The Wise Man of the Gargano
A survey taken in Italy in November 2005 concerning Italy’s most beloved saints concluded:
Padre Pio has no rivals. He is the saint most frequently invoked and most frequently stuck on the windshields of cars and trucks. And for some he is also [the unofficial] patron saint of Italy.
According to the survey, 70 percent of Italians invoke saints: 31 percent invoke Padre Pio, as opposed to 9 percent who call upon the Virgin Mary and 2 percent who call upon Christ!1 Even at the time of his death in 1968, National Review described him as “one of the chief religious forces in Italy.”2
By the end of his life, five thousand letters a day were arriving for Pio of Pietrelcina, a priest in the Order of Friars Minor Capuchins. This priest lived for more than half a century in the friary of Our Lady of Grace, on the outskirts of San Giovanni Rotondo, a town of some twenty thousand in the Gargano hills in southeastern Italy near the Adriatic Sea in Foggia, the northernmost province of the region of Apulia (Puglia), which is the spur of the heel of the Italian boot. For years, throngs of people waited in pre-dawn darkness for the opportunity to attend Mass with the priest who for fifty years had displayed the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion on his hands, feet, and side. Some people waited for days — even weeks — for the opportunity to make their confession to him.
Most of Padre Pio’s visitors were Italian, but, especially after the Second World War, pilgrims increasingly came to San Giovanni Rotondo from all over the world. Many knew not a single word of Italian — the only language, other than his regional dialect, in which Pio was fluent. Despite the language barrier, many of them claimed that they were somehow able to communicate effectively with the holy man on the mountain. Although the overwhelming majority of his visitors were Catholics, a number of Protestants and Orthodox, as well as Jews and other non-Christians — even atheists — joined in seeking out the priest with the wounds of Christ who declared, “I am for everyone!”
Those who sought out “The Wise Man of the Gargano” included both the uneducated peasant as well as the intellectual, artists, singers, actors, politicians, and priests and religious. During the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), someone remarked, with some exaggeration, that so many bishops were consulting Padre Pio, it seemed as if the council was being held at San Giovanni. One of his visitors was a cardinal allegedly sent by the pope to explore Padre Pio’s reaction to some of the reforms.3
During his lifetime, at least two popes said privately that Padre Pio was a saint. On March 9, 1952, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI, remarked to a major general of the Italian national police (carabinieri), “Padre Pio is a saint.” Overhearing the remark, a few minutes later the reigning pontiff, Pius XII, concurred, “We all know that Padre Pio is a saint.”4 During the early part of Padre Pio’s ministry, when a number of high-ranking Church officials regarded the Capuchin friar with hostility, Pope Benedict XV characterized him as “a man of God.”5
Not only churchmen, but notables from the world of politics and entertainment, made their way to Padre Pio’s friary door. Aldo Moro, longtime prime minister of Italy, made frequent trips to see “The Light of the Gargano,” as did many other Italian politicians. King Alfonso XIII of Spain, Queen Maria José of Italy, and Francisco Franco (“Caudillo” of Spain) were among those known to have sought his advice. Beniamino Gigli, the celebrated operatic tenor, made several trips to see Padre Pio, and Irving Berlin, the American songwriter, made at least one, as did composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Even members of the scientific community, such as American cardiologist Paul Dudley White, visited Padre Pio and professed to be “deeply impressed” with him and his work.
The gray-bearded friar, to whom the fictional character Obi-Wan Kenobi would bear a striking resemblance, who was described by National Review as having “the greatest moral prestige of any priest in Italy,” was widely credited with transforming the life of a region of Italy that had been cruelly impoverished for centuries by bringing — chiefly through the establishment of his famous hospital, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza — prosperity, employment, education, and first-class health care.
There are innumerable testimonies to the dramatic effect the Padre had in people’s lives. “I was drawn to him like a magnet!” an elderly lady from the Italian city of Taranto told the author in San Giovanni Rotondo in 1978. From the time of her first visit in 1948, she and her family traveled several times a year to see him and ask his counsel. Long after his death, she and her husband, children, and grandchildren continued to make the four-hour trip from their home at least twice a year to “visit” with Padre Pio at his tomb.
Andre Mandato (1928–2014), a native of Padre Pio’s hometown of Pietrelcina who became a custom tailor in North Plainfield, New Jersey, related how “Padre Pio changed my life.” He went with a friend to see the Padre in 1945 — out of curiosity. He left the confessional awestruck. Padre Pio knew — without ever having met Mandato before — that he had been debating in his mind whether or not to make his confession to him before returning home. Moreover, Padre Pio recited, correctly and in detail, all the sins of which the young man was guilty. “He knew everything that I had done,” Mandato declared. “Padre Pio asked, ‘Have you done this? … Have you done that?’” In every instance, the answer was yes. Padre Pio referred not merely to general categories of sin, but to specific acts which he could scarcely have guessed, even through a shrewd knowledge of human nature. After Mandato left the confessional, he said, “All I could do was cry, cry, cry.” His experience had a profound and lasting effect on him. “Many times, we ask God to forgive us,” Mandato said, “but with the mind and not the heart. Padre Pio made it possible for me to ask forgiveness of God with all my heart and soul, not just with my mind and lips. From that moment I have really felt what I prayed. He made my religion real!”6
Monika Hellwig (1929–2005), professor of theology at Georgetown University, spent three years in Italy during the time of the Second Vatican Council and visited San Giovanni Rotondo. She said she never met anyone in Italy who was skeptical of Padre Pio. Even radicals and anti-clericals regarded the venerable friar with “respect and reverence.” Moreover, she could testify that the stigmatized Capuchin led people to “deep conversions.” “What struck me most,” Hellwig stated, “is how much Padre Pio mediated the presence of the Divine to all who came to him. People came away from him invariably inspired and assured of God’s presence and care for them. In him they experienced a most immediate revelation of God’s love and concern for them.”7
Padre Pio was almost an exact contemporary of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), the German Lutheran theologian who, in an attempt to reconcile the traditional teachings of Christianity with contemporary perceptions, devised a theology that “demythologized” the Gospels, stripping away such uncomfortable baggage as miracles and other vestiges of a “first-century worldview” in order to get at what he believed was the essential kernel of truth underlying all the “mythological” paraphernalia. Bultmann’s approach and those of religious writers with a similar point of view strongly colored much of the theological thinking of the twentieth century. Bultmann wrote in Kerygma and Myth: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless [radio] and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of demons and spirits.”8 Meanwhile, Padre Pio convinced many reasonable and intelligent people that he regularly saw and conversed with the Virgin Mary, that he could see their guardian angels just like he saw them, that he cast out demons, and, on occasion, was bodily attacked by them.
Without publishing a book or delivering a lecture, Padre Pio convinced thousands that miracles are not mythology but reality. Through his life and ministry, thousands came to accept the Sacred Scriptures and all the historical doctrines of Christianity. Indeed, Padre Pio, whom some ecclesiastical
