Padre Pio
San Giovanni Rotondo, Gargano
Nine stops with the friar who carried the wounds for fifty years
On the morning of the twentieth of September 1918, a thirty-one-year-old Capuchin came down from the choir loft of a poor friary church on a mountain in southern Italy bleeding from his hands, his feet and his side. He carried those wounds for fifty years, and for much of that time he was examined, doubted, investigated and silenced by his own Church. He is remembered now for wonders. But the written record he left is mostly darkness — letters in which he says plainly that he cannot feel God at all. What he did in that darkness was sit in a confessional ten hours a day and build a hospital, and he called the hospital the House for the Relief of Suffering. This pilgrimage walks nine stops with him, from a sickly boy in a hill village to a bed in San Giovanni Rotondo on a September night in 1968. It is for anyone whose body has become a problem, whose prayer has gone quiet, or who has been waiting a very long time.
The nine days
Day 1 · The Boy — A Poor House in Pietrelcina
Pietrelcina, 25 May 1887
Day 2 · The Habit — Fifteen Years Old at Morcone
Morcone, January 1903
Day 3 · The Delay — Ordained, and Sent Home
Pietrelcina and the barracks at Naples, 1910–1918
Day 4 · The Darkness — I Live in a Perpetual Night
His letters to his directors, 1911–1918
Day 5 · The Wound — The Twentieth of September
San Giovanni Rotondo, 20 September 1918
Day 6 · The Silence — Mass Behind a Closed Door
San Giovanni Rotondo, 1931–1933
Day 7 · The Confessional — Ten Hours a Day
The church of Our Lady of Grace, for thirty-four years
Day 8 · The House — For the Relief of Suffering
San Giovanni Rotondo, 5 May 1956
Day 9 · The Fiftieth Year — The Wounds Were Gone
San Giovanni Rotondo, 23 September 1968