Francesco was remembered as a handsome teenager, with fair, rosy skin and auburn hair, and a winning smile. Steadfastly he ignored the flirtations of his female classmates, lowering his eyes when they spoke to him. He was also very fond of reading. To a spiritual daughter, he wrote: “I never felt the least attraction for the type of reading that might sully moral innocence and purity, for I held quite naturally in greatest abhorrence even the slightest obscenity. In my readings, which were not improper, but were invariably worldly, I sought merely scientific satisfaction and the pastime of honest mental recreation.” He regretted, however, that such reading never helped him “acquire a single virtue” and, on the contrary, according to him, diminished his love for God.35
A note Franci wrote to his childhood friend Luigi Orlando on March 9, 1902, when he was two months shy of his fifteenth birthday, reveals a sensitive, affectionate boy who wanted to be loved. “Luigino” evidently had been snubbing him.
My good dear Luigino,
If you find any fault in me, I beg you explain it to me.
I know that you were angry with me yesterday evening, and I can’t understand the reason. I don’t think I’ve done anything bad to you; therefore I’m writing this letter, lovingly asking you for the reason for your new attitude towards me.
I’m sure that you’ll give me an explanation for acting this way because I want to be friends with everybody.
Goodbye, today, seeing you in school or church, I hope that you don’t act in the same way towards me. If you’re angry with me concerning what happened yesterday evening, it wasn’t I, but you should know that it was your friend Bonavita who told Sagginario to push you down.
Many regards and a hearty embrace from your most affectionate friend,
Francesco Forgione36
Already Francesco was beginning to adopt some of the self-denying practices for which he was later famous. While one school composition reveals that he liked to sleep late on days when he did not have to go to school, he already practiced mortification in eating. It seems as if, during certain times of the year, Francesco stayed in town while his mother lived at Piana Romana, where she supervised the farmwork. She returned to Pietrelcina, however, once a day, to prepare Francesco’s meals. (It isn’t clear if the other children were there with him or elsewhere.) Sometimes she left him food to cook. When she noticed that he was leaving uneaten much of what she left him, she was deeply hurt. She was especially upset when he failed to touch “a magnificent and perfumed dish of zucchini alla parmigiana.” In fact, she burst into tears. Francesco was deeply contrite. In later years he remarked, “If I had realized that Mother would have been hurt, I would have eaten all the zucchini.” After that he tried to eat whatever his mother left for him, for her sake.37
Pati
As Francesco neared the time of his entrance into the Capuchin order, he nearly got cold feet. The decision to abandon home and family for a life of prayer, obedience, and rigid self-discipline was not an easy one for the sensitive boy. Later in life, Padre Pio said that at that time he had drunk “great draughts of the world’s vanity.” He was unsure how he would face the prospect of having to forgo the innocent pleasures of secular life in the harsh austerity of the friary.
At this point in his life, Francesco found a friend and confidant who was to assume great importance in his life during the next few years. Salvatore Maria Pannullo, a fifty-two-year-old former college and seminary professor, became head pastor of the parish of Pietrelcina in 1901. Lively, cultured, and learned, “Zi’ Tore,” as he was known to his parishioners, had a photographic memory and could recite the Gospels by heart in their entirety. With Orazio in Pennsylvania, Pannullo became like a second father to Francesco, who called him “Pati” or “Little Father.”
By the fall of 1902, Francesco’s plans to become a Capuchin were nearly derailed.
Pannullo received an anonymous letter accusing Francesco of having a sexual relationship with the daughter of the stationmaster. He called his staff together, and they decided to suspend Francesco from his duties as an altar boy. Francesco, for his part, had not the slightest idea what was going on and thought this must be normal practice. Pannullo conducted a thorough investigation and discovered that some schoolmates of Francesco’s had written the letter. The boys admitted they made everything up. Only after he was allowed to resume his duties as altar boy was Francesco told what had transpired. Many years later, Padre Pio’s friend Padre Agostino asked him if he ever thought of taking revenge. “On the contrary,” said Pio, “I prayed for them and I am still praying for them.” Yet, he conceded, “At times I did mention to God, ‘My Lord, if it is necessary to give them a whipping or two to convert them, please do it, as long as their souls are saved in the end.’”38
When he was a middle-aged man, Padre Pio told George Pogany, a Hungarian 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.”39 Around the same time, Padre Agostino, who often heard Padre Pio’s confessions, wrote, “I can swear that [Padre Pio] has conserved his virginity up to the present and that he has never sinned, even venially, against this angelic virtue.”40
“You Must Fight a Formidable Warrior”
On New Year’s Day 1903, Francesco was meditating on his vocation, wondering how he could find the strength to bid farewell to his family and the world to devote himself entirely to God in the cloister. Suddenly, he experienced what is known as an “intellectual vision,” in which the physical senses are not involved. He was made “to gaze with the eye of his intellect on [things] quite different from those seen with bodily eyes.”
Describing the vision, he speaks of himself in the third person:
At his side he beheld a majestic man of rare beauty, resplendent as the sun. This man took him by the hand and said, “Come with me, for you must fight a formidable warrior.” He then led him 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.
Between these large groups of people was a great space in which that soul was placed by his guide. As he gazed intently and with wonder … in the midst of the space that divided the two groups, a man appeared, advancing, so tall that his very forehead seemed to touch the heavens, while his face seemed to be that of an Ethiopian, so black and horrible it was. [Francesco had no doubt seen unflattering depictions of Ethiopians in connection with Italy’s abortive campaign to set up a colony in East Africa.]
At this point the poor soul was completely disconcerted that he felt that his life was suspended. This strange personage approached nearer and nearer, and the guide who was beside the soul informed him that he would have to fight with that creature. At these words the poor little soul turned pale, trembled all over and was about to fall to the ground in a faint, so great was his terror.
The guide supported him with one arm until he recovered somewhat from his fright. The soul then turned to his guide and begged him to spare him from the fury of that sinister being, because [the guide] said [the creature] was so strong that the strength of all men combined would not be sufficient to bring him down.
“Your every resistance is vain. You must fight with this man. Take heart. Enter the combat with confidence. Go forth with courage. I shall be with you. In reward for your victory over him I will give you a shining crown to adorn your brow.”
The poor little soul took heart. He entered into combat with the formidable and mysterious creature. The assault [of the creature] was ferocious, but with the help of his guide, who never left his side, [the soul] finally overcame his adversary, threw him to the ground, and forced him to flee.
Then his guide, faithful to his promise, took from beneath his robes a crown of rarest beauty, a beauty