Padre Pio...he's everywhere!

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

FIVE
   It has been a wonderful two and a half weeks, but I have started the homeward bound countdown. I miss home.

   They keep giving us things to take home with us. Home made liqueur, home pressed olive oil, home grown lemons, walnuts, pomegranites... I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to bring those things into the country. I have a horrible poker face. Going through customs is going to be interesting.

   I don't remember seeing him anywhere in Rome, but here in rural Sicily Padre Pio is everywhere you look. Well, not Padre Pio himself, he's dead. But, pictures of the guy. Padre Pio is the most recently canonized Italian saint. He is a hero to religious Italians.
   Born Francesco Forgione in 1887, he entered a monastery at the early age of 16, and was ordained a priest in 1910, at only 23 years of age. Eight years later, he was sent to the Friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, where he remained until his death in 1968.
   According to popular reports, Padre Pio, as he named himself when he first took orders, bore the stigmata continuously for 50 years. Local legend also has it that Allied fighter planes during WWII attempting to bomb the area saw a huge vision of Padre Pio in the air above San Giovanni Rotondo, and encountered an unknown force that prevented them completing their missions. His most important "miracle" took place in 1962, when a young priest asked Padre Pio to pray for a woman in a hospital in Poland who was reportedly dying of cancer. The woman made a full recovery, and we are told that the doctors could not explain it. That priest would later become Pope John Paul II.
   Although everything one will hear about Padre Pio in the popular media is all wine and roses, it was not always so. Investigations into his youth reveal that he was prone to fits or faints, or some kind of spells. Unusual behaviour would sometimes accompany these episodes. It is likely that his parents placed him in the care of the Capucin Friars in order to get rid of an embarrassing problem child. It is also likely he was sent to San Giovanni Rotondo because it was a small, out of the way parish where they might hide an oddball priest. Thatis, after all, how the Catholic church traditionally deals with its problems. Just ask any Newfie orphan.
   Claims of stigmata are not taken lightly by the Catholic church. They are always investigated thoroughly, and ruthlessly. Padre Pio's first claims of stigmata were of the sensation of pain in his hands and his side only. It was three years before any physical manifestations became apparent. When they did, it was claimed that he lost a cup of blood per day through the wounds. It was also considered miraculous by many that the blood smelled of floral perfume. Apparently, the man bled continuously from 1918 until just before his death in 1968. A few short days before he passed away, the stigmata disappeared, reportedly leaving no traces that there had ever been wounds.
   It is instructive that after an early investigation into his stigmata, the Vatican ordered Padre Pio not to appear in public without gloves on to cover his stigmata, and eventually prohibited him from public celebrations of the mass. Doctors' reports of the time period suggest that his wounds were self inflicted, perhaps by the use of acid, and an investigator for the Holy See expressed the opinion that the floral perfume was simply something Padre Pio used to mask the musk generated by frequent "giving of penance" in the confessional to female members of the congregation.
   Padre Pio's transformation from priest of questionable piety to miracle worker bound for sainthood appears to mirror the rise in prominence within the church of Karol Józef Wojtyła. The man who would become Pope John Paul II was reported to have steadily advanced the cause of Padre Pio, and he was the one to beatify in 1999, and then canonize Pio in 2002. John Paul II was also the Pope responsible for the elimination of the office of the "Devil's Advocate," a Vatican scholar charged with casting a critical and challenging eye over the evidence put forward to support a nominee's potential sainthood. Other questionable candidates to attain sainthood under John Paul II were excommunicated 15th century theocratic dictator Girolamo Savonarola, and Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of the Opus Dei group who was a virulent anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. In total, John Paul II was responsible for the raising of 482 saints, the most by one Pope in the history of the Catholic church. In Italy, the canonization of Padre Pio is his most popular decision.
   So, let's see what we have. A young man, born at the end of the nineteenth century, so alarms and embarrasses his parents that they send him to a monastery to get rid of him. The Capuchin Friars find him so disturbing, they fast track him for the priesthood. (It's the only way to get rid of him, you see. If he doesn't become a priest, he spends the rest of his life there). He is a priest for less than eight years before the Vatican needs to make him go away, and sends him to some out of the way church in a backwater province. Eventually, they prohibit him from performing the mass in public, in his own church. Sounds like a saint to me.

tags:Skepticism, Italy vacation