Franci was exceptionally devout as a child, but his piety was not unique in his family. His sisters Felicita and Graziella were said to have been just as pious. Riparta Masone recalled that Graziella never wanted to play with the other girls. “She’d carry her jug to the well to get water and never look to the left or to the right or say anything to the other children. She spent all her time praying.”17 Franci, too, at times, would go off by himself and sit under the shade of an elm tree to pray and study. In school, it was said that he was the only boy among his companions who consistently completed all his homework. But he also liked to play and tease (even as an old man). The boy loved to sneak up quietly behind his sister Felicita while she was taking her bath in the portable tub on the kitchen floor and dunk her head in the water. Felicita, a gentle, sweet-natured girl whom Padre Pio would later characterize as “a saint” and “the best of all the family,” never complained, but merely looked at him, smiled, and said, “Hey, Franci, you never stop playing, do you?”18
One day when Franci was taking his siesta under an elm tree, Mercurio Scocca decided to bury him in corn shocks. When Franci awoke in darkness, screaming for his mother, Mercurio burst out laughing. The next day at siesta time it was Franci who found Mercurio sound asleep on top of a small farm wagon. Pulling the wagon to the crest of a nearby hill, Franci pushed it over the brink with Mercurio still in it. The wagon crashed into a nearby tree; fortunately, Mercurio was unhurt.19
Franci also tried smoking — once. A neighbor gave him money to go to town to fetch a cigar. On his way back, Franci lit the cigar and took a puff. He became so ill that he never smoked again (although as an adult he used snuff).
Franci developed early a deep concern for the poor and the sick. Although he later remembered never lacking for anything as a child, he was deeply moved and troubled when he accompanied his mother on one of her frequent errands of charity and saw poor peasants without adequate food, clothing, and shelter. His school compositions reveal compassion for persons like “little Silvio,” an orphan, shivering with cold, whom he described as kneeling with his grandfather at the tomb of his parents, weeping bitterly.20 In another composition he described “little Anselm” who, at twelve, had neither mother nor father nor sisters nor brothers, who lived alone at home, and, “in order to eke out a living,” was forced “to go from door to door, to beg for charity.”21
Franci Witnesses a Miracle
When Franci was eight, he witnessed an event that remained indelibly imprinted in his mind for the rest of his life. For vacations, the Forgiones went to nearby shrines, such as that of Our Lady of Grace in Benevento and Our Lady of Pompeii near Naples (thirtysome miles away). On August 25, 1895, Orazio took his younger son to the town of Altavilla Irpina, about twenty miles south of Pietrelcina, to the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo, which contained the relics of Saint Pellegrino, an early Christian martyr. The church was frequently the site of flamboyant displays of excessive piety. Padre Alessio Parente, Padre Pio’s assistant in his old age, recalled seeing in that very church in the 1940s or 1950s a young man crawling around, licking the floor with his tongue!
On that summer day, Franci and his father were in a crowd of worshipers, amidst the smells of incense, garlic, and wine, when a “raging, disheveled woman” forced herself up to the altar area, where stood a statue of Saint Pellegrino. In her arms she carried a deformed, mentally disabled child. According to some versions, the boy had a grossly enlarged head; according to another he had only stumps for limbs. He ceaselessly vocalized a horrible, raucous graak! graak! graak! like a crow. Hysterically, the disheveled mother implored Saint Pellegrino to heal the child. Nothing happened. The child continued his obscene and pathetic litany: Graak! Graak! Graak!
The worshipers watched in horror as the frantic mother, with a bloodcurdling shriek and gruesome oaths, began to curse the saint. Finally, she screamed, “Why don’t you cure him? Well … keep him! He’s yours!” Thereupon, she threw the child at the statue. He hit the image, bounced off, and crashed to the floor. Then, to the stupefaction of everyone, the child, who had never walked or talked, got up and ran to his mother (on his stumps?), crying, in a clear and normal voice: “Mother! Mother!”
Cries of “Miracolo! Miracolo!” filled the church. Men, women, boys, and girls surged forward to behold what Saint Pellegrino had wrought. Franci and his father were nearly trampled in the pandemonium, but they were both so moved that they exchanged scarcely a word on the way home. As long as he lived, Padre Pio would remember that episode at Altavilla Irpina as a demonstration of God’s mercy and love.22
“Don’t You See the Madonna?”
The miracle of Saint Pellegrino was not the first time that Franci saw the hand of God break into the physical world. As Fra Pio he once told his friend Padre Agostino of San Marco in Lamis that from early childhood he had seen and spoken to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and his guardian angel. He said this as if he did not realize it was unusual. “Don’t you see the Madonna?” he asked. When Agostino replied that he did not, Fra Pio replied, “Surely, you’re saying that out of humility.”23
Franci also saw and communicated with his guardian angel. In letters, he sometimes referred to his celestial protector as “the companion of my infancy.” The boy claimed that Jesus also visited him and guided him.
Margherita DeCianni, a childhood friend, recounted in later years how one day Franci was with his father, who was attempting to dig a well at Piana Romana. After the elder Forgione had dug forty feet without finding water, Franci announced, “You won’t find any water down there.” When Orazio asked him how he knew, the child said bluntly, “Jesus told me, if you want to find water, you must dig over there.” The boy pointed to a precise spot in another part of the field. “All right,” said his father. “I’ll dig where you tell me, but, if there’s no water there, I’ll throw you in the hole!” Orazio dug three feet … four feet … five … six … seven — and then there burst forth an abundant spring of water!24
Today, a boy such as Franci probably would be taken to a psychiatrist, diagnosed with some sort of mental illness, and drugged. Or perhaps he would simply be accused of lying. Orazio and Giuseppa and their relatives and neighbors recognized that some people who claimed to have visions were liars or crazy. But, as in the case of the spring, Franci’s paranormal experiences corresponded to a concrete reality. Moreover, other members of Franci’s family seem to have had some sort of mystical experiences, albeit less spectacular than his. Padre Pio’s niece Pia Forgione affirmed that, although her father, Michele, never had any supersensible experiences, she was of the firm belief that her aunt Graziella was characterized by an “enhanced spirituality.” There are also reports from several sources that once when Orazio was visiting his son Padre Pio, he claimed to see the soul of a dead person there in front of the door to his room.
As far as we know, it was in his tenth year that Franci had his first experience of the death of a close relative. On August 22, 1896, his grandfather, Fortunato De Nunzio, died in Pietrelcina at the age of seventy-five. We know nothing of Franci’s relationship with him or whether he was present at the old man’s deathbed, but, from one of his school essays, we do know that a few months earlier he had seen a man die.
He and his mother had gone to the hospital at Benevento to visit a relative. It seems to have been the custom of Giuseppa De Nunzio