THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO # 9 OF 25

THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO #9 OF 25

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPORT.COM - THURS. APR. 26/18

    From the book, "Padre Pio: The True Story (revised and expanded) C. Bernard Ruffin). Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Indiana, 46750. These are direct excerpts.

Chapter 2 'Il Bello Francesco - 39-41

   "When he was a middle-aged man, Padre Pio told another priest, "When I was a teenager, I didn't even know how human beings came about. None of the teenagers in Pietrelcina knew anything about sex in those days." Around the same time, Padre Agostino wrote, "I could swear that [Padre Pio} has conserved his virginity up to the present and that he has never sinned, even venially, against this angelic virtue.

    On New Year's Day in 1903, Francesco was meditating on his vocation, wondering how he would ever be able to bid farewell to the world and devote himself entirely to God in the cloister, when he was favored with and "intellectual vision" (that is, a vision perceived other than through the physical senses). His physical senses were, as he put it, "suddenly suspended," and he was made "to gaze with the eye of his intellect quite different from those seen with bodily eyes." His vivid description bears, careful reading. In it he speaks of himself in the third person.

    'At his side he beheld a majestic man of rare beauty, resplendit as the the sun. This man took him by the hand and said, "Come with me, for you must fight a doughty warrior.' He then led me to a vast field where there was a great multitude. The multitude was divided into two groups. On the one side he saw men of the most beautiful countenance, clad in snow- white garments. On the other ... he saw men of hideous aspect, dressed in black raiment like so many dark shadows.....'

    One's first impression is that Francesco must have fallen asleep over a copy of John Bunyan's "Pilgram's Progress at the point at which at which the Christian fights and subdues the fearsome giant Apollyon, but it was highly unlikely that a good Roman Catholic boy would have been caught with a book by Bunyan, who almost certainly would have been considered a heretic.

     On January 3, 1903, Francesco had just received the Eucharist and was engaged "in intimate conversation with the Lord" when he was favored with another purely intellectual vision. His soul was " suddenly flooded with supernatural light, by means of which he understood in an instant that his entry into religion in the service of the heavenly monarch was to be nothing other than a prolonged combat with that mysterious man of hell with whom he had found himself in the preceding vision. Then he understood - and this was sufficient to sustain him - that although the demons would be present at his battles to ridicule his failures, there was nothing to fear his victories over Satan. He also understood that the heavenly guide was none other than Jesus Christ, who would sustain him in his battles and "reward him in paradise for the victorious he would win, so long as he trusted in Him alone and fought gallantly."

    Two days later, the evening before he was to depart from Pietrelcina for Morcone, Francesco felt a lump in his throat. At the approaching separation from his mother and brother and sisters, he felt his "very bones crushed." The psychic pain was so great that he very nearly collapsed. But now he was favored with a third vision in five days. "The Lord came to comfort him," he wrote about himself,as he described how he beheld in all their majesty Jesus and His blessed Mother. They encouraged him and assured him if their love. Jesus, at length, placed a hand on his head. This was sufficient to rend him strong in the higher part of his soul, so that he shed not a single tear at his painful parting, although at the moment he was suffering [inwardly] agonies in soul and body.

George H. Kubeck

A Salute to Our Founding Fathers and Tradition

"Almighty God, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy Holy protection, and ... wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation." George Washington, April 26 letter - Annals, II, 607