free vent to their imagination, have exaggerated, added, misunderstood, and misconstrued events. They probably did not want to lie. But they were such who could not think straight and mixed too much of their own into the story.”
While many newspaper accounts and much oral history must be taken with a grain of salt, there are solid and substantial sources. Chief of these are Padre Pio’s own letters, in four volumes, written to his spiritual advisers, spiritual children, and friends and colleagues. To corroborate these are the diaries and memoranda of several of Padre Pio’s confreres, notably Padre Agostino Daniele of San Marco in Lamis, who kept a journal, off and on, for fifty years. Of special value are the letters that Father Dominic, who was generally regarded as a somewhat skeptical man, wrote to his family between 1948 and 1958 — notably to his cousin Albert Meyer, who became cardinal-archbishop of Chicago. Also oral and written testimony by priests, physicians, and other educated persons, which corroborate accounts by persons whose humble background and lack of education would naturally render them suspect by the sophisticated. Father Dominic, after dismissing as rubbish much of the material written about Padre Pio, nevertheless concluded that when one looked at the actual events of his life, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Moreover, in recent years the Vatican archives have made accessible documents from the pontificates of Benedict XV and Pius XI, among which are the records of a thorough investigation in the early 1920s by Monsignor Carlo Rossi from the Holy Office (or Inquisition).
The life of Padre Pio is, to be sure, replete with events that seem strange, even incredible to the average reader, but it is also a life of a real human being with real emotions, real joys, real sorrows, and real defects as well, who strove in his day to serve his fellow human beings by addressing their spiritual as well as physical needs.
Chapter One
The Roots of a Saint
Pietrelcina
A little town of about four thousand souls, Pietrelcina — the birthplace of Padre Pio — lies some six miles northeast of the city of Benevento, the capital of the province of the same name. It is about forty miles northeast of the city of Naples in a region of southern Italy known as Campania. Over the years, the town, which grew up around an ancient castle, has been called Petrapolcina, Petrapolicina, Pretapucina, and, only since the eighteenth century, Pietra Elcina or Pietrelcina. Although most people think the word means “Little Rock” or “Little Oak,” no one seems to know for sure.
In 1860, the province of Benevento, until then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose prime minister, Camillo Benso, Count Cavour, created a united Kingdom of Italy the following year. A quarter-century later, Italy, a nation of twenty-eight million, was really two separate countries. While northern Italy (the area from Rome north to the Alps) was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing, the south, called the Mezzogiorno, remained socially, agriculturally, and economically depressed. In Pietrelcina, as in most parts of the south, the vast majority of the populace was illiterate and so isolated that many peasants still did not know that they were citizens of a united Italy.1
The census returns of 1881 revealed that only forty-six of every one thousand inhabitants in southern Italy were sharecroppers, and only fifty-nine were peasant proprietors. Most of the people were landless, employed seasonally as farm laborers, who lived from hand to mouth. They subsisted largely on a diet of rice, bread, pasta, and cornmeal, with almost no meat, and they were generally so unhealthy that few of their young men were found fit for military service. Malaria, pellagra, and tuberculosis were widespread, child mortality was astronomical, and every few years cholera epidemics claimed thousands of lives.2
Although nearly everyone in southern Italy was Catholic, Christianity there was badly vitiated by superstition, comprising, for many people, a mixture of Christian and pagan elements. A popular prayer, whether to God, Mary, or the saints, was: “You give me something, and I’ll give you something in return.”3 Many approached God, Mary, and the saints only when they were in need, and sometimes blasphemed them when they failed to obtain what they wanted. One historian has characterized southern Italian men at the time as typically skeptical and anti-clerical, while their wives were wont to attend Mass daily, “rosaries in hand, fervently praying and supplicating priests, seeking out holy people who seemed closer to God.” They were often completely lacking in theological understanding and ignorant even of the words they prayed in Latin.
Pietrelcina was two miles from the nearest railroad station, its only communication with the outside world, as there were no roads, not even to Benevento. The social hierarchy of the town was similar to that of others of the Mezzogiorno. Except for a few artisans, nearly everyone was tied to the land and belonged to one of two classes: the possedenti, who were the landowners, and the braccianti, who were landless laborers. All were considered “peasants” except four or five wealthy families who lived on big estates near Benevento and owned much of the land worked by the braccianti.4 Most of the possedenti of Pietrelcina were the proprietors of very small farms, which they worked themselves with the help of hired braccianti during the busiest times of the year. While many braccianti lived in miserable dwellings in the country, most of the possedenti had houses in town and went out every day to work in their fields, remaining in the summer in cottages in the country.5
At Pietrelcina, the day was punctuated by the striking of the church bell, marking the various periods of prayer specified by local devotion. The year was highlighted by numerous saints’ days. Few towns in the region observed so many religious feasts as Pietrelcina. One writer noted, “The year was a veritable succession of feasts, novenas, High Masses, processions, with the inevitable accompaniment of fireworks [and] music.”6
Devotion to Mary was especially strong in Pietrelcina. Aside from Christmas and Easter, the chief feast of the year celebrated the town’s local patroness, La Madonna della Libera (Our Lady of Deliverance), in August. During her three-day festival, the faithful went to the church, offering the firstfruits of their harvest of grain. Some of those who were better off left candles with banknotes pinned to them. The bejeweled wooden statue of La Libera was carried through the streets, accompanied by the town band. Padre Pio later wrote, “The main street was splendidly illuminated and in the evening there was an artistic fireworks display. There were games, horse-racing, tight-rope walking, and theatrical performances.”7
The Pucinari hailed La Libera as their personal protectress. They were familiar with the account of how Our Lady delivered their ancestors from the wrath of the Byzantine Greek armies, who rampaged Italy in the seventh century. When the area escaped the wrath of these invaders, the bishop of Benevento, venerated as San Barbato (“The Holy Bearded Man”) taught his flock to pray to Mary under the title Our Lady of Deliverance. As late as 1854, La Libera was credited with rescuing the town from an epidemic of cholera that claimed 153 lives.8 Records indicate that after the town gathered to pray for La Libera’s intercession, many were healed, and new cases of sickness rapidly declined.9
The supernatural was near at hand for the Pucinari. Many people believed at the time that a special prayer or combination of prayers, if repeated in a certain way, would enable one to predict the day of his death. They spoke of a formula, supposedly in Aramaic, by which a person could commit himself to Satan in return for worldly gain. The “old people” of the town made prophecies and predictions about the future, even “predicting,” in the 1800s, the advent of automobiles, airplanes, and space travel.10
A native of Pietrelcina, who was a slightly younger contemporary of Padre Pio, described her town: “It was all farms in Pietrelcina. For us, Benevento was the big city. That’s all we knew. We dressed like people did in America. We didn’t have arranged marriages. We didn’t wear local costumes [except on special occasions], but all our clothing was
