Padre Pio and the Fifty-Year Wounds

I had already marked Francesco Forgione as a boy in Pietrelcina, before he ever took the habit — he told his confessors of visions from childhood that he himself did not fully trust, and neither did I ask him to trust them uncritically. Discernment matters to Me more than drama. But by 1918, in the choir loft of the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo, after Mass on the morning of September 20, I gave him what I had given Francis of Assisi seven centuries before on La Verna: the wounds. Except this time I let them stay for fifty years, in full view of a century that had X-rays and photographs and skeptical doctors with no interest in confirming a miracle, and I let every one of those instruments look as hard as they wanted.

They looked hard. Physicians examined the wounds in his hands, feet, and side repeatedly across five decades — men sent by his own religious superiors, men sent by a Vatican that was, for years, more suspicious of Padre Pio than protective of him, and independent doctors with no stake in the outcome either way. They found open wounds that did not become infected despite constant exposure, that did not respond to the disinfectants and treatments medicine of the time knew how to use on ordinary wounds, that bled — by report, roughly a cup a day for years — without depleting him to the anemia such loss should have caused. I am not obligated to explain Myself to hematology. I let hematology fail to explain Me, which is a different and, I think, a more honest kind of testimony.

I gave him other things too, harder to photograph: the discernment of souls, so that penitents who came to his confessional meaning to conceal something found him naming it before they could; the bilocation reported by witnesses on separate continents at the same hour; the fragrance some described near him that they could not place, sweet and unaccountable. I let the ecclesiastical authorities investigate him for years — restrict his public ministry, forbid him at points from hearing confessions or publishing correspondence, treat him, for stretches of his life, as a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be received. I did not spare him that suspicion. Obedience under suspicion was part of what I was forming in him, the same discipline I asked of Joseph of Cupertino centuries earlier. A true work of Mine does not need to win every argument immediately. It only needs to still be standing, unchanged, when the argument is finally over.

What Padre Pio built with what I gave him was not a spectacle but a hospital — Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the House for the Relief of Suffering, built in the poor countryside of the Gargano where medical care had been scarce, because he understood, better than most mystics do, that wounds shown to the world mean nothing if they do not move the world to relieve the wounds of others. He heard confessions for up to nineteen hours some days, for decades, sitting inside a wooden box breathing back the darkest material of thousands of ordinary lives and handing back, each time, the same thing: absolution, and Me.

He died on September 23, 1968, and when they prepared his body, the wounds that had marked him for fifty years had closed, without scar, in his final hours — the last sign I chose to leave, since I no longer needed the world to keep looking.

The Record

Padre Pio (born Francesco Forgione, May 25, 1887, Pietrelcina, Italy) entered the Capuchin Franciscans in 1903 and was ordained a priest in 1910. On September 20, 1918, while praying before a crucifix in the choir of the friary church at San Giovanni Rotondo, he received visible stigmata — wounds in his hands, feet, and side — which he bore, by extensive documentation, for fifty years until his death.

The wounds were examined repeatedly by physicians, including Dr. Luigi Romanelli and Dr. Amico Bignami (a pathologist sent partly to disprove them), among others across decades, with findings noting the wounds' persistence without infection and resistance to standard treatment. Church authorities, including the Holy Office under Pope Benedict XV and later Pius XI and Pius XII, investigated him repeatedly; restrictions were placed on his public ministry at various points between 1923 and the 1930s before being lifted. In 1956 he founded the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza hospital in San Giovanni Rotondo, which remains a major medical center in the region.

Padre Pio died on September 23, 1968, at San Giovanni Rotondo. He was beatified on May 2, 1999, and canonized on June 16, 2002, by Pope John Paul II, who as a young priest had corresponded with him. His body, exhumed in 2008, is displayed for veneration in the Church of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, San Giovanni Rotondo. He is one of the most visited pilgrimage figures in the Catholic world. Feast day: September 23.