Padre Pio Achieves Sainthood

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from Reuters.com, June 16, 2002 with a headline: “Padre Pio wrestled with devil, predicted future,” dateline: Vatican City.Padre Pio, the 20^th century mystic monk and miracle worker who for 50 years is to said to have had the stigmata, that is the bleeding wounds of Christ, have for many people always been a saint.Pope John Paul IV formally declared his sainthood on Sunday at a solemn ceremony attended by hundreds of thousands in a sweltering St. Peters Square and watched on screen by millions in Italy and around the world.For many, this was simply the church rubber-stamping the status they had always believed in.Padre Pio’s fame centers on the stigmata which he had for 50 years from 1918 to his death in 1968 at the age of 81.Padre Pio had wounds in the hands, feet and side that corresponded with the wounds Christ suffered in the crucifixion.He used brown fingerless gloves to absorb the blood and cover the wounds except when he said Mass.Doctors were at a loss to explain the wounds which never produced gangrene or infection.When they examined them they were able to feel their fingers pressing in from either side.When he held up the host at Mass, the faithful were able to see light coming through the wounds.According to conferees, Pio lost a cup of blood a day from the stigmata, ate one Spartan meal a day and slept three hours each night.Yet he was not anemic and did not lose weight.The stigmata started fading toward the end of his life and disappeared when he died.Padre Pio was said to have a stern look in his eyes that could scare even the devil and some say it sometimes did.“Padre Pio had no sympathy for the devil and the devil certainly had none for him.” His biographers say he wrestled with the devil, literally and one of the many books written about him is called The Devil in the Life of Padre Pio.According to monks who lived with him, the last big demonic tussle was in July 1964 when at 10:00 at night, the friars heard him calling out from his cell.They found him on the floor, his forehead slit open.He told a priest later that “the devil tried to scratch out my eyes.”The next day the devil is said to have spoken through a possessed person saying, “I went to visit somebody, I took revenge.”Many people say Padre Pio was able to predict events in their lives or knew what they were about to confess.He was also said to be seen in two places at the same time, a mystic ability the church calls “bi-location.”The Vatican investigated and rehabilitated him twice and cleared him of charges of sexual misconduct and fraud.In the 1930s he was ordered not to say Mass in public or hear confessions.The ban was lifted after three years.A new investigation began in 1960, but he was cleared and rehabilitated in 1965.The bearded, brown robed Padre Pio spent nearly all his life in a simple monastery in the hilltop town of San Giovanni Rotondo, in Italy’s rugged southern Puglia region.Today, it is the Lourdes of Southern Italy, a pilgrim boomtown of some 27,000 residents and 7.5 million visitors a year.Its economy revolves around souvenir shops, hotels, and a huge hospital which Padre Pio built.He is credited with performing two miracles after his death for people who prayed to him.Before his beatification, the penultimate step before sainthood, he was credited with the inexplicable healing of an Italian woman who had a lung disease.The second miracle was the curing of an eleven year old Italian boy who had meningitis and whose mother prayed to Padre Pio while her son was in a coma.

Tom:

Dave, we could spend a week on this guy, a really fascinating individual, but the claim here is that he wrestled with the devil.He did certain things throughout his life that are above what the normal person would certainly experience.

Dave:

I would say he was a representative of the devil in fact.When he first manifested the stigmata or the reason why he did, he asked his superior of the monastery for permission to suffer for the sins of the world.He was granted permission and that was when he began to manifest the stigmata.So he claimed he was suffering for the sins of the world and the monks in the monastery testified that they heard multitudes of voices at night talking with him in his cell and he claimed that more spirits of the dead than living people came to visit him on their way from purgatory to heaven thanking him for suffering for their sins to pay the penalty for their sins.So they could be delivered from purgatory and taken to heaven.

Tom:

Now Dave, let me stop you right there.For some people who are hearing this, they are saying okay, okay, okay, but this is a denial of the atonement of Christ.This is somebody interjecting themselves in this process and becoming a savior in effect.

Dave:

Denial that Christ paid the penalty.

Tom:

So that’s why you say this man is a worker for Satan.

Dave:

Yes, and it’s also a contradiction Tom, as you would know as an ex-Catholic, for what the Catholic Church teaches.The Catholic Church teaches that Christ’s suffering on the cross was not sufficient to deliver us from temporal punishment; therefore you have to go to purgatory and suffer there in the flames for your own sin.Here we have Padre Pio suffering for people’s sins, reducing their penalty, the time that they themselves have to suffer in purgatory.Now wait a minute!If the suffering of Christ wouldn’t do that, why would the suffering of Padre Pio do that?The man was an agent of Satan and yet he is one of the most highly honored, now saints of the Catholic Church.Pope John Paul II paid a pilgrimage as you recall.How some of the apologists for the Catholic Church like Scott Hahn and—

Tom:

Karl Keating.

Dave:

Karl Keating—how they can overlook this, and Tom, I remember being at the Christian Booksellers Convention and now they’ve got crucifixes, they’ve got—this was supposed to be Christian publishers—they’ve got Catholic publishers now and I remember seeing books about Padre Pio being sold—at Christian Booksellers Convention?You would think it was so obvious, but somehow it doesn’t seem to make an impression upon people.

Tom:

Right, and I think one of the insights from this article—well it said “Today this town, this small town, just a bump on the road is now almost as large as the Lourdes.Well they call it the Lourdes of Southern Italy, 7.5 million visitors a year.

Dave:

Yes, another problem Tom—made a saint by the Pope.Come on, the New Testament was written to the saints.The saints at Ephesus, the saints at Colossus, we are all saints.If you are a Christian, you are a saint.That means that you’ve been sanctified, set apart by God.You belong to him, you belong to Christ, you are purchased with the blood of Christ, and to say that you become a saint after they vote you in and the Pope makes you a saint—again it is so contrary to the Bible, you would think it would just stand out!People would recognize this as a fraud, but they don’t.Why not?Because they are ignorant of the Word of God and that’s why we’re trying to get people to search the scriptures daily and see what it teaches in contrast.