Padre Pio’s World  is,  above all, his unsurpassed Mass, in which he entered the Crucifixion and people saw the agony of the Passion of Christ on His face....It is this Crucifixion he carried and suffered on His body for over fifty years -- the stigmata, at first invisible, then incredibly, startingly visible....                  

 "The central point in Padre Pio's life was the altar. That is where the great warrior of God principally carried on his battle for souls." Fr. Joseph Pius Martin, A Complete Priest.(www.peacethroughmercy.com)

Padre Pio’s World is his long hours of hearing confessions every day, sometimes up to 18 and 19 hours, stretching into his whole life of bringing the forgotten sins of penitents out of the darkness of the past and cleansing  the poison from souls.
It's his reading of hearts; that is, discerning the person, the pure from the impure.  It's his clairvoyance, his prophecies....

Padre Pio’s World  is a world of supernatural realism, from flights of Guardian Angels to flights of Padre Pio as he bilocated to people in all parts of the world: "...a prolongation of personality,"  he explained.  It is the gift of perfume, of fragrances that also went around the world to his spiritual children -- roses, violets, tobacco, incense -- whatever  was needed....

All this in one man, one Saint....

Jesus answered. . ."The wind blows where it will, and thou hearest its sound but dost not know where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the spirit.”

Nicodemus answered and said to him “How can these things be?”

Answering him, Jesus said, “Thou art a teacher in Israel and dost not know these things? Amen, amen, I say to thee, we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen; and our witness you do not  receive. If I have spoken of earthly things to you, and you do not believe, how will you believe if I speak to you of heavenly things?” (John 3:8-12)


Padre Pio’s World  is a world of strange happenings defying categories. 
Something new and mind-boggling every day.  But before one had the
chance to know any of these strange happenings, for most, Padre Pio's
world  was, and is, the stigmata.

The stigmata imbued and flavored his world. It was 'the thing'
that drew attention, that turned the world's head in his
direction. He was "the priest with the stigmata," and anyone
could see the wounds of Christ during his Mass in the small,
antique Church of Our Lady of Grace. The people came to have
a look, invading the peaceful, isolated Gargano mountain. The
compelling Catholic writer, Graham Greene, who wrote books
about priests and Catholic themes (The Power and the Glory,
Monsignor Quixote, Brighton Rock, A Burnt-Out Case,
The End of the Affair), was one who came and saw:

"I have also seen with my own eyes the stigmata on Padre
Pio's hands, in the south of Italy. He was not a man who
looked as though he suffered from a nervous disorder.
I was so convinced of his powers of goodness that I refused
to approach him and speak with him.  I explained to the
friends who had brought me along that I was too afraid
that it might upset my entire life."
(Marie Francoise Allain: The Other Man, cited
by The Voice of Padre Pio, #5/1997 "In the Margin")

Elsewhere, Greene wrote of the two Masses he would always remember:
The Pope's [Pius XII] Jubilee Mass in Rome: ". . .the enormous crowd
pressed into St. Peter's. . . . and later the Pope alone at the altar...moving
with grace and precision through the motions of the Mass...." and the other:
"at five-thirty in the morning, at a side altar in the small Franciscan
monastery of San Giovanni Rotondo, in the bleak southern province of
Apulia, the Host was raised in the hands of Padre Pio -- the aged, bearded
priest whose hands are famed through the Catholic world for the black,
ugly dried patches of the stigmata that they bear."
  (The Pope Who Remains a Priest; Life, 9/24/1951, cited in Vatican Impressions,
   Ed. Francis Sweeney, S.J.)

Padre Pio's World was people crowding him, touching him,
snipping his habit for a relic, barring his way, crushing him....
"Slowly, slowly...And now you're killing me."



"We, ourselves, who besiege him, implore, beseech him, place at his feet each day,
in a thousand ways, an immense burden of wretchedness, of suffering. A heavy burden
of pain, above all, which we pour into Padre Pio's heart each day."
(Gherardo Leone, La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza. Oct.1965)

                             

  "I have seen with my own eyes the stigmata of Padre Pio..."
  "...the aged, bearded priest whose hands are famed through the
   Catholic world  for the black, ugly dried patches of the stigmata
   that they bear."  ( Graham Greene ) 


The simple truth is: a replica of Jesus Christ Crucified walked on the
Gargano mountain in Italy from 1918 until his death in 1968.  Whatever
God's plan was in giving the world Padre Pio, it is said the Lord sends us
the saints we need when we need them. Padre Pio became the most
beloved and popular saint of the century, some say in Christendom,
for he stands alone in his brilliant sunburst of charisms.

Padre Pio lived with the painful stigmata for fifty-eight years.  During
the first eight years, they were invisible, but on September 20, 1918,
they became visible --and the blood flowed in his hands, feet and side.
It never stopped flowing for the next fifty years-- witnessed and
documented by doctors and uncountable people.  There are years of
stained shirts and handkerchiefs to tell the story.

"Blood, blood, blood everywhere.  An enormous quantity of clothes that
had been used to stem the flow of blood from the wounds of the chest."
(Fra Modestino, Witness to the Padre, The Voice of Padre Pio, No.12/1980)
 

    
The Crucifix before which Padre Pio was praying
when he received the Stigmata.

























Padre Pio’s World was a world of suffering.  He walked on pierced and
painful feet and endured a life of intense pain in his hands and side and
shoulder wound.  Padre Pellegrino, in his book, Padre Pio's Jack of All Trades,
tells of a moment when the pain was so excruciating that Padre Pio had to
collapse himself into a chair.  Suffering was strangely his friend:
"My sufferings are pleasant. I only suffer when I don't suffer." 

It was a world of co-redeeming....

Even as a child, he suffered in his heart as he saw the sufferings of
others. Read his school compositions in Padre Alessio's book,
The Holy Souls -- one can almost hear the child crying out in him for
humanity, especially sick children. It drove him to build the great cream-colored
hospital (Home for the Relief of Suffering) that is renowned in Italy and abroad,
and which some call his greatest miracle in a life filled with miracles. And if that
is what one mere human is capable of, then we realize how infinitely unknowable
and powerful is God's love.

Padre Pio’s World  is prayers throughout the day and throughout
the night, during which he had only "fragments" of sleep as he prayed
for every single soul who sought his intercession, as well as for those
beyond our knowing, but whom Padre Pio knew were in the world
somewhere, needing help... 

The Rosary was never out of his hands...or heart.








But it's also a world of his humorous quips cheering the day, sparkling the
moment, telling funny stories, jokes...bringing on the laughter of confreres
and friends as they take a breather on the veranda or in the friary garden.




"His was a style full of Franciscan joy...A pure joy shone from his face...Around the winter hearth, in the company of his fellow friars, or in the friary garden during the summer with visitors, Padre Pio knew how to converse delightfully...He had a refined sense of humor that would captivate everyone!  Those who imagine Padre Pio with a long face, always sad
and unsatisfied, are far from the truth."
(Msgr. Antonio del Gaudio, Voice of Padre Pio, 4/01, p.21)










Padre Pio’s World is populated with children, his and God's predilection,
their favorites. He loved their purity, couldn't bear to see the sick ones in
their mother's arms as they crowded the corridors hoping for a cure.  This
very important story -- and the connection between Padre Pio, children,
and the world -- is told in my upcoming book, Padre Pio and Children.

He was the instrument for a multitude of cures and miracles. Children
saw him in bilocation and spoke to him.  He played with them, even after
his death; and when a miracle was not in the plan, he reassured them and
gave them a most peaceful and unafraid understanding not many of us
adults can fathom -- that they were about to go to Heaven.  Many of these
children, call them victim souls, if you wish, left the world anticipating....  

St. Michael, Satan and the Gargano...
What's Going On?

This is where Padre Pio came in 1916 and was to live the rest of his life.

'The Gargano' is an odd mountain that fills the spur of the boot of Italy.
It is made of karst limestone-- you can see large chalk-white boulders
bursting out of the earth.  The Gargano is also where an apparition of
St. Michael occurred in 490 A.D. A cave church was built on the spot,
which made it one of  the oldest Christian shrines in the West, and over
the centuries millions upon millions have pilgrimaged to that shrine of
the warrior-angel who will fight the fight when the time comes, including
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Brigid, St. Gregory,
St. Bernard and Padre Pio.  The shrine of the angel is still there, and the
pilgrims continue to stream down the winding stone stairs to the cave....

Despite the great Crusade trail that went down the eastern coast of Italy
to sailing points for Jerusalem, and despite a fascinating medieval period
that saw gigantic figures such as Frederick II and his son, Manfred, whose
legends still echo today in the castles strewn about the general area like a
necklace -- including the massive castle in Lucera that once housed 15,000
Muslims -- despite all this, in the centuries that followed, the focus of history 
slowly drifted away, and this Apulian area seemed to disappear in the mists
of time, although many fascinating things may have been happening. 

A few fascinating tomes exist, however: Ernst Kantorowicz's Frederick II (1927)
and Janet Ross' Land of Manfred (1889). (See my article, Discovering the Gargano
and Thereabouts, in the menu.)  Both books are out of print, but you 
may be able to find used copies on Amazon at high prices.  There is also 
The Normans in the South by John Julius Norwich, and Georgina Masson's
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: A Life, both unputdownable history reading.

When Pio came along, and word of his stigmata and miracles spread, the
off-the-tourist-trail Gargano mountain came to light 000again slowly.  The
growth of knowledge of Padre Pio was interrupted by the Second World War;
GIs stationed at the nearby airfields, however, came to hear of him and made
the trek up the mountain by truck, jeep and even foot, to meet the priest with
the stigmata.  When they returned to the States many of them brought back
word of Padre Pio's existence and, in no small way, made Padre Pio known 
in America.  Among them were Bob Coble (RIP), who returned to San Giovanni 
Rotondo for the first time on our first group pilgrimage in 1993, and Ray Ewen,
still living and still promoting Padre Pio almost with every breath he takes. Some
of the stories of these GIs are told in Frank Rega's Padre Pio and America.

After the war, the economy of the Gargano began pulsing with thriving life
as pilgrims came from all over the world.  Hotels and restaurants sprouted
everywhere, and the small town of San Giovanni Rotondo grew and grew to
accommodate the millions that came up the mountain to see the Padre.
Commenting on the continuous room shortage, even with the ever-burgeoning
number of hotels being built, Fr. Joseph Pius Martin wrote:   

"San Giovanni hasn't ever been perfectly fit into its breeches, 
but always outgrown them." (Letter to Jeanette Salerno, 2/7/84)

It is no coincidence that Padre Pio was brought to the Gargano by the Capuchins;
as he was apt to say in various ways, 'God arranges the coincidences.' 

Padre Pio fought the devil, there is much testimony on this, and there are
photos of his bruised face. He has joined the warrior-angel, St. Michael,
on this battlefield where "the two conflicting armies of good and evil" will
contend for souls.  When we speak of things "visible and invisible," this
is one of the invisible.

"Satan was very real for Jesus. He was very real for Paul and the other
great saints throughout history.  And he is profoundly formidable. If we
want a sense of the grandeur of the Fallen Angel before he fell, the
violated genius of who Satan really is, we can take a hint from the Rilke
poem, "The Angels":

'...when they spread their wings they waken a great wind through the land:
as though with his broad sculptor-hands God was turning the leaves of
the dark book of the Beginning.'

"This is the kind of Being—once glorious, but then consumed by his own
pride—who is now the Enemy of humanity."
       (Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., Archbishop of Denver; delivered on
January 27, 2010, at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission.)


There is still more to Padre Pio's World. It was and still is a world of
people yearning for the truths of God, for Jesus Christ, for the reality
of Heaven.  While Padre Pio lived, they came to him, hearts pumping
with the quest. Skeptics came out of curiosity and were paralyzed
as they stood before him, frozen with a sudden awe they could not explain. 
Many fell to their knees.... 

His world, then, is also the meaning we find in him, as far as we can know
or imagine, for he was a mystic and a mystery -- a mystery to himself, as
well, as he wrote to his spiritual director. All of us who are or want to be
his spiritual children, embrace his world joyously and with awe, marveling
from the vantage point of this secular world so absent of Christian beauty
and understanding, as we glimpse all that is possible with God. Even those
who have not yet heard of him will come to this joy if they find him, for he
wrote:  "I belong to everyone..." 

And that means everyone. Our children and our children's children.

For me, Padre Pio's World is a world of supernatural reality, and
when the world is much too much for us, when our minds question,
even balk at our Faith, I say, but there was Padre Pio!

Whenever I lose heart or have a moment's doubt for some earthly
reason, but there was Padre Pio, I tell myself. 

When a priest goes wrong, I repeat, but there was Padre Pio!
Padre Pio tips the scale on the side of Faith a millionfold. 

When the outlook is bleak in a world smothered by arid secularism
and highly contagious evil, I say always, but there was Padre Pio!
When human logic mocks Faith, but there was Padre Pio, I say...
and say again. 
Which means, of course, but there was Jesus.   t  

                  _____________________________                 

"A powerful attraction shone from him...illuminated and foreseeing..."
(La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, 8/04; p3)

I have long agreed with the quotes above and those following.  Reading
issues of La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza since 1959 and the Voice of Padre
Pio since 1971, I have noticed that there is always something supernatural
about Padre Pio in all the photos -- as though he is inserted from a
heavenly realm with a heavenly light on him.

It's all there, in that face. In those eyes.  Everyone speaks of his eyes.  
Something there...the sweet hold on a soul. Pictures show it.  I imagine
what the real thing must have been, and an intense desire to have lived
close to him in those days then overpowers me.                        

"The goodness that transpired from his face and his limpid countenance immediately
made an impression on our hearts,  We were attracted to him by an indescribable force..." 
(One of the Ventrella sisters, on their first seeing Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo,
Letters 3; p535)

"The world climbs to San Giovanni Rotondo and gazes at this old monk, and in his gaze
and gestures discovers in itself the nostalgia for a differest, better, more divine world."
(Don Giancarlo Setti, La Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza; 10/66; p2)


My favorite picture of Padre Pio.
His eyes have "...the sweet hold on a soul."


"...a measureless love for his neighbor, without pretenses, self-interest and exclusions. 
In the style of the Gospel!"
(Antonio Del Gaudio, The Voice of Padre Pio, 4/01; p20)

"I end my paper with this idyll of love between Padre Pio and the Blessed Mother. My words
are only a pale vision of the wonderful world that the Holy Spirit built in Padre Pio's soul. He
let us glimpse this when his deep and luminous eyes contemplated ecstatically the image of the
Immaculate Virgin.  When he directed to her his ardent prayer, which was often bathed in tears
and interrupted by sobs.  When he let the beads of the Holy Rosary run through his bloody hands."
(Padre Bernardino of Siena, Acts of the First Congress of Studies on Padre Pio's Spirituality) 

You won't find a chronological biography of Padre Pio on this website. 
I would prefer you catch telling glimpses as you read the books and piece
together the mystery, the man who was half here, half in Heaven,
remembering you'll never find Padre Pio in one book, or find all of him in all the books. 

Bear in mind words expressed by Fr. Joseph Pius Martin (RIP 2000), who attended Padre Pio 
in the last years of his life, as told to Fr. John Schug in an interview (Profiles 0f Padre Pio; p70).

Father Joseph said: "Some people think they can't get close to God, but they can get close to God
through him. That will never stop.  The fact that he is dead makes no difference at all.  When you
see the thousands of people [coming to the tomb], they can't all be fanatics and tourists.  We will
never be finished with Padre Piotill the end of time."

My purpose for this website is, of course, to share Padre Pio with those already devoted 
to him -- old faithful followers that we are -- but also to awaken interest in him in newcomers, 
even mere curiosity! Best of all, to awaken a sudden feeling or a grasp of the great something
that is there, and a wish to begin the journey of getting to know him, finding your Padre Pio...
who is for everyone!  I'll be adding many things with time, between my book writing -- things
that to me, touch Padre Pio's World.

If something here enlivens you in some way, I'd like to hear about it, so send me an email and
tell me your thoughts. 
It's also very encouraging. . . . 

                      Padre Pio     

                     Born: May 25, 1887
                               Ordained: August 10, 1910
                               Invisible Stigmata: August-September, 1910
                               Visible Stigmata: September 20, 1918  
                               Died: Septmber 23, 1968   
                         Beatified: May 2, 1999 
                               Canonized: June 16, 2002 
                                 
    
          JESU, LUMEN DE  LUMINE             
                 
            
                   
                                  Launched October 7, 2010  
                                    Our Lady of the Rosary 

. . .  and propelled in the three days leading up to "Launch" on the jet-stream
of the Divine Push, with the help of: St. Francis of Assisi (October 4th); Sister
Faustina; my cousin-saint, Jamesie, who died at fourteen years (October 5th);
and St. Bruno  (October 6th), founder of the Carthusians, who proclaimed the
Mother of God the first and chief patron of the Order and who settled in the
land of my father (Louis Maria Bruno) and is venerated there.  
 
And of course by Saint Padre Pio, whose day, for devotees, like Christ's, is always . . .

                             OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY        
                                
                                 PRAY FOR US