When that mysterious man had been vanquished, all the multitude of men of horrible countenance took to flight with shrieks, curses, and deafening cries, while from the other multitude of men came the sound of applause and praise for the splendid man, more radiant than the sun, who had assisted the poor soul so splendidly in the fierce battle. And so the vision ended.41
On January 3, 1903, Francesco had just received the Eucharist and was engaged “in intimate conversation with the Lord,” when his soul was “suddenly flooded with supernatural light,” and he understood in an instant that his entry into religion in the service of the heavenly king was to be a prolonged battle against the mysterious man of hell with whom he had done combat in the previous 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, the angels would also be there to applaud his victories. He understood his heavenly guide was Jesus Christ, who would sustain him in his battles and “reward him in paradise for the victories he would win, so long as he trusted in Him alone and fought gallantly.”42
Two days later, the evening before he was to depart from Pietrelcina to Morcone, Francesco felt his “very bones crushed” by the impending separation from his mother and siblings, to the point that he nearly collapsed. Then he experienced his third vision in five days. “The Lord came to comfort him,” he wrote, and he “beheld in all their majesty Jesus and His Blessed Mother. They encouraged him and assured him of their love. Jesus, at length, placed a hand on his head. This was sufficient to make 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 agonies in soul and body.”43
On January 6, 1903, Francesco bade farewell to his mother and siblings. Giuseppa, in tears, blessed him and told him that henceforth he belonged, not to her, but to Saint Francis. Then, accompanied by his teacher Don Angelo Caccavo, along with two friends, Vincenzo Masone and Antonio Bonavito, who also aspired to the priesthood, Francesco boarded the train. An hour later, they arrived at the station at Morcone, a town nestled on the slopes of Mount Mucre in the Matese Mountains, overlooking the Tammaro River Valley. Don Angelo and the three boys alighted and walked the unpaved, rocky path that led to the friary of Saints Philip and James of the Capuchin province of Sant’Angelo. Fra Cami’ answered the door and instantly remembered the boy who had wanted to be a Capuchin so he could have a beard. “Ah, Franci! Bravo! Bravo! You’ve been faithful to your promise and to the calling of St. Francis!”44
Chapter Three
Fra Pio
The Capuchins
The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin traces its origin to Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226), who, in 1206, organized a community of men “to observe the Holy Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ by living in obedience, without property, and in chastity.”1 Padre Pio was not a “monk,” but a “friar” (the word means “brother”) — a member of a mendicant, not a monastic, order.
The mendicant orders forbade their members from owning any property, even in common. They were to support themselves through their own labor and the charity of the faithful. In fact, “mendicant” comes from the Latin word meaning “to beg,” and mendicant brothers solicite material sustenance through begging. In addition to lives of contemplation and spiritual exercises, members of mendicant orders engage in active service to the community. Unlike a monk, who remains in one place, a mendicant friar may be assigned to any number of residences, called friaries or convents. Padre Pio remained in one convent for more than fifty years, but this was unusual. (The terms “friary,” “convent,” and “monastery” were used interchangeably.) The distinction, however, between a monk and a friar is appreciated by few outside the religious orders, and for most people, Padre Pio was a “monk.”
Most of the friars in the monastery Francesco Forgione entered in 1903 were comparatively young men. The Capuchin order in Italy was just then recovering from more than two decades of suppression by the Italian government. The middle of the nineteenth century had seen a tide of anticlerical sentiment swamp much of Europe. This was a time of rampant nationalism that eventually would explode into World War I. Since the Church had great temporal power and exerted political control over much of central Italy, it found itself the scapegoat for many nationalistic politicians who insisted that the Church was the enemy of the state. Since Catholics were bound in allegiance to the pope, who in those days was the head of the Papal States (a sovereign state), many European leaders, especially in the newly independent countries of Germany and Italy, considered the Catholic Church and its institutions subversive. During the 1860s and 1870s, both countries tried to weaken the Church’s power, and one of the ways they did this was by suppressing the religious orders.
The problem was especially bad in Italy, where the central part of the peninsula had been torn from the political control of the papacy in spite of the vehement opposition by Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878 and did not hesitate to use excommunication as a weapon against politicians who trod roughshod over the ancient privileges and prerogatives of the Church. Count Cavour, who became Italy’s first prime minister in 1861, considered all religious orders “useless and harmful,”2 and Giuseppe Garibaldi, liberator of southern Italy from the control of the Bourbon monarchy, called priests “wolves” and “assassins” and characterized the pope as “not a true Christian.”3 Some Italian politicians, in fact, called for the army to storm the Vatican and throw members of the College of Cardinals into the Tiber.4
Faced with such violent sentiment, in 1864 Pius IX criticized “Liberalism” in his “Syllabus of Errors,” arguing against religious toleration, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press, and denying that the pontiff had any need to accommodate himself to “progress,” “Liberalism,” or even “modern civilization.”5
Partly in retaliation, but mostly as a means of raising money, the Italian government legislated in 1866 the dissolution of all religious orders and the confiscation of all their lands and goods. The Capuchin order maintained many of the 38,000 religious institutions that were closed down, with their assets sold to raise money for the Italian government. The friars were forced to become secular clergy, go abroad, or operate in secret.
The policy of selling Church property proved a failure, as most peasants were too poor to buy the parcels of land offered for sale, and the use for confiscated churches, monasteries, and convents was extremely limited. After some twenty years, the state relented, and the Capuchins and other religious orders were once again allowed to wear their habits, live by their Rule, and eventually reclaim most of their churches and convents.
The task of reorganizing the more than a dozen friaries in the Capuchin province of Sant’Angelo, in the “heel” of Italy’s boot, fell to the learned and devout Padre Pio Nardone of Benevento (1842–1908), who had ministered in England and India during the time of suppression. Assuming the position of minister provincial (administrator) of the province, he actively recruited young men to restore the death-depleted ranks of the order. He saw to it that the province maintained its ascetical rigor, which prior to the suppression had been among the strictest in all of Italy. Before its dissolution, it was said that many of the friars had “died in the odor of sanctity.”
The Novice
For Francesco, as for all religious who were preparing for the priesthood, there was a double formation program: the “religious,” which prepared him for community life, and the “ecclesiastical,” which prepared him for the priesthood. The ecclesiastical program of studies at that time was usually determined by the student’s previous education.
When Francesco arrived at the convent at Morcone, he was shown to a tiny cell in which there was a mattress