Padre Agostino, in particular, was forever asking questions that he expected Padre Pio to answer on the basis of supersensible wisdom. On May 13, 1914, for example, Padre Agostino asked Padre Pio about the upcoming elections in the province. Mentioning that he had spoken to Padre Benedetto about him, Padre Agostino suggested, “Perhaps the Lord will reveal the content of our conversation.”2 When Padre Pio failed to mention the subject in his next letter, Padre Agostino again urged him to tell him what had happened during his conference with Padre Benedetto. This time Padre Pio responded that he had no idea. In August of the same year, Padre Agostino wrote on behalf of another priest who wanted Padre Pio to ask the Lord to reveal something about his future. Padre Pio replied that Jesus did not want the priest to know more than he already knew through natural means. Moreover, this time he warned Padre Agostino that he was going a bit too far and was coming close to putting the Lord to the test.
Despite the fact that Padre Pio was in the dark as to his own relationship with God, he was able to discern the divine will for certain people whom God evidently entrusted to him. Replying to a letter from Padre Agostino early in 1916, for example, Padre Pio commented on a soul about whom he was enlightened: “Jesus wants to test her some more, and for the moment he will not grant her request. Let this blessed soul have a little patience, because, in the end, he will satisfy her.”3 Padre Benedetto wrote to Padre Pio concerning a woman who had tragically backslid in her Christian life. He asked how this could have happened, and Padre Pio gave a detailed reply:
This is how that soul was snared in the devil’s net: When she saw that she was so favored by God … she was amazed at all the good that God sent her and she clearly discerned the difference between the goods of heaven and those of earth. At this point she was proceeding well.
But the Enemy, who is always alert, seeing such affection, convinced her that such great confidence and certainty could never diminish…. Furthermore, he put into her heart a clear vision of the heavenly prize, so that it seemed impossible for her to renounce so great a happiness for things so base and vile as earthly pleasures.
The devil used this immoderate confidence to make her lose that holy distrust in herself, a diffidence that must never leave the soul, no matter how privileged it is by God.
Meanwhile, having lost, little by little, this distrust of herself, she was cast severely into temptation, still persuaded that she had nothing to fear…. This then was the origin and cause of her final ruin. What remains for us to do? Let’s pray to the Lord that he might put her back on the right path.4
God enlightened Padre Pio about some people; but about many others, especially if he had never met them, he could say nothing. Padre Eusebio Notte, Padre Pio’s assistant in the 1960s, recalled how Padre Pio responded to a request for advice by his current father superior with a promise to pray. A few days later the superior asked again, only to have Padre Pio assure him, “I’m praying.” When the superior expressed his surprise that the man by then venerated as a prophet had no answer, Padre Pio told him, “My son, if the answer doesn’t come from above, what can I myself say? … If nobody up there says something, what answers can I give?”5 This was true throughout his ministry.
The Sisters Cerase
Padres Benedetto and Agostino were eager for Padre Pio to be a spiritual director to others, and they recommended several women to be his “spiritual daughters.” These included Margherita Tresca, from Barletta, and Annitta Rodote, from Foggia, both of whom eventually became nuns. By 1915, Padre Pio was also advising two sickly spinster sisters, Giovina and Raffaella Cerase of Foggia. They were considered “saintly,” and, although Giovina was fifty-three and Raffaella forty-six, the twenty-eight-year-old friar considered them “elderly.” The Cerases came from a wealthy family but were involved in an ongoing quarrel over their inheritance with their brother and his wife. Giovina suffered from what her sister described as “a sick stomach brought about by constant worry” and was emaciated and “worn out, physically and mentally,” from a life that had been “one long series of conflicts, contradictions, sighs, and tears.”6 Although she had “a heart of gold and great ideals,” she was irritable and “bored by everything and everyone,”7 constantly muttering, “A sad youth, a sadder old age.”8 Raffaella (or Raffaelina), the more cheerful and outgoing of the sisters — who, by her own admission, lived like “cloistered nuns” — was also nervous, frail, and constantly ill, complaining of her “forty-six years of useless, empty, and sinful life.”9 She admitted that she was “afraid of life,”10 wracked with “hellish interior martyrdoms,”11 and “drowning in a sea of sorrows.”12 She thought of herself as “a handful of filth,”13 “a mass of sin,”14 and “empty, wretched, and useless.”15
For the better part of two years, Padre Pio maintained an extensive correspondence with Raffaelina Cerase. Although he was almost two decades her junior, he did not hesitate to adopt a paternal tone in his letters to her, and she one of childlike submission. In his letters, the Capuchin stressed that Raffaelina’s temptations were “proof of the soul’s union” with God and that the storms that raged around her were proof of God’s presence and love:
The fact of being harassed, therefore, means that you are in the Lord’s service, and the more fully you become the friend and intimate of God, the more you will have to endure temptation. Temptation is a most convincing proof that God is united with a soul…. All the disheartening thoughts that are running around in your mind, such as the idea that God may be punishing you for Communions and Confessions badly made and for all the other devotional practices carelessly performed, believe me, are nothing but temptations which you must drive far from you, for it is by no means true that in all these things you have offended God, since Jesus, by his watchful grace, has guarded you very well against all such offenses.16
Padre Pio assured Raffaelina that God was with her and that a soul who is afraid of offending God is not far from him; rather, her fears and worries had their origins in Satan, whose attacks were permitted by a merciful heaven “because [God’s] mercy makes you dear to him and he wants to make you similar to his Only Begotten Son, who took upon himself all the iniquities of men and was subjected to terrible and unspeakable torture.”17 Therefore he urged Raffaelina to praise God, who was treating her as “one chosen to follow closely in the steps of Jesus up the hill of Calvary.”18
Padre Pio points out that suffering is a sign of God’s favor, and the Christian, instead of complaining of trials and temptations, should “follow the Divine Master up the steep slope of Calvary, loaded with our cross, and when it pleases him to place us on the cross by confining us to a bed of sickness, let us thank him and consider ourselves lucky to be honored in this way, aware that to be on the cross with Jesus is infinitely more perfect than merely contemplating [him] on the cross.”19
Likewise, Padre Pio stressed that joy is an integral part of the Christian life. He exhorted Raffaelina to “rejoice at all times, for the Lord’s yoke is an agreeable one. You are glorifying the Lord by your life and he is pleased with you. Never leave any room for sadness in your heart, for this would be in conflict with the Holy Spirit poured out into your soul.”20 If she found herself oppressed by melancholy, she should think about Jesus, read a good book, then give herself “to some manual work or something which distracts … even … singing some cheerful song, and … [inviting] others to sing with you.”21 Moreover, she should keep her thoughts on heaven, and “the fact that here on earth we are on a battleground and that in paradise we shall receive the crown of victory; that this is a testing-ground and the prize will be awarded up above; that we are now in a land of exile, while our true homeland is heaven, to which we must continuously aspire.”22
Padre Pio told Raffaelina that she was undergoing