Padre Pio, anachronistic miracles, and grace

One of our special September Saints is St. Padre Pio, whose His Feast Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 23, 2014.

According to Wikipedia, Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgione  May 25, 1887, in Pietrelcina, in Southern Italy to peasant farmers. His baptism name was Francesco and he stated he had made the decision to dedicate his entire life to God at five years old. He attended daily Mass, prayed the Rosary nightly, and abstained from meat three days a week in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel  As a child, he was able to see and speak with Jesus, the Virgin Maryand his guardian angel, and had heavenly visions and ecstasies, and suffered many illnesses during his childhood. On January 6, 1903, at the age of 15, he entered the novitiate of the Capuchin friars at Morcone where, on January 22, he took the Franciscan habit, and vows of poverty. chastity and obedience, and the name of Fra (Friar) Pio, He was ordained in 1910, yet because of illness remained with his family until 1916 when he entered Our Lady of GraceCapuchin Friary, located in the Gargano Mountains in San Giovanni Rotondoin Foggia, where he remained until his death.  He would spend 10 hours a day in the confessional.

He had his first occurrence of the stigmata two years later, which continued for 50 years, and he was gifted with the ability to read hearts, the gift of tongues, the gift of conversions, of reading souls, the ability to bilocate, and the floral/perfume scent fragrant from his wounds (which disappeared at his death without leaving any scars), and he experienced visions since his novitiate period (1903 to 1904).

Throughout his life of suffering, Padre Pio believed the love of God is inseparable from suffering and that suffering all things for the sake of God is the way for the soul to reach God. Thus he frequently advised, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” Padre Pio died in 1968 at the age of 81 and Pope John Paul II declared him venerablein 1997, and canonized him to sainthood on June 16,  2002.

40 years after his death, the body of St. Pio was exhumed from his crypt March 3, 2008 and was publicly displayed through September, 2009. 

I saw Padre Pio when his body was exposed in San Giovanni Rotundo in the summer of 2009. It was a whirlwind summer in Europe for me...one of the few times in my life that I had the complete freedom to venture wherever I felt the Spirit calling me. It was filled with holy places, and people, and impossible-to-ignore coincidences that shouted that I was in the right place at the right time. Padre Pio was the third stigmatist I had visited in three days, having spent one night in Siena, and then Assisi. The stigmata still terrifies me about as much as it did then. When I was a little girl, I longed for the stigmata. How comforting to know you were worthy to receive such an outward sign of holiness! But that was only until my mother reminded me that it would mean pretty much constant pain and bleeding, at which point I decided I didn't really care to be graced with that particular gift.  

Padre Pio, like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena, dedicated so much of his life to serving others, even with inescapable pain and trials in his life. In the place where he lived, I was struck by the seemingly endless walls filled with thousands of letters, to each of which he personally responded. I shuffled through his living quarters and the church where his body was exposed, surrounded by dozens of languages and awestruck pilgrims from all walks of life. In death, just like in life, he seems to be a saint that people of many different backgrounds are drawn to, someone whose life represents something of the mysteries of God to us in the modern age. Hearing about his spiritual gifts, it would be forgivable to place him in a remote time in our imaginations, one more in a string of fairy-tale saints. It seems somehow more believable to think that someone could read souls or be in two places at once when you also imagine them making speeches to knights or riding horseback from village to village. They might as well have been able to spin flax into gold, too! But Padre Pio existed as a man that Modern Science could not find a satisfying explanation for, despite its many advancements since the feudal age.

The following is an excerpt from the journal entry I made the day I saw him: 

Being near the tombs of saints is so energizing and freeing and moving.  I feel like I’m growing closer to them and to God, and that their prayers are helping me move forward into accomplishing what God has set forth for me.  I feel relaxed, even though my travel plans aren’t laid out, and I recognize what would have previously made me really anxious.  But I’ve been too blessed to dwell on that, and instead just think about all the joy God lets us have in the world.  I think that overall this has increased my patience and my trust in God.  After all, I showed up in San Giovanni Rotundo with no place to stay, alone...normally I wouldn’t have done such a thing.  But everything is bringing me closer to God.

Today, when I went to confession, my confessor swore his English was very bad, but what he said came out perfectly, and he told me about how important it was to accept God’s grace and cooperate with it, and to take that grace into account every day.

Every time that I think I’m doing well at being a Christian, or that I understand what it means, something happens to remind me that I’m really not very good at all in uniting myself to Christ.  Seeing the relics of these saints...their clothes, their living spaces...has given me a dose of reality regarding my service to God.  I’m sure they were electric personalities and filled with divine love, but they endured so many trials and mortifications.  I’ve seen three stigmatists in three days and just thinking about that alone is awe-inspiring.  We complain about so much without realizing that a) our sufferings are really nothing and b) God can use our sufferings, and they can teach us things and make us better able to serve Him.  I get so distracted from the fact that the only thing that matters is service to Christ.  Even considering where I’m going to sleep tomorrow is a trifling matter compared to that.  

In the five years since, I don't feel that I'm really any closer to being able to serve God, or appreciate my sufferings, or focus solely on service to Christ. In fact, I think I might be even worse. But I know that God is with me in the process, and that I can think back to a hot and sunny day in Italy when apriest from India heard my confession and gave me the most perfect advice, despite apologizing repeatedly that he didn't speak English. Grace is abundant, everywhere, even in the mundane details in our daily lives. Not just when I'm bounding through Europe with no place to stay or even a fixed itinerary, or facing a life-and-death struggle, or watching miraculous coincidences unfold before me. And it is something to appreciate every single day. Even though I was bowled over by seeing the sacrifices of the saints and thinking about how much my life pales in comparison to theirs, ultimately it taught me to appreciate the everyday graces, which can be just as powerful in their abundance.