Who was St. Pio of Pietrelcina?
He was born Francesco Forgione on May 25, 1887, in Pietrelcina, a farming village in southern Italy in the Archdiocese of Benevento, to Grazio Forgione and Maria Giuseppa De Nunzio. He entered the Capuchin novitiate at Morcone on January 6, 1903, at sixteen according to the Vatican biography (Franciscan Media says fifteen), and took the habit and the name Brother Pio sixteen days later. He made solemn profession in 1907 and was ordained a priest at Benevento on August 10, 1910. The Vatican's biography for his canonization says he arrived at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, on the Gargano in Puglia, in September 1916 and stayed until his death; Franciscan Media gives 1917 for the assignment.
On September 20, 1918, Franciscan Media records, during his thanksgiving after Mass he had a vision of Jesus and afterward bore the wounds of the Crucified in his hands, feet and side. He carried them for fifty years. The wounds brought crowds, and the crowds brought suspicion. The Church questioned the stigmata in 1924 and again in 1931, Franciscan Media says, and for a time he was not allowed to say Mass in public or hear confessions. He did not complain, and the restrictions were lifted. The Vatican biography says only that he faced "investigations and restrictions" in his ministry and accepted them with humility.
The confessional was his life's work. Franciscan Media describes the routine: Mass at five in the morning, confessions until noon, confessions again in the afternoon, sometimes ten hours a day, with penitents taking numbers. Pope John Paul II, who recalled that in his own young years he had benefited from Padre Pio's availability to penitents, said at the canonization that the ministry of confession was one of the distinctive marks of his apostolate and drew "great crowds of the faithful" to San Giovanni Rotondo. Although he sometimes treated penitents with "apparent severity," the Pope said, those who became aware of their sins usually came back for forgiveness.
He also built a hospital. The Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering, opened on May 5, 1956, on the mountain beside the friary; Franciscan Media says the idea dates from 1940, that ground was broken in 1946, and that it has 350 beds. John Paul II called it "an extraordinary expression" of his charity.
Padre Pio died at San Giovanni Rotondo on September 23, 1968, at eighty-one. John Paul II beatified him in St. Peter's Square on May 2, 1999, and canonized him on June 16, 2002; the decree of canonization is dated February 28 of that year. Two of his sayings are preserved in the Vatican biography: "In books we seek God, in prayer we find him. Prayer is the key which opens God's heart," and "I only want to be a poor friar who prays." The Pope quoted the second at the canonization in a slightly different form, "I am a poor Franciscan who prays," and recalled Pio's description of prayer as "the best weapon we have, a key that opens the heart of God."
Why Catholics pray to Padre Pio for healing and for a good Confession
No papal document names Padre Pio patron of the sick or of penitents. Both devotions are traditional, and both grow from what he did every day for half a century.
On healing: he lived in pain, and he built a hospital. A man with wounds that never closed spent his last decades raising a 350-bed hospital so that the sick would be cared for properly. People who pray to him for a sick child or a parent are praying to a saint who thought medicine and prayer belonged in the same building. John Paul II drew the lesson at the canonization: "difficulties and sorrows, if accepted out of love, are transformed into a privileged way of holiness." That is not a promise of cure. It is a promise that suffering offered to God is not wasted, which is sometimes the only thing a sick person can hold onto at night.
On Confession: the Pope called him "a generous dispenser of divine mercy." If you have stayed away from the sacrament for years, if you are afraid of what you would have to say, if guilt has gone around and around until it feels like an illness, he is the saint to ask. He heard confessions for ten hours a day, sent some people away because they were not ready, and watched them come back. Catholics ask him for the courage to go, for the honesty to say it all, and for the peace afterward.
How to pray to Padre Pio
His memorial is September 23, the day of his death, kept on the General Roman Calendar as a Memorial. A novena can be made September 14 to 22. Any day is fine; he prayed all of them.
Say the prayer below, and then do what he would tell you. Make an examination of conscience and go to Confession this week; if it has been a long time, say so to the priest at the start, and let him help. Go to Mass. If you or someone you love is sick, keep the appointments, take the medicine and follow the treatment; prayer to Padre Pio accompanies medical care and never replaces it, and the man who built a hospital would say so himself. His rule for the rest was simple: "In books we seek God, in prayer we find him."