“Will you pay for the journey?” asked Padre Nazareno. “We don’t have money for the bus fare.”9
Russo paid the fare, and on July 28, 1916, Padre Paolino returned to his friary at San Giovanni Rotondo with Padre Pio.
Padre Pio returned after about a week and wrote to Padre Benedetto, asking for permission to spend a more extended period of time there. Though touchy about the breach of protocol in which Padre Pio had showed “willingness to please an ordinary priest, but not your superior,” the minister provincial conceded, “I am nonetheless happy that you went to San Giovanni Rotondo and hope that this has brought an improvement in your health.” In fact, he granted permission for Padre Pio to live there permanently, if he so desired.10
After Padre Pio begged Padre Benedetto’s pardon, accepted his forgiveness, and secured his permission to transfer to Our Lady of Grace, he arrived at his new home on September 4, 1916. A week later he wrote to Padre Benedetto, saying that he gave “fervent thanks to the Most High for making me worthy of finding a most edifying religious community.”11 The same day Padre Paolino wrote Padre Agostino: “You can imagine the benefit we experience in the presence of Padre Pio! He is likewise pleased with us, with the air, the living arrangements, the quiet, the solitude, and everything else, and, except for the interior pains with which it pleases the Lord to test him, he might be said to be truly happy. What is most important is that we are happy with him.”12
Some had a different explanation for the reason for Padre Pio’s transfer to San Giovanni Rotondo. Raffaello Carlo Rossi (1876–1948), who a few years later would be sent as an inquisitor by the Holy Office to investigate Padre Pio, wrote:
At that time [1916], the superior of the Capuchins at San Giovanni Rotondo was a Father Paolino, a rather intrusive religious. During [the time when the office of archpriest of San Giovanni was vacant], he had started hearing confessions in the town’s churches, without asking for the appropriate faculties, as if he were in his own church, so much so that the new archpriest … once in office, was forced to have recourse to the ordinary [the archbishop of Manfredonia]. Obviously, the superior was looking for “people.” His church, far from town, was isolated; it needed to be enlivened. He started talking about a holy monk living in Foggia [rumors about the extraordinary things happening around Padre Pio already existed]; in turn, some devout women lobbied, it seems, to have Padre Pio definitely transferred to San Giovanni Rotondo, the wish was granted, and Padre Pio settled in the town where he is now.13
The source of this interpretation, however, appears to have been the new archpriest of San Giovanni Rotondo, Don Giuseppe Prencipe, who, as we shall see, was no friend of Padre Pio or the Capuchins.
San Giovanni Rotondo
San Giovanni Rotondo (Saint John-in-the-Round), a town with approximately ten thousand inhabitants in 1916, derives its name from an ancient circular temple dedicated in Roman times to the god Janus, but, with the coming of Christianity, consecrated to Saint John the Baptist. A “commune” in the province of Foggia and the region of Apulia, San Giovanni lies about 1,800 feet above sea level in the Gargano Mountains, on the spur of the Italian “boot,” within sight, on clear days, of the Adriatic Sea. A native has written: “To the north, the mountains, verdant with trees, bushes, and aromatic herbs, form a marvelous background for the town, which rests on a gentle shell. The horizon is bounded by the nearby mountains to the east and west; to the south, by the almost uniform prominence of the lower hills.”14
In 1916, the town, which was circular in shape, like the old temple, was a “conglomerate of old houses, one on top of another,” on either side of narrow, curving lanes. Most of the land near the town was in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, and most of the inhabitants eked out an existence working for them, either on the mountains as shepherds or in the plain as farm laborers, with both men and women toiling in the fields. There were only a few poorly stocked stores in town. To buy staples, people had to go to the cities of Foggia and San Severo, both more than twenty miles away. Although there were a few primitive motorized buses, people still traveled mostly by stagecoach. Most people subsisted on a diet of cereal, vegetables, and potatoes. Spaghetti was a feast-day meal, and meat was a luxury, eaten only on Sundays.15 Lives were weakened and shortened by malaria, vitamin-deficiency anemia, and tuberculosis. A visitor around that time described streets that were narrow alleys, “almost unbelievably filthy and muddy, flanked by a row of poor, squat, miserable huts out of which burst gangs of runny-nosed children and pigs, wallowing and snorting in the mud; houses with primitive furnishings, men and women who stare at you with sorrowful, unsmiling, suspicious faces, and nowhere a flower.”16
Most of the houses had one room on the upper story, where the inhabitants lived and slept, which was accessed by means of wooden stairs. The lower level was occupied by chickens and donkeys.17 A scholarly visitor, while noting the cheerful appearance of the friary in the midst of a green garden, found the townspeople “monumental and savage,” showing signs of malaria and trachoma (a contagious eye disease that often leads to blindness). The streets were full of women “with red stockings and noisy little clogs, sheathed in long severe shawls” and “huge, somber men,” dressed in black cloaks and leather collars, congregating in little groups.18 Most of them seemed old, as many of the younger men had left for northern Italy or the Americas in search of work.
The Convent of Our Lady of Grace
The Convent of Our Lady of Grace was about a mile and a half from town, on a branch of a five-mile, zigzagging mule track that passed for a road, which ran to the town of San Marco in Lamis. The track was full of stones and potholes, covered with mud in winter and infested with snakes in summer. Our Lady of Grace (La Madonna delle Grazie) was one of the oldest and poorest friaries in the province of Sant’Angelo. The terrain between the town and the friary was desolate, rocky, and all but devoid of verdure, with the exception of an occasional olive, pine, or cypress tree, and was dominated by a mountainside “squalid, parched, fissured, with green patches of oak groves and the rest bare rock.”19 At the time of Padre Pio’s arrival, according to a resident of the town, the path to the friary was
bordered by hedges and a few trees along the way. In front of the convent and church the path widened, creating a small square, where two elm trees stood, facing one another, on the left and on the right-hand side of the façade. When it rained, the water descended from the side of the … mountain like a waterfall that widened the rural churchyard. The friars changed what could have been a source of damage into a benefit: they made a hole at the bottom of the boundary wall to let the water flow through a duct into a tank built in the vegetable garden. Around the friary there were small plots of land dug out of the rocks and preserved by dry stone walls, a few poor houses and a few barns.20