Padre Pio

Today we celebrate the liturgical feast of St. Pio of Pietralcina, known as Padre Pio. He was a holy man who received the stigmata in 1918, and they disappeared the moment he died in 1968, suffering with bleeding all through his life. Padre Pio saw Jesus in all the sick and suffering. A fine hospital was built on nearby Mount Gargano in the 1940s, known as "House for the Alleviation of Suffering" and has 350 beds. A number of people have reported cures they believe were received through the intercession of Padre Pio. He died on September 23, 1968, was beatified in 1999 and made a saint in 2002. While Padre Pio never visited the United States, the famous stigmatist did have some interesting interactions with US servicemen during and after World War II. During the Allied aerial bombing campaign in Italy, the Nazis had placed one of their ammo dumps close to San Giovanni Rotondo, Padre Pio’s monastery, and the nearby town and the people of the town begged the pious monk to save them from the bombs. From that point, whenever an Allied bombing mission targeted the Nazi base, the American planes would develop malfunctions of various sorts that prevented them from dropping their payloads or would encounter unexpected bad weather right over the target. Eventually, pilots began reporting seeing a ‘little man with a brown robe’ flying through the air, waving their planes off. After the Allies liberated Italy, some of the pilots visited the monastery and recognized Padre Pio as the little man in the air.