The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [65]
Eventually he moved into the monastery at San Giovanni Rotundo, not far from his hometown. Maybe he had weird eating habits and noisy nighttime antics, but there was something special about Padre Pio. With his powers of clairvoyance, he could locate missing soldiers, and with the touch of his hand, hunchbacks stood upright.
His fame as a healer was already spreading across Italy when, at the age of thirty-one, he experienced a transverberation. He’d been hearing a young boy’s confession when an angel appeared in his mind’s eye. The angel held a long steel blade that spewed flames. Suddenly, and with the force of some mad warrior, the angel hurled the blade into his soul. Padre Pio thought he’d die of the pain, thought that surely some internal organ had ruptured. He told the confessing boy to leave, that he felt too ill to continue. All night he languished in agony. A month and a half later, as the priest knelt in front of a large crucifix, he swooned, suddenly tired. And the vision appeared again. Blood dripped from the angel’s hands, feet, and side. When he came to, Padre Pio had received the stigmata—all five wounds of Christ. He was put under medical observation immediately—only doctors were allowed to seal and unseal his bandages—but the doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding, and they could find no natural cause.
News of the miracle-making modern priest with the stigmata brought pilgrims from all over the world, turning San Giovanni Rotundo into a veritable Graceland, but within the church, controversy bloomed. Folks accused Padre Pio of stabbing himself to make his palms and feet bleed. They called him hysterical, called him a fraud, called him worse. In an attempt to quiet the whole thing down, the church silenced the bleeding priest in 1923, forbidding him to write letters or give sermons. He obliged, but church authorities were too late. Padre Pio was a rock star. The faithful and the curious still flocked to southern Italy to confess their sins. And the church finally relented.
Padre Pio performed miraculous healings, if not in person then via bilocation—quicker and cheaper than train travel. “I feel all your troubles as if they were my own,” he said. He hardly ever left San Giovanni Rotundo, but he was seen all over the world—from Hawaii to St. Peter’s, where he made an unexpected appearance at the canonization of the Little Flower Thérèse of Lisieux.
Boyishly devoted to his guardian angel, old “macaroni without salt” reminded his followers that if he didn’t pick up their prayer-calls himself, they could always leave a message with his angel. “I sleep with a smile of sweet beatitude on my lips,” he said. “And a perfectly tranquil countenance, waiting for the little companion of my childhood to come to waken me, so that we may sing together the morning praises.”
That angel arrived every morning long before sunrise—2:30 A.M., and the two of them already up and praying, preparing for mass and hearing confessions. Padre Pio’s full workday lasted nineteen hours, but he subsisted on just a few hundred calories a day: some boiled vegetables and a half glass of beer at noontime. All the while, his five wounds oozed a blood that smelled of roses.
Military records from World War II confirm that on many occasions, when Allied forces attempted to bomb San Giovanni Rotundo, a monk was seen in the sky, directing the planes to turn around.
Imagine the look on those commanding officers’ faces when their pilots returned to base, bombs still on board, explaining, “Sir, yes, sir, but see there was this monk in the clouds…”
That monk was Padre Pio.
In 1968, the old priest finally surrendered to Sister Death. He performs his