THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO # 2 OF 25

THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO # 2 OF 25

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP:W.W.W.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - FRI., MARCH 9/18

PREFACE:

    From the book, "Padre Pio: The True Story (Revised and Expanded) by C Bernard Ruffin, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1991.

PROLOGUE: THE SECOND ST. FRANCIS:

    "Today in southern Italy many shops and homes prominently display pictures of Padre Pio. One sees occasionally graffiti bearing the legend: "Viva Padre Pio." And for those who knew him in life, as for many who have come to know him only after his death, Padre Pio lieves in deed! "I was drawn to him like a magnet," an elderly lady from the Italian city of Taranto told the author in Sand Giovanni in 1978.... Many are the stories related of how Padre Pio changed people' lives....

      After Mandato left the confessional, all he could do was "cry, cry, cry." His experience had a profound and lasting impression upon him. "Many times," he has said, "we ask God to forgive us, but with the mind and not with the heart, Padre Pio made it possible for me to ask God's forgiveness of God with all my heart and soul, not just with my mind and my lips. From that moment I have really felt what I prayed. He made my religion real!"

    Monika Hellwig, professor of theology at Georgetown University, spent three years in Italy during the time of the Second Vatican Council and visited San Giovanni. She never met anyone in Italy who was skeptical of Padre Pio. Even radicals and anti-clericals regarded the venerable friar with 'reverance and respect.' Moreover,she could testify that the stigmatized Capuchin did indeed , lead people to "deep conversions." "What struck me most." she stated, "is how much Padre Pio mediated the presence of the divine to all who came to him. People came away from him invariably inspired and assured of God's presence and care for them. In him they experienced a most immediate revelation of God's love and concern for them."  ...

     Padre Pio was also a contemporary of Paul, Tillich, Karl Barth, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Albert Schweitzer, and other profound and learned theologians but Padre Pio is attested to have communicated dthe existential presence of many more people than did any of his immensely erudite contemporaries in there university chairs...

There is testimony also that Padre Pio was gifted with the "odor of sanctity," the he frequently displayed intimate knowledge of those who came to him. Without leaving his friary at San Giovanni Rotondo, Padre Pio was frequently seen and addressed in different parts of the world. While he was observed in his room by colleagues, he was simultaneously seen in such diverse places as Rome, Uruguay, Hawaiia, and Wisconsin....

    One of the friars who assisted Padre Pio in the last years of his life declared that more people were deeoky touched by Padre Pio through his Mass than through his healings, bilocations, ecstasies , and prophecies. Perhaps more important, thousands testify that through Padre Pio's ministry, they learned to walk in holiness and to resign themselves to God's will, offering their sufferings and heartache as a sacrifice to the Almighty for the conversion of souls....

    Not everyone was impressed by Padre Pio. In the 1920s he as denounced to the Vatican as a fraud by several prestigious priests and theologians, chief among whom were Padre Agostino Gemelli, a renowned physician,psychologist,and theologian, who insisted that Padre Pio's stigmata were due to hysteria, and the powerful archbishop of Manfredonia, Pasquale Gagliardi, who swore on is pectoral cross that the controversial wounds were self-inflicted, and worse, and, worse, that their bearer was demon possessed.... To many, Padre Pio remains a curious and unbelievable figure, the subject matter for supermarket tabloids rather than serious literature, his alleged appearance after death to be relegated to the class of Elvis Presley. Many people, at least in the "industrialized world," cannot relate to mysterious perfumes, miraculous healings, and traffic with angels and devils.

     Despite the reluctance of the modern materialistic sophisticate to accept Padre Pio and his ministry, one fact is incontrovertible: for thousands of people from all walks of life - physicians, scientists, intellectuals, as well as peasants and blue-collar types - Padre Pio made Christianity real. Through his ministry many were led to deep and permanent conversion experiences, and without any significant rate of recidivism. It cannot be denied that Padre Pio changed lives....

George H. Kubeck