#32 OF 45 - THIS HAPPY BOOK REPORT ON PADRE PIO

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

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - FRI. SEP. 13/19

Padre Pio - The True Story By C. Bernard

Chapter 12 - The Stigmata, 150-  Selected Excerpts - 150-155

 

    "In June 1918, Pio wrote to Benedetto: "How can I tell you of the agonizing pain which is causing my soul a martyrdom? ... I feel ... crushed by His mighty hand. Tears are my daily bread. I toss and turn, I seek Him, but I do not find Him ... except in the fury of His justice." Although he still access to supersensible wisdom with regard to others. Pio continued to be in the dark." about his own soul. Moreover the experience of God's love seem to have been withdrawn. "He has blotted out everything." Pio writes, "and I, alas, am lost in the thickest darkness, while I return in vain to disconnected memories of a lost love.... O Great God, where art Thou to be found? I have lost Thee! I cannot find Thee again because Thou hast accepted forthwith the total offering I made to Thee!"

 

    Deprived of the light to see his own way, Pio had to rely totally upon the counsel of Benedetto and Agostino. Agostino later wrote that he felt that God brought about Pio's trial to keep him humble: to know how successfully he was fulfilling God's will would have been too great a temptation to spiritual pride. Pio speaks of his fear that he is "about ground into powder" beneath the heavy hand of a God who is justly angry with him. Yet he prays, "I ask of Thee the strength to suffer, stripped of all consolation. Make these resolutions of mine constant, steadfast, and fruitful so that they may at least suffice to disarm Thy fury."

 

    Benedetto assured Pio that his bitter anguish was part of his participation in the passion of Christ for the sake of mankind. "The Omnipotent wants to make a holocaust of you," he told Pio.

 

    Pio frequently renewed his offering of himself as a victim for various intentions. In July, Pope Benedict XV urged all Christians to pray for an end to the world war, which was still raging; and, on July 27, despite his sufferings, Pio offered himself as a victim for the end of the war. "No sooner had I made this offering," he wrote, "than I felt myself plunged into a terrible prison and heard the crash of the gate behind me." From that moment, every minute of the day he felt as if he was in hell. He told Benedetto: "I no longer know the way. I no longer have as single ray of light, not one torch, not one single guideline, no life and no more truth to understand how I can nurture or refresh myself. Thus, I hope against hope, as you suggested to me." He is willing to be swallowed by the tempest, like Jonah, but "at the bottom of the sea I fear that I will find nothing but everlasting death." ...

 

    "In the late summer of 1918, with the Great War still raging, the terrible worldwide pandemic of Spanish influenza struck central Italy... In San Giovanni Rotondo, the situation was scarcely less appalling. Everyone seemed to be ill. What commerce there was in the town ground to a standstill. 

    Padre Pio's spiritual daughters came to him terrified, begin him to save them from this wicked strain of the flu. "Never fear," he said to Maria Campanile. "Put yourself under the protection of the Virgin, do not sin, and the sickness will not overcome you." Although some fell ill, none of them died....

 

    Padre Pio described his stigmatizing several times in his life, but his account given under obedience, to Padre Benedetto in October 1918.... when Padre Pio went to the choir between nine and ten in the morning and sat on the "vicar's bench" to make his thanksgiving after celebrating Mass. It was then he told Benedetto, "I was overtaken by a repose, similar to a deep sleep. All my internal and external senses and even the very faculties of my soul were steeped in indescribable quiet. In this state absolute silence reigned within me... I was filled with great peace and abandonment that blotted out every other worry or preoccupation. All this happening in a twinkling." It was then that he saw the same "mysterious Exalted Being" ... who wounded him on August 5. He did not identify the Exalted Being as Christ, but described the hands, feet, and side as dripping blood. The countenance of the celestial visitor frightened him. " I thought I should die and really should have died if the Lord hadn't intervened to strengthen my heart, which was ready to burst out of my chest....

 

  It is clear that Padre Pio, at least by the end of his life, identified the "Exalted Being" who appeared to him in August and September of 1918 as Christ.... Although Padre Pio was glad to suffer the pain of stigmatization .... he was mortified at the thought of people seeing the wounds....

 

George H. Kubeck