“A Holy Priest, a Perfect Victim”
A Mysterious Illness
Fra Pio was plagued by a variety of ill-defined physical problems from the very beginning of his novitiate. He suffered from intestinal irritability and attacks of vomiting so intense that he was sometimes unable to retain food for weeks on end. Once, for a space of six months, he was forced to subsist largely on milk. He suffered from spasms of violent coughing, was tormented by headaches, and frequently ran high temperatures. Several times he was sent home to try to regain his health. Repeatedly, Fra Pio seemed to be reduced almost to the point of death, only to recover just as suddenly. His superiors, with the help of medical consultation, tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint the cause of his physical afflictions.
In 1908, while Fra Pio was studying at the friary of St. Egidio at Montefusco, physicians made a devastating diagnosis. Noting the weakness of the twenty-one-year-old patient, coupled with his severe respiratory symptoms and his fevers, which were most severe at night, they diagnosed him with an active case of tuberculosis of the lungs, a disease that exacted a tremendous toll among the overworked and undernourished peasantry of southern Italy at the time. The diagnosis of this contagious, life-threatening disease indicated that Fra Pio would have to remain outside the friary indefinitely.
Orazio (who was home at the time) and Giuseppa were not satisfied with their son’s diagnosis and took him to Andrea Cardone, a young doctor in Pietrelcina. Cardone, who boasted of a doctorate in medicine (as many practitioners in southern Italy at the time could not), was said to have been a brilliant physician who, even in his nineties, kept abreast of the latest medical advances. Cardone took issue with the diagnosis of tuberculosis, but, just to be sure, he convinced Pio’s parents to send him to specialists some sixty miles away in Naples, who confirmed that the friar was not suffering from any form of tuberculosis.
However, the doctors in Naples were not able to say what was wrong with Fra Pio. Cardone was convinced that his illness was a case of chronic bronchitis aggravated by his ascetic lifestyle. He recommended a period of rest and “abundant nourishment” in Pietrelcina. After a short time, Fra Pio seemed cured and was able to return to community life, assigned to the convent at Montefusco, eighteen miles south of home. His mysterious illness, however, was to plague him off and on for the next decade, and it very nearly derailed his vocation.
Until 1909, his health did not prevent his progress toward ordination. Fra Pio received minor orders on December 19, 1908, and two days later was ordained to the subdiaconate. The next month, he was ordained a deacon. But now Fra Pio was in a state of near-total collapse. His stomach could retain nothing, and, judged by his superiors as too ill to remain in a community, he was sent home to complete his studies in moral theology under Don Giuseppe Maria Orlando, a professor in the seminary at Benevento.1 Orlando, seventy-eight years old, was said to be subject to periods of “mental derangement,” but very intelligent and very pious. In this way, Fra Pio completed the studies necessary for ordination.
During this period, Fra Pio kept in constant touch with Padre Benedetto, and his letters from this period suggest that he was in very low spirits, depressed by his poor health and inability to live in a friary. He seemed to have cherished a desire to be ordained a priest and then die. Even in Pietrelcina, he seems to have been constantly ill. In March 1910, he complained to Padre Benedetto of continuous fever, especially at night; a cough; pains in his chest and back; and profuse sweating. In April, he was confined to bed. In May, he was suffering from chest pains. In July, he insisted that these pains were so bad as to render him speechless at times.
“If Almighty God in His mercy desires to free me from the sufferings of this body of mine, as I hope he does, through shortening my exile here on earth,” he wrote Padre Benedetto, “I shall die very happy.”2 In another letter, he confided: “The notion of being healed, after all the tempests that the Most High has sent me, seems to me as only a dream, even madness. On the contrary, the idea is very attractive to me.”3
Fra Pio was afraid, however, that his illness might be a punishment from God on account of unconfessed sin. He told Padre Benedetto:
For several days my conscience has been continually troubled over my past life, which I spent so wickedly. But what particularly tortures my heart and afflicts me exceedingly is the worry about my uncertainty as to whether I confessed all the sins of my past life, and, more than that, whether I have confessed them well…. Dear Father, I need your help to still the disquietude of my spirit because — and you must believe me — this is a thought that is destroying me … I should like to make a general confession, but I don’t know whether that would be good or bad. Please help me, O Father, for the love of our dear Jesus.4
Troubled that these conflicts and doubts could exist in a heart “that prefers death a thousand times to committing one sin,” Pio declared, “I would like to make a bundle of all my bad inclinations and give them to Jesus so that he might condescend to consume them all in the fire of his divine love!”5 Yet, through it all, Fra Pio was resigned to the will of God: “I do not know the reason for this, but in silence I adore and kiss the hand of the One who smites me, knowing truly that it is [God] himself who, on the one hand, afflicts me, and, on the other, consoles me.”6
Meanwhile, Padre Benedetto was working to make it possible for Fra Pio to be ordained. On July 6, he informed Fra Pio that all the necessary dispensations had been obtained and that the day of his ordination had been tentatively set for August 12. It would be necessary, however, for Fra Pio to journey to Morcone in mid-July to learn the ceremonies involved in exercising priestly ministry. He would also have to go to go to Benevento for his final examination.
And so, on July 21, Fra Pio, along with one Padre Eugenio of Pignataro Maggiore (Capuchins were supposed to travel in pairs), journeyed from Pietrelcina to Morcone. As soon as he arrived at the friary, Fra Pio was seized with cramps and started to vomit, and the next day, Padre Tommaso, the old novice master, wrote to Padre Benedetto to tell him that he was sending Fra Pio home. A sympathetic Padre Benedetto wrote Fra Pio immediately after his return to Pietrelcina, saying that he would authorize Don Salvatore Pannullo to instruct him on the rubrics of the Mass. “Your sufferings,” he added reassuringly, “are not punishment, but rather ways of earning merit that the Lord is giving you, and the shadows that weigh on your soul are generated by the devil, who wants to harm you.” He exhorted Fra Pio to remember that “the closer God draws to a soul, the more the enemy troubles him.”7
“That Beautiful Day of My Ordination”
The day of Fra Pio’s ordination was set for August 10, 1910. His father and brother, both living and working in Jamaica, Long Island, New York, were unable to come, but twenty-three-year-old Fra Pio boarded a horse-drawn cab, along with his mother and “Pati,” and bounced over what passed for a road to Benevento, where, in the cathedral, he was ordained a priest by eighty-three-year-old Archbishop Paolo Schinosi. After a light lunch, which Pio — now and forevermore to be known as Padre Pio — presumably was able to hold down, the little party returned to Pietrelcina, arriving home at 5:00 p.m. They were met on the edge of town by the local band, which had been hired by Giuseppa Cardone, Michele’s wife. The band accompanied Padre Pio to his home while, along the way, cheering townspeople showered him with coins and candy. At the house, his mother put on a great feast. Through it all, Padre Pio sat with his head bowed, blushing with emotion. “That beautiful day of my ordination” he would always recall as a day on which he felt as if he were in heaven.
As a souvenir of his ordination, Padre Pio passed out holy cards on which were printed words he intended as the theme of his ministry:
Jesus, my life and my breath, today I timorously raise thee in a mystery of love. With thee may I be for the world the way, the truth, and the life, and, through thee, a holy priest, a perfect victim.8
Four days later, at the parish church of Our Lady of the Angels in Pietrelcina, Padre Pio celebrated his first public Mass. The sermon was preached by Padre Agostino, who described the triple mission of a priest as the altar, the pulpit, and the confessional. Actually, at that stage, Padre Pio was authorized to