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St. Padre Pio — The Catholic Saint Banned From Saying Mass in Public by His Church · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  On September 20th, 1918, a priest in southern Italy knelt in front of a crucifix after Mass.
• 0:07
  By the time he stood up, his hands were bleeding, so were his feet, and a wound had opened in
• 0:13
  his side, the exact places Jesus was wounded on the cross. Those wounds never closed, not
• 0:20
  for 50 years. And here's the part that most people don't know. The Vatican's own watchdog
• 0:27
  office looked into it. and ruled there was nothing supernatural going on. For more than a decade,
• 0:34
  the church kept him from saying mass in public and from hearing confessions. A famous doctor
• 0:40
  wrote him off as unstable. This is the story of Saint Padre Pio, a saint his own church
• 0:47
  spent over 10 years doubting.
• 1:00
  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is now episode 23. If this is
• 1:08
  your first time stopping by, consider yourself invited. Grab a seat, something to drink, and
• 1:14
  get comfortable. A new Saints story lands here every Thursday. Today's Saint is one of the
• 1:20
  most famous Catholics of the 20th century, Padre Pio. Now Padre is just Italian for Father,
• 1:27
  the way we would say Father John. and Pio is the name he took when he joined a religious
• 1:32
  order as a teenager. Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgona in 1887 in a little farming town in
• 1:41
  southern Italy called Pietretina. His parents were peasant farmers, not wealthy and not educated,
• 1:48
  just hardworking people trying to raise a family. From early on, Francesco was sick. His health
• 1:55
  stayed shaky his entire life and doctors never fully figured out why. He also said he was
• 2:01
  seeing things other kids were not. Visions of Jesus and Mary going back all the way through
• 2:07
  his childhood. Now, take that the way we take any saint's private account of their own visions.
• 2:14
  It's what he said happened, but nobody else could check it. At 15, he joined the Capuchins.
• 2:22
  Now, that's a branch of the Franciscans, the order that follows St. Francis of Assisi. Now,
• 2:27
  St. Francis of Assisi was way back at the beginning of our Saint journey, episode three to be exact,
• 2:33
  if you want to go and listen to it. But back to Francesco's story. The men in the Capuchins
• 2:39
  are called friars. They live together in a community a lot like monks, but they spend their days
• 2:45
  out serving people. That's when he took the name Pio. He was ordained a priest in 1910
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  at 23 years of age. His health was so fragile that for years afterward, he lived mostly outside
• 2:59
  the monastery, back in his hometown, just so he could survive. Then, about a month after
• 3:05
  his ordination, something strange happened. By his own later account, marks appeared on
• 3:11
  his hands. He begged God to take them away, and they faded. The pain stayed, though, but
• 3:18
  for the next eight years, nobody outside his small circle knew a thing about it. To the
• 3:25
  wider world, Padre Pio was basically invisible. A sick, obscure young priest from a small farming
• 3:32
  town doing ordinary parish work. If he died in, 1917, almost nobody outside Pietraicina
• 3:41
  would remember his name today. By 1918, Padre Pio was living at a monastery in a town called
• 3:48
  Sangiovanni Rotondo. On the morning of September 20th, he said mass. Afterward, he stayed behind
• 3:56
  in the choir, the part of the church where the friars pray, as he usually did, to spend a
• 4:02
  few quiet minutes thanking God. A month later, he described what happened next in a letter
• 4:09
  to his spiritual director. A mysterious figure appeared in front of him. He wrote, with hands,
• 4:16
  feet, and side dripping blood. Then the figure vanished. and Padre Pio realized his own hands,
• 4:23
  feet, and side were bleeding the same way. Those wounds, well, they have a name. They are called
• 4:30
  the stigmata, which just means wounds that match the wounds of Jesus on the cross. But this
• 4:37
  time, they didn't hide and they didn't fade. Think about that. Not an invisible mark only
• 4:43
  he could feel. Open wounds in his hands, his feet, his side that other people could see.
• 4:51
  At first, he tried to keep it quiet. By the spring of 1919, church doctors were already
• 4:57
  coming to examine him. A surgeon named Luigi Rominelli examined him five times between 1919
• 5:05
  and 1920, the first formal exam anyone gave him. Rominelli wrote that the cause of the
• 5:12
  wounds was not natural, but doctors didn't agree. Later in 1919, A pathology professor from
• 5:20
  Rome named Amico Bignami came to look. He was an atheist and he had his doubts. He suspected
• 5:27
  that Padre Pio was causing the wounds himself or at least keeping them open. Believers say
• 5:35
  the wounds never got infected and that the blood smelled like flowers. That part comes from
• 5:40
  the people who loved him but not from a lab or a doctor. Here's something that surprises
• 5:46
  people. Padre Pio hated the attention. He often wore bandages or mittens to cover his hands
• 5:54
  and he avoided showing the wounds whenever he could. This wasn't a man putting on a show.
• 6:00
  It was a man trying to live an ordinary life while something extraordinary kept happening
• 6:05
  to his body, whether he wanted it or not. So, yeah, you would think that the Vatican would
• 6:13
  have been thrilled. a priest with Christ's wounds right there to examine. Instead, they got suspicious.
• 6:22
  And this is the part most retellings skip that I could find. Now, to be fair to the Vatican,
• 6:28
  a little caution is part of the job. The church wants to be sure a miracle is real before it
• 6:34
  puts its name on one, and it didn't want a crowd of pilgrims built around something that might
• 6:40
  fall apart. That's a reasonable instinct. It's just Not how this story went. Later in 1920,
• 6:49
  a famous doctor named Agustino Giamelli came to meet Padre Pio. Giamelli was a Franciscan
• 6:56
  priest and a trained physician who had founded a Catholic university in Milan. So people listened
• 7:03
  to him. The visit did not go well and Padre Pio sent him away immediately. Giamelli went
• 7:11
  home and wrote a scathing report anyway. He said Padre Pio was making the wounds himself,
• 7:16
  and he suggested acid was how. Later on, he went so far to call Padre Pio a psychopath.
• 7:24
  Now, the doubters had one detail on their side, and it's real. In 1919, Padre Pio quietly had
• 7:32
  a woman traveling to the province of Foja bring him four grams of carbolic acid from a pharmacy
• 7:38
  there. It's a strong disinfectant that can also burn skin. He told her it was for cleaning
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  syringes, and he said the same thing later under oath. No one has ever shown he used it on his
• 7:51
  hands, but the secrecy didn't help. Next, the Vatican sent a bishop to investigate. His report
• 7:59
  in 1921 was mostly positive, but he did put limits on Padre Pio. No blessing the crowds
• 8:07
  and no showing the wounds to anyone. Then the pressure got worse. In 1922, the Holy Office,
• 8:15
  that's the Vatican's office that investigates questions of Church teaching, ordered him to
• 8:20
  stop saying Mass in public. In 1923, it announced its verdict. There was nothing supernatural
• 8:28
  going on. The town didn't take it quietly. In June of 1923, a crowd gathered at the church,
• 8:36
  led by the mayor, and simply refused to accept the ban. Padre Pio ended up saying mass in
• 8:42
  public again, with the whole town watching. Then came the order to move him. In August,
• 8:50
  Padre Pio was told he'd be transferred to a monastery far, away, quietly, and the whole
• 8:56
  thing would fade away. But word got out anyway. The people of San Giovanni Rotundo gathered
• 9:04
  again. and the mayor warned the officials that they'd have to walk over townspeople's dead
• 9:09
  bodies to take him. The police told the church the transfer could not happen without bloodshed.
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  Hmm, think about the standoff that created. A small farming town on one side, the Holy
• 9:23
  Office, one of the most powerful offices in the Vatican on the other. And the man everyone
• 9:29
  was arguing about was just a priest, sick, quiet, and trying to stay out of it. The Vatican
• 9:37
  backed down and the order was suspended. But the doubts, they didn't go away. In 1929, The
• 9:46
  church tried to move him again, and again violent protests stopped it. Then in 1931, the restrictions
• 9:55
  got tougher. Padre Pio was barred from saying Mass in public and from hearing confessions.
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  Now, if you were unfamiliar, that's where Catholics privately tell a priest their sins, the thing
• 10:06
  he would eventually become the most famous for, but we'll get there shortly. For two years,
• 10:13
  he said Mass alone. with no one watching, no crowd, no congregation, nobody there to see
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  the wounds everyone had been arguing about. So with that, the institution Padre Pio had
• 10:27
  given his whole life to looked at his wounds and at different points called him a fraud,
• 10:33
  an unstable man, or just a problem to be moved. And he obeyed. He said mass to an empty room
• 10:40
  and kept going. Then in 1933, the Pope himself stepped in. Pope Pius XI ordered the ban lifted,
• 10:49
  and he reportedly told people he'd never had anything against Padre Pio. He'd just been,
• 10:56
  and I quote, badly informed. Eleven years of restrictions, and the Pope's own explanation
• 11:03
  came down to two words, badly informed. Whether that was the whole story or not, that's what
• 11:11
  the Pope said. You'd think, after all this, all the controversy has finally reached its
• 11:19
  closure point. But you'd be mistaken. In 1934, Padre Pio was allowed to hear confessions again,
• 11:27
  first for men and a couple of months later for women. What he did with that second chance
• 11:33
  became the thing he's most remembered for. He'd spend 10, sometimes 12 hours a day in that
• 11:39
  confessional for decades, and the lines outside only got longer. People came from all over
• 11:46
  Italy and then from all over the world. Many of them described something unsettling. He
• 11:53
  seemed to already know what they were about to confess before they said it. Sometimes,
• 11:58
  he'd bring up sins from years earlier that they hadn't planned to mention. There were stranger
• 12:05
  reports too. Some people claimed he'd appeared to them in places far from San Giovanni Rotondo.
• 12:13
  at times when he never left the monastery. That's called bilocation, being in two places at once.
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  I can't tell you what to make of those stories. I can tell you they came from a lot of different
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  people and nobody has ever been able to prove them or disprove them. Here's what I find remarkable.
• 12:35
  The same institution that once questioned his sanity was now sending pilgrims to his confessional
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  by the thousands. And the doubts never fully disappeared. More than 25 years after the church
• 12:50
  had cleared him, the suspicions came back. In 1960, microphones were hidden in the friary
• 12:57
  at San Giovanni Rotundo, including in Padre Pio's cell and in the confessional, the booth
• 13:04
  where a confession is supposed to be completely private. A friar and a Roman priest made the
• 13:11
  recordings. Padre Pio later found a wire under his own bed and cut it. Those tapes and some
• 13:19
  short films shot around the convent got carried up to Rome. On June 25th, 1960, Pope John
• 13:27
  XXIII sat down and wrote that he had just been handed quote, very serious information on
• 13:34
  Padre Pio. The charge was not about money. It was about the women around him. The report
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  called them his praetorian guard. That is an old Roman term that I had to look up. The praetorian
• 13:47
  guard was the emperor's private bodyguard, the circle that never left his side. So what they
• 13:54
  meant was his inner circle, the closest followers. And the claim was that the closeness was not
• 14:01
  just spiritual, that it had gotten intimate, improper. And the pope did not simply take
• 14:08
  it as fact. In his own notes, he wrote, If what they are telling me is true, then this is a
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  disaster for souls set up to discredit the church. That was his fear. The tapes never proved the
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  women around Padre Pio were anything but devoted followers. That July, they sent a man down
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  to look for himself, Monsignor Carlo Macari, an apostolic visitor, which just means Rome's
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  inspector. New limits followed. Padre Pio could say Mass only in a short window. Confessions
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  got tight rules. He was told not to speak with women alone. Those limits held until 1964 when
• 14:54
  Pope Paul VI told the Holy Office, the Vatican office that had clamped down on him, to stop
• 15:01
  confining him like a criminal and to let him do his ministry in full freedom. A lifetime
• 15:08
  of being doubted. and a lifetime of showing up anyway. Incredible. Pandre Pio didn't just
• 15:15
  stop at confessions. He had a bigger project in mind, one most people don't associate with
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  him at all. Sangiovanni Rotondo was a poor rural part of Italy, and Pandre Pio wanted
• 15:28
  real medical care for the people there. So he set out to build an actual hospital. He spent
• 15:34
  years raising money and donations came in from all over the world. In 1956, it opened. He
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  called it, and I'm probably going to butcher it, so my apologies, Casa Solivo della Sofarenza,
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  which, if I said that right, means the house for the relief of suffering. This wasn't a
• 15:57
  small clinic. It was a full-scale hospital built in a poor rural corner of Italy, and it's still
• 16:04
  a working hospital today. A sickly kid from a poor farming town built a hospital in a place
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  that had nothing like it before. That's not a mystical claim. That's bricks, donors, and
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  decades of fundraising done by a man the church once wondered if it even could trust. Think
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  about that contrast for a second. The Vatican's own critics said Padre Pio might not be of
• 16:31
  sound mind. That same man went on to organize, fund, and build a full-scale hospital. I don't
• 16:40
  know about you, but that doesn't sound like someone whose judgment couldn't be trusted.
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  By the 1960s, Padre Pio's health, never strong to begin with, was failing fast. He told people
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  decades earlier, right around the time the stigmata first appeared, that the wounds would vanish
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  when he died. He died in the early hours of September 23rd, 1968, at 81 years old. with
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  a rosary in his hands. His last words, according to the friar who was with him, were simply,
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  Jesus, Mary. That was it. And then, just like he'd said 50 years before, the wounds were
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  gone. No scarring, no marks at all, just skin that looked by every account completely renewed.
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  He was canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. Over half a million people packed into Rome
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  to watch it happen. And 40 years after his death, in 2008, his body was exhumed from its tomb.
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  Reports from the Times say the body was in remarkably good condition, far better than you'd expect
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  after four decades underground. All right, back to the porch.
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  Here's what sticks with me about this one. It's not the wounds, it's not even the hospital.
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  It's the two words the Pope used to explain 11 years of doubt. Badly informed. Think about
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  that. Eleven years. A man told to say Mass alone with no one watching because the people in
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  charge were working from incomplete information. And he didn't fight it. He obeyed and kept
• 18:35
  being exactly who he already was. Now, I want to be careful here because it would be easy
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  to turn this into a story about the bad guys. But It is not. The people who doubted Padre
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  Pio weren't fools. There was a real bottle of acid. There was a real skeptical professor.
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  There were real reasons to ask hard questions. Asking wasn't the mistake. Deciding before
• 19:08
  they had really looked was. Now, there's a big difference between asking a question and supposedly
• 19:18
  already having the answer. And that's the part I keep turning over. How many times have I
• 19:27
  decided that what someone was like based on something I'd only half heard? The coworker
• 19:34
  I wrote off as lazy. The neighbor I assumed was unfriendly. The family member whose side
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  of the story I never actually asked for. How many of them were dealing with something I
• 19:48
  knew nothing about? And how many times did I never find out? None of us, I would guess,
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  will ever bear the stigmata. But almost all of us know what it's like to be on the other
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  end, to be doubted by the people whose approval we wanted most. A family member who doesn't
• 20:13
  buy your side of the story, or a boss who assumes the worst explanation instead of the honest
• 20:20
  one. If that's you right now, here's what Padre Pio's story says to me. You don't have to win
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  it today. You don't have to prove anything to anybody by Friday, let's say. Some things take
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  11 years to come out. And the only thing you really control is who you are being while you
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  wait. There's something almost, dare I say it, poetic in how his story ended too. The wounds
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  everyone argued over for 50 years, the ones he spent his whole life trying to cover up,
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  were gone around the time he died. He didn't get to enjoy any vindication. He just got to
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  be done carrying it. So here's what I'm sitting with this week. Is there someone in your life
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  you have been quietly doubting? Before you decide about them, try one thing. Ask one honest question
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  you haven't asked yet. Something like, help me understand. Then actually listen to the
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  answer. Because here's the thing about being sure. It doesn't feel like guessing. It feels
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  like knowing. The people who doubted Padre Pio felt sure too. And it took 11 years before
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  the Pope himself admitted he'd been badly informed. So ask the question. It might turn out to be
• 22:06
  right, but at least you will know. It is now time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you
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  for Padre Pio. for a faith that kept showing up even while it was doubted. For anyone who
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  feels misjudged right now, give them that same quiet patience. And for the rest of us, help
• 22:28
  us be slower to doubt the person in front of us. We have been badly informed often enough
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  ourselves. Amen. St. Padre Pio is recognized as the patron saint of civil defense volunteers,
• 22:42
  stress relief, and adolescence. His feast day is September 23rd. Well, that is episode 23.
• 22:51
  If his story stuck with you, send it to somebody who needs to hear that even saints weren't
• 22:56
  always believed right away. Next week, I haven't decided yet on who the saint is, but we are
• 23:03
  back to an unknown saint. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the porch with me, and
• 23:08
  I will see you next week.