Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was a Capuchin monk (an order of friars in the Catholic Church). During his life time he performed many miracles. Through a mystical experience he received the five wounds of the Christ (the wounds of the stigmata) – two on his feet, two on the palms of his hands and one on the side near the heart. Attracted by his miracles people flocked to him from all corners of the globe. Yet it was not his miracles but it was his love – his love for God and his love for man that won people’s hearts. He once wrote, “I am devoured by the love of God and the love of my neighbor. God is always fixed in my mind and stamped in my heart. I never lose sight of Him. I can admire His beauty, His smiles, His vexation, His mercy, His vengeance, or, rather, the rigors of His justice….”¹

Padre Pio’s only desire was “to be a poor friar who prays”. He did not take any credit for the miracles that he performed. For him these miracles were “gifts” that came from God and they belonged to God. When his friend Angelo Battisti once questioned him about these things, Padre Pio replied: “Angelo, they are a mystery for me too.”² Italian journalist, Renzo Allegri, writes, “I was extremely impressed, not so much by the stories of miracles that people told about him but by the extraordinary moral strength that emanated from his whole being…When he would lift his head and look around, his big eyes looked like they were burning, not from pain but from a goodness that he could not contain.”³

Unlike most people when Padre Pio prayed, God literally spoke to him either through a word or a vision. In a letter to his spiritual director Padre Pio wrote, “My ordinary way of praying is this: hardly do I begin to pray than at once I feel my soul begin to recollect itself in a peace and tranquility that I cannot express in words…” Sometimes Padre Pio felt “touched by the Lord … in a way that is so vivid and so sweet that most of the time I am constrained to shed tears of sorrow for my infidelity and for the tender mercy of having a Father so loving and so good as to summon me thus to His presence.”⁴ Padre Pio once told his friend Padre Agostino that from early childhood he had seen and spoken to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and his guardian angel. He thought this was something that happened to everyone. “Don’t you see the Madonna?” he asked his friend. When Agostino denied this, Padre Pio shrugged his shoulders and said, “Surely, you’re saying that out of humility.”⁵
Read On…