# 61 OF 80 - THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO

# 61 OF 80 - THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - TUES. AUG. 4, 2020

 

PADRE PIO - THE TRUE STORY - C. BERNARD 

Chapter 30 - The Greatest Cross p. 347- 351

    We return to our narrative. It is now the late 1950s. Italy, recovered from the devastation of the war, is now in a period of prosperity. Padre Pio no longer lives in a tiny friary in the middle of a barren wilderness accessed by a donkey path, The friary and the old church are now dwarfed by the new house of worship which is rising beside it and by La Casa Sllievo della Sofferenza which towers across the street. Thanks to the late, lamented Guglielmo Sanguinetii, the hills are no longer barren but covered by a handsome growth of evergreens.

 

    The donkey path is now a paved road lined with houses and shops. Many of the townspeople work at the hospital or work in businesses catering to the increasing number of tourists. Most of those who still work the earth do so with tractors rather than draft animals. Buses bring thousands of pilgrims each year, not over bumpy and rutted paths, but over modern highways.

 

    There are twenty-five friars at San Giovanni. Father Dominic is still there, but he has undergone cancer surgery and cut back considerably his workload. Padre Agostino, now nearly eighty and badly crippled, has been elected to his third term as minister provincial. But there are younger men, most of whom idolize the aging priest who has borne the visible stigmata for as long as they can remember.

 

    Across from the friary, on the other side of the road from the hospital stands Maria Pyle's pink "castle." Pyle, now called "Mamma" by many Sangiovannese, is active as ever, even though she describes herself in letters to friends as "oldissima." For many years, she and her ladies have opened a "missionary workshop" in their house for the benefit of Capuchin friars in the missionary field...

 

    Maria Pyle was wont to show visitors pictures of Padre Pio as a young man, and, clasping them to her bosom, exclaim, "And just think I knew Padre Pio when he looked like this!" She was known to gush,"How can anyone keep quiet about Padre Pio? ...One American visitor was put off by the way she clasped Padre Pio's picture ... Just two years after its opening, the Casa was already overcrowded. Pio has insisted, from the first, that no one was to turned away, and when told that the number of beds was inadequate for the number of patients, he urged the administrators, "Add extra beds, ..."

 

    When it became known in Vatican circles that Padre Pio was deathly ill, the papal secretary of state, fro some reason, decided to become involved. It seems as if he insisted that Pio return to the hospital for treatment.This distressed the sick man, who wanted to die at the friary but indicated, that if Rome insisted, he would obey,..

 

    On August 5, a statue known as the Pilgrim Madonna was brought from its home in Fatima, Portugal, where it represented the celebrated apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three local children in 1917. The image was brought to San Giovanni by helicopter, and for a day the faithful gathered in prayer and devotion before it. On the afternoon of August 6, the statue, before being taken through the wards of the Casa, was placed in the sacristy of the old church. Padre Pio had himself carried  on a chair. His eyes filled with tears, he leaned forward and kissed the statue and draped a golden rosary around it. Then, breathless and in pain , he was carried back to bed...

 

  "Viva! Viva!" and see the helicopter (with the pilgrim Madonna) rise to circle the friary three times in a gesture of farewell to him. Seeing the statue airborne, he prayed aloud, "Dear Mother, ever since you came to Italy, I have been laid low with sickness. Now that you are leaving, aren't you going to say even one word to me?" In a twinkling of an eye, the Capuchin stigmatist felt a "mysterious force" surge through his body. Those with him saw him shudder, from head to toe, as he leaped from his chair shouting, "I'm healed!" Within two weeks he had resumed all his duties...

 

George H. Kubeck,                                                                                                                                                       I hope Saint Padre Pio will play a role in this Nov. 3rd Presidential election. Someone did in 2016.