Padre Pio Biography

Portraits of saints. And it’s hard to imagine what suffering was inevitably connected with such a fate. Suffering, caused equally by admirers and smaller ones, the church and the world. But even more so: the suffering that the “greatest mission” required from him, accepted by him voluntarily: the mission to clearly reproduce the image of Christ, crucified for the sake of saving the world and tormented by the devil and sinners.

As far as we know, the father of Pio was the only priest in history who received stigmata: five bleeding wounds on his chest, on his arms and on the legs like the wounds of Christ, nailed to the Cross and pierced by a spear of Centurion. If other mystics who received the same sacred signs from St. Francis of the Assisian, the stigmata was soon a symbol of fiery marriage love that likened them to Christ, then the Father Pio seemed to be so expressed, that crashed so deeply that it was obviously manifested even on his body.

This is evidenced by history. Without fear of mistake, we can say that it was these wounds that attracted crowds to his priestly service: not only because living blood oozed, and sometimes they exuded a mysterious and strong aroma, but also because they were a complete identification of themselves with the Holy Service. Stigmata showed him to the cross at the moment when he served the Holy Mass with such humble love that those who saw him once could no longer forget him.

In addition, stigmata seemed physically pointed to the price of the blood that Christ paid - whenever the priest, Father Pio, full of obvious horror before sin and endless tenderness for the sinner, taught the sacrament of forgiveness. And, finally, thousands of believers, who prayed for intercession and miracles, they reminded of what the price of merits that God had so generously gave through him.

The miracle of the Eucharist, the miracle of forgiveness, the miracle of the resurrection anticipated in sick bodies and souls, recovering from one of his signs, as well as from one of his words: bleeding stigmata - the very ones that everyone would like to see and touch them - were a symbol that combined other miracles and which appeared their mysterious source.

They also expressed, but the pilgrims were interested in less than a miracle of his constant and very cruel personal fight with Satan, from which he came out every day an exhausted winner. The father of Pio Stigmata was the burning obviousness of everything that the Catholic priesthood is.

His name was Francesco Fordjone, and he was born in Pietrelchina, a village in Benevento’s province, almost on the border with a bullet. At the age of fifteen, he acted as a novice to the kapucins, taking one of the most severe and to many binding "charters". He already caused admiration for his simple and obvious faith, tense and passionate, and his unconditional obedience.

However, no one suspected that this novice, who was eagerly spent for many hours in prayer, but almost always with tears, from some mournful and excited involvement in the Holy Sacraments, had long lived in friendship with the Angel of the Guardian, whom he called his childhood friend, and among the frequent visions of Christ and the Virgin, who seemed to want to prepare him to fulfill the task, too difficult for the end.

On the eve of admission to the monastery, he had a vision in which he was called as a young “David”, so that he would enter the struggle “against someone terrible and huge”: that was the sign of the life that expected him. However, the visions of Jesus and the heavenly mother and the painful struggle against the devil accompanied him from the age of five, when he chased his two sheep on this, the young novice did not tell anyone, but only because he, in his naivety, believed that all souls were illuminated and mercy like this, although they keep easily explained silence.

To his happiness: because if he talked about this, even these good monks would consider it mentally ill, especially that his health caused serious concerns: he suffered from acute pain in his chest, a constant lack of appetite and frequent fever. If he had not been so kind and obedient, if he had not prayed, so deeply living into his prayer, he would be returned to his family.

Instead, he was endlessly transferred from one monastery to another, trying to choose a more favorable climate for him. But it seemed that the situation only worsened. And besides, some devilish actions that frightened his brothers began to manifest itself. The situation remained shaky throughout the training period: he somehow finished his studies, with difficulty overcame various stages of preparation for the priesthood interrupted by frequent and long-term stay in the family and received a holy ordination ahead of schedule, as a reward for his kindness, because the abstines thought that he had not stayed for long.In the early years, he was not even allowed to confess both because of his too poor health, which did not tolerate fatigue, and because they doubted that he had the necessary preparation for this service.

He did not die, but his position becomes strange. The first five years after the adoption of the sacred dignity, Father Pio was not able to live in a monastery. As soon as he returned there, he became ill and after a few weeks he was death. He was constantly forced to send him home. Only in Pietrelchin the forces return to him. He lives in the “hut”, that is, in a room built to protect the vineyards, near a centuries -old elm, and here spends life in prayer and in experiences that he cannot tell anyone about.

He is repeatedly called for military service by the First World War, but each time they are forced, almost immediately, to send on vacation due to illness. The abbot also often summon him to the monastery, and Pio's father is ready to obey any of their orders, but for everyone it becomes obvious that each time he risks his life. Sometimes he cannot take any food except the Eucharist, and this lasts weeks; And on some days, the thermometer goes off scale much higher than forty -two degrees.

Some brothers are annoyed and strongly advise excluding it from the order. Fortunately, the holy throne prefers to give this strange monk a special resolution so that he can live “outside the community”, in his native village. In those years there is something mysterious. Later, Father Pio will say that he is not allowed to explain the cause and meaning of these events. But he admits to his confessor: “The biggest sacrifice that I brought to the Lord is that I could not live in the monastery.” Only the confessor knows that he spends his life, praying day and night, experiencing burning mystical experiences even then he feels the pain from five stigmata, but he beg the Lord so that the wounds are not visible and every night - learning the grueling battles against the spirit of evil, which are eliminated.

Leave it exhausted and physically broken. In that hut there are long heavenly ecstasy and dialogues of love, which refers to the salvation of sinners, and the terrible suffering, in which the father of Pio is redeemed not only by his sins: paradise days and hellish nights. Father Pio feels how the good Jesus, surrounding him from all sides, and Satan, who torments him with terrifying visions and real beatings, is disputed with each other.

Periodically, he experiences Jesus’s passion in his body: “This soul,” he will reveal from obedience to the confessor in the year, “for several years now it endures all this [that is:“ Correction of thorns and scourging ”] almost every week.” This is an incredible love story. He writes in a letter dated March 21: “Jesus almost always requires love from me. And my heart, rather than the mouth, replies: Oh, my Jesus, I would like to but, in the end, exclaim: yes, Jesus, I love you, at that moment it seems to me that I love you, and I also feel the need to love you more and more; But, Jesus, I no longer have love in my heart, you know that I gave it all of it to you; If you want more love, then take my heart and fill it with your love, and then order me to love you, and I will not refuse you this; On the contrary, I pray you, do it - I wish it so.

From the evening of Thursday to Saturday, as well as on Tuesdays - a painful tragedy for me. It seems to me that my heart, arms and legs pierce the sword, I feel such severe pain. Meanwhile, the devil does not stop being in the most terrible views and beat me truly scary. But Long live the love of Jesus, who rewards me for all his visits. " The most fiery expressions of mystical literature are common under his pen.

Sometimes he writes whole phrases that we find in the same form in St. John the Cross, by Aville Teresa and even Teresa from Lizier, but he takes them from his own heart, and not from the books that he did not even have the opportunity to read. This was not two hearts, but one. My heart disappeared like a drop of water that is lost in the sea, ”he writes on April 18.

I was in the church and raised his thanksgiving for the Mass when I suddenly felt my heart wounded by a fiery arrow, so burning and fiery that it seemed to me that I was dying. ” Judging by what will happen later, one can try to give such an explanation: Pio's father, before the real, “complete” time of his mission, was supposed to survive the difficult battles of the ancient hermits, the intense spiritual experiences of the first monks, the ardent desires of the first apostles and missionaries, the suffering of the persecuted and martyrs, the story of the love of the most fiery mystics, in fact, that with him is with him, that with him.

It happens - so all -consuming that a small monastic community could not have taken it out. Pio's father is deeply immersed in the very heart of the Church: where sinners who need to be saved are suffered by; where the nearrified, who need to give a help hand; where the clergymen who should be supported; where patients should be helped; Where the souls that should be made by saints, he is so involved in the whirlwind of the “involvement of the saints”, that at first it requires loneliness.

His brothers-kapuzins later, when the mission of Father Pio becomes public, will be given almost fifty years in order to make sure that it means to be together, communon, busy preserving the mission of their father and brother and absorbed in her. And many will have to admit that they "can no longer bear it." Therefore, at first, the will of God is that He lives alone, even at the cost of violation of the holy customs.

Many years later, the father of Pio will say in sensations: “Jesus was in Pietrelchina, and there everything happened he returned to the monastery in the year, first to Foju, and then to San Jovanni Rotondo-a village lost among the rocks of Gargano, without roads, without water supply, without electricity. He accidentally arrived there in the summer of the year and retired from there only for several periods of compulsory military service, until he was sent home to “die with the world” - he was in such a deplorable state.

He returned to that small mountain monastery in the year, when a significant part of the population of San Jovanni Rotondo was destroyed by the war and the Spanish epidemic, which in just two months took two hundred lives. There he will live continuously for more than fifty years. The flow of pilgrims, who climbed into these mountains, attracted by the glory of the Holy confessor, but a decisive fracture occurred when God decided to make the mysterious wounds that so likened him so likened to Jesus climbed.

We should not restore anything, since we have a narrative that the father of Pio had to write in obedience to the will of his confessor. In August, transversion of a mystical wound in the heart repeated with impressive realism: “From that day,” he wrote, “I have been mortally wounded.” A few days later: “The wound, which I opened again, bleed and bleed it alone, it would be enough to give me death a thousand or more times.

Oh my god, why don't I die? It was morning, and he, having served the Holy Mass, was immersed in thanksgiving. He says: “Peace suddenly condescended to me, like a sweet bed I saw in front of me someone mysterious appearance, he horrified me; I cannot describe what I felt at that moment. I felt that I was dying, and I would have died if the Lord had not intervened and support my heart, which, as I felt, broke in my chest.

The mysterious vision left, and I noticed that my arms, legs and chest were pierced and bleeding. Imagine the torment that I experienced then and which I experience constantly, almost every day. Blood flows from the wound in the heart endlessly. ” Before we talk about what happened in the monastery, after which the father of Pio could no longer hide this blood when the rectors certainly wished to “put the finger” into his wounds, when they caused doctors for consultation when newspapers took possession of this news, when the flow of curious and the pilgrims poured into the monastery to imagine his confusion, his Domine, non sum dignus Lat.

But we could also imagine that he probably experienced a certain exalted and pure joy because of such a high difference. So, as for the father of PIO, his expressions are full of fear and horror. Already in the previous months, he wrote: “I feel that the hand of the Lord has been insolent on me, I feel that the Lord is all His power to punish me and as a leaf, torn by the wind, He throws me back and pursues me, I can no longer be my God, I got lost and lost you, but will I find you again?

My God and my God I can’t tell you anything else: why did you leave me? .. In addition to this loneliness and despondency, nothing is more unknown to me, even my life - I don’t know if I live this complaint after he repeats in more and more tragic tones. But when stigmata appears, this does not mean that his suffering from God -state decreased: on the contrary, it increases immensely, to such an extent that Father Pio feels damned.

He speaks of his “terrible situation, I got to the point that it seems to me that the temptation of despair from me has already entered my soul and that I have already lost hope