Great emphasis was placed on the practice of meditation, withdrawing attention from the material world and focusing mind and soul on God. The novices were taught to concentrate their psychic energies on one aspect of Divine Reality, such as one of the names or attributes of God, a passage of Scripture, or an event in the life of Christ. Not all the novices or even the older friars felt divine light break upon them as a result of this activity, but everyone was supposed to meditate the best one could.
Strict obedience to superiors was considered essential for anyone aspiring to the highest state of spirituality. It was part of giving up one’s will, dying to oneself. The Capuchin was at all times expected to learn and carry out as diligently as possible the will and desire of his superiors. “Obedience is everything for me,” Padre Pio wrote later in life. “God forbid that I should knowingly go against [a superior] who has been designated as my interior and exterior judge, even in the slightest way.”7 Padre Bernardino of Siena recalled that even as a very old man Padre Pio would ask his superiors for permission to do the most trivial things, such as getting his hair cut, changing his habit, and putting on his mantle in cold weather. What many would consider a pathetic lack of initiative and a disturbing dependency is in fact a virtue for those concerned with humility, selflessness, and surrender to the will of God. When, at one period in his life, he was accused of disobedience, Padre Pio cried, “If my superior ordered me to jump out of the window, I would not argue. I would jump!”8
Fra Pio and his fellow novices got plenty of opportunities to practice the virtues of humility and obedience under the not-so-tender care of the thirty-one-year-old novice master, Tommaso of Monte Sant’Angelo. A photograph of him taken around this time shows a scowling man with sunken eyes; a short, dark, neatly trimmed beard and moustache; and a grim downturned mouth. After his death at sixty, Padre Tommaso was characterized as a man “with a heart of gold, understanding, and full of charity to his novices.”9 His actions when Pio was a novice, however, are more reminiscent of a character straight out of a Dickens novel. Padre Tommaso felt that he had to carry out the rules of the Capuchin Constitutions to the letter, which prescribed that novices, along with all members of the community, “take the discipline” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This meant going to the choir, pulling up their habits, and striking themselves across the shoulders with a corded whip. The purpose was to subdue the sinful desires of the flesh, especially sexual passions, laziness, and inconstancy. During this exercise, the Constitutions directed the friars to meditate on the Passion of Christ.
Padre Tommaso, however, went a step further. He reportedly ordered the novices to whip themselves until their blood ran onto the floor. Moreover, without warning or apparent provocation, he would order the young novices to administer the discipline at any time or place. During meals, often he would order a hapless novice to go into a corner, strip, and flagellate himself until his back was a mass of bleeding flesh. The slightest infraction of the Rule was an occasion for harsh reproofs, mortifications, and heavy punishments. Sometimes Padre Tommaso would put a wooden collar around a novice’s neck, sometimes he would blindfold him, and sometimes he would make him eat off the ground. In the refectory, before eating his meager repast, each novice had to kneel at Padre Tommaso’s feet and beseech him, “Father, bless me.” If the master answered, “I bless you,” the novice could rise and take his place in the dining hall. But if the master remained silent, the boy had to stay there, kneeling on the cold floor until it was Padre Tommaso’s pleasure to dispose otherwise. Sometimes novices were forced to remain on their knees for the duration of the meal. For breaking just one of the rules, the master made novices eat bread and water from a plate on the ground, like a dog.10 Padre Tommaso never gave any explanations.11 Fifty years later, Padre Pio tearfully recalled to a younger confrere, “One day the Master of the Novices declared [without any explanation], ‘Tomorrow there will be no Communion for you.’”12
Vincenzo Masone, one of Fra Pio’s two friends who entered the novitiate with him, was able to take the stifling regime only two months before he returned home. (The other boy, Bonavita, had been sent home almost immediately because he was judged to be too young.) Then there was a novice from Naples, whose name has not been recorded, who was made to kneel hungry, all through dinner, and muttered, “Back home in Naples we pay a dime to see madmen. Here we see them for free.” Padre Tommaso overheard this remark and ordered the boy to strip and take the discipline there and then. The boy refused, got up, and walked out of the convent, never to return.13
Fra Pio never complained. When another novice urged him to leave with him, insisting that the master was insane, even diabolical, Pio answered:
I could never agree to this. You’ll see, with Our Lady’s and St. Francis’ help, we too, little by little, will get used to this new life just as others before us did. Do you believe the friars here and elsewhere were not once like us? No one is born a friar.14
One of his confreres at the time recalled that Pio
… kept to the genuine spirit of his novitiate…. Quite often, when I went to his cell to call him, I found him on his knees at the end of his bed, or with his face buried in his hands over books. Sometimes he failed to appear in the choir for night office, and when I went to call him, I found him on his knees, deeply immersed in prayer. I never heard him complain of the poor food, although the friary could have given us something better. He never criticized the actions of his superiors, and when others did, he either rebuked them or else left their company. He never grumbled about the cold, which was really severe, or about the few blankets we were given. However, what struck me most about Fra Pio was his love of prayer.15
Another religious who knew him as a novice recalled that when Pio prayed, “he would weep many tears, so much so that very often the floor would be stained.”16
Fra Pio appreciated the need to mortify the flesh. A few years later, when writing to a spiritual daughter, he quoted Galatians 5:24, in which Saint Paul declares, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Pio wrote:
From this it is apparent that anyone who wants to be a true Christian … must fortify his flesh for no other reason than devotion to Jesus, who, for love of us, mortified his entire body on the cross. The mortification must be constant and steady, not intermittent, and it must last for one’s whole life. Moreover, the perfect Christian must not be satisfied with a kind of mortification which merely appears to be severe. He must make sure that it hurts … for … all the evils which hurt your soul can be traced to the failure to practice due mortification of the flesh, either through ignorance or lack of the will to do so. If you want to [achieve holiness] you must master your flesh and crucify it, for it is the source of all evil.17
As time went on, Pio would modify this position somewhat, as he realized that few people were capable of the degree of ascetical rigor that he imposed on himself.
Novices, in addition to showing detachment from all material pleasures, were supposed to distance themselves from family and friends. Too strong a desire on the part of a novice to see his family was taken as a sign that he lacked a genuine call from God to the order. Unfortunately, no one bothered to explain this practice to Fra Pio’s mother when she came one day to visit her son. Giuseppa was escorted into the guest room, and Fra Pio came down to meet her in the company of another friar, who sat a few feet away, immobile, with his head down and eyes lowered. Giuseppa was horrified that her son, instead of embracing her, sat with his hands in his sleeves, looking at the floor. When she gave him a number of presents, he showed no enthusiasm. “Thank you,” he said, coldly and quietly, “I will take them to my superior.”
Frustrated at her inability to draw her son into any kind of conversation, she cried, “Son, what’s the matter? Why have you become mute?” Giuseppa returned in tears to Pietrelcina without either Pio or any of his superiors making any explanation for his behavior. In later years, Padre Pio recalled, “As