. The Holy See's account of his life says he met death well prepared and serene. When his body was examined just after he died, the stigmata had disappeared without leaving a trace.

On September 26, 1968 AD, St. Pio's open hearse went a mile and a half down the hill into San Giovanni Rotondo. People along the route hung bedspreads and tablecloths from their windows, each with a framed picture of St. Pio edged in black cloth. There was no hysteria, and men and women, priests and religious, wiped away tears in public.

He was buried that day in the crypt of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Pope John Paul II, who had made his confession to St. Pio as a young priest, beatified him on May 2, 1999 AD, and canonized him on June 16, 2002 AD.