# 30 OF 45 - THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO!

# 30 OF 45 - THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO!

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - THURS. JULY 11/19

PADRE PIO - THE TRUE STORY BY C. BERNARD

CHAPTER 11 - SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR - 142 - 145

5. Always to God and say, in every circumstance, "Thy will be done." (continued) ..."As we have seen, he recommended prayer for the departed. When Pope Pius X died, Padre Pio said, "I believe that his holy soul has no need of our intercessory prayer, but let us pray for his eternal rest just the same, since our prayers will never go to waste....

6. "Love the cross." Padre Pio consistently taught that suffering is special sign of God's love. "Without love for the cross, he wrote, "we cannot make much profit in the Christian life. "He frequently reminded his disciples, "The heavenly Father wants to make you resemble His divine Son in His anguish in the desert and on Calvary."

Why must Christians suffer? Why do bad things happen to them? "Religion," he wrote, "is a hospital for spiritual sick people who want to be healed. To be healed they must submit themselves to suffering, namely, to bloodletting, to the lance, to the razor, to the probe, to the scapel,  to the fire, and to all the bitterness of medicine. In order to  be spiritually cured, we have to submit to all the tortures of the Divine Physician....

7. Offer every action up to God.Padre Pio urged his disciples to make short mental prayers, offering everything they did, no matter how trivial, to Christ. "Let's refer everything to God and live and move in Him," he wrote. Along with everything else, the Christian was to offer his sufferings to God as a sacrifice. While Padre Pio did urge everyone to offer himself as a victim soul, he did teach that everyone should offer sufferings, when it come, to God, to be used for his good purposes. "Physical and spiritual ills are the most worthy offering you can make to Him, who saved you by suffering," he wrote to Nina Campanile. 

8. Never Worry. Anxieties, Padre Pio, taught, are a waste of time. The devil uses worry to befoul our good works because of our lack of confidence in God's goodness. "Our sweet Lord is deprived of giving us many graces, solely because the door of our heart is not open to Him in holy confidence," he insisted. Worry, he contended, "dries up Christian piety and makes it sterile."

9. Aspire to the heavenly prize. "How lovable an eternity in heaven is, and how miserable the affairs of this world!" Padre Pio exclaimed to a spiritual daughter. "Continually aspire to the former and fervently despise the comforts and affairs of this mortality."

Padre Pio had many things to say about heaven. There the child of God is forever happy, united with loved ones, watching over family and friends on earth. When the father of his spiritual daughters Erminia and Maria Gargani died, he wrote them, "Comfort yourself with the sweet thought that your Daddy is not dead .... He lives a life of joy that will have no end. He lives in Heaven....

10. Rejoice in the Lord.  Despite his sufferings as a victim of divine love, Padre Pio was a cheerful man. Nearly everyone who knew him found him basically happy, even jovial. "Drive melancholy away,"he wrote Raffaelina "Joy, with peace, is the sister charity .... Serve the Lord with laughter," he frequently said....

Padre Pio discouraged, however, too great a curiosity in the miraculous and extraordinary. Whenever people asked him about visions or alleged miraculous events, he said, "That is for the ecclesiastical authorities." He once told a friar, "I'm convinced that so many people don't want to live by faith, but seek the extraordinary." ... "Live by faith!" ...

To those, who like his sister Pellegrina, seemed hopelessly obdurate, he nonetheless showed love and patience. When a man confided to him, "I don't believe in God," Pio smiled and said, "But God believes in you! ....

George H. Kubeck