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Do you want to see? Then you shall see.
Padre Pio
IN THE WESTERN and northern Gargano, at the foot of the great mountain where the landscape is less rugged, there are attractive little cities, some quite big. Among these cities, San Severo was once capital of the province of the Capitanata, the De Sangro Princes of San Severo ranking with the Regno’s greatest magnates. Its vineyards produce what are among Apulia’s best wines, red and white. At Serracapriola the lowering castle of the eponymous Dukes has an octagonal Norman tower. There is another impres-sive feudal stronghold at Sannicandro Garganico, built in the fifteenth century by the della Marra family.
It is San Giovanni Rotondo, however, whose fame has exceeded all other towns in the region in recent times, now attracting more pilgrims than Monte Sant’ Angelo. It has been a place of veneration since time began. The baptistery or rotonda from which it takes its name, the Chiesetta di San Giovanni, stands on the site of a temple of Janus. Reputedly the oldest of Roman gods, double-headed Janus guarded doorways; his feast was in January, the month named after him, a day when devotees gave each other sweets and big copper coins with his two heads on one side and a ship on the other. In the thirteenth century Emperor Frederick II surrounded the city with high walls, and during times of trouble it sheltered pilgrims to St Michael’s shrine, fourteen miles further up the mountain. The amazingly energetic Abate Pacichelli, who came here too, wrongly thought the rotonda had been a temple of Apollo, but he was justified in saying it was set “in a pleasant plain amid lush meadows”. As usual, he was overawed by the local grandee, in this case, the Duke Cavaniglia. He may well have visited the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, founded in 1540.
Born into a family of poor peasants at Benevento in 1887, Padre Pio entered the Capuchins as a young man, joining the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo during the Great War and then became seriously ill with tuberculosis. In 1918 he collapsed in choir and was discovered to have the same stigmata as St Francis of Assisi – constantly bleeding wounds in the palms of his hands. He nonetheless managed to live a comparatively normal if invalid existence here for the next fifty years, wearing mittens to hide the wounds on his hands.
‘Normal’ is not quite the right word. His struggles with the Fiend recall St Anthony in the desert, and in his letters he tells of onslaughts by the Devil and demons from Hell, of a mind filled with hallucinations and despair, of being beaten. Often he thought he would die or go mad, sometimes he was bruised all over, spitting blood. The noise was so loud that it could be heard by other friars passing his cell.
He is said to have told the then Archbishop of Cracow that he would be Pope. Carol Wojtyla had come to San Giovanni Rotondo dressed as a simple priest, but Padre Pio picked him out from among a huge crowd. (The Vatican refuses to confirm or deny the story.) He cured very many people, healing not only physical ailments such as blindness, but alcoholism and personality disorders. Tens of thousands of men and women visited him, while he received 600 letters a day. He had the gift of “bilocation”, the ability to be in two places at the same time; when bedridden at San Giovanni Rotondo, he was seen at Rome on five occasions, his explanation being that it was done by “a prolongation of personality.” He smelt of roses, violets or incense and, although he died forty years ago, people think he still visits them, recognising the scent. His relics continue to heal.
His most spectacular miracle was for a pilot whose plane blew up at high altitude. The man woke up on a beach near Naples with an unopened parachute – at the time of the explosion his mother had a vision of a bearded friar telling her in dialect not to worry about her son. Usually, however, his interventions were less dramatic, advice full of earthy common sense. A widow asked him whether she should marry again. “So far, you’ve wept with one eye”, he told her. “If you remarry, you’ll cry with both.”
He raised vast sums of money, sufficient to build not only a new basilica for the pilgrims, flanking the friary’s nice little Baroque church, but also a large hospital and a centre for handicapped children. Some people who remember him say he looked “like every-body’s favourite grandfather”, but others who claim to have seen his ghost in the friary church or the new basilica describe a man of about thirty-five. As a man devoted to poverty, he would have hated the gilded statue of himself that stands outside the basilica.
The nails went through Christ’s wrists, not through the palms, and a friar who nursed Padre Pio on his deathbed once told us the wounds began to close within ten minutes of his dying. But this does not detract from his sanctity and it seems strange that it took so long to canonise him. Some have suggested that his “bilocation” encouraged the local witches, inspiring them to attempt similar feats. The real reason, however, is more prosaic: The Vatican needed time to read the letters he had sent to all the men and women who had written to him asking for advice. When his steel coffin was opened, his body was found to be uncorrupted. He was beatified in 1999, the first step towards being made a saint, then canonised in 2002. For several months in 2008, his body – still in a remarkable state of preservation, with a silicone mask round the face – was put on display for veneration in a glass casket at the fri-ary in San Giovanni Rotondo.
This mysterious friar is more like some figure from the Middle Ages than a man who died only in 1968, and many people alive today owe Padre Pio their physical or mental well-being, and some-times both. With St Michael, he has become part of the Gargano.