Saint Pio of Pietrelcina: Feast Day September 23 Explained

On the evening of September 22, in the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, an old friar offered Mass for what he did not yet know would be the last time. He wept through it. He had carried the wounds of Christ for fifty years, and by morning they would be gone from his hands, his feet, his side, healed as suddenly as they had appeared half a century before. He died before dawn, murmuring the names of Jesus and Mary. That night became his feast.

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, born Francesco Forgione, was a Capuchin Franciscan friar of southern Italy who bore the visible stigmata of the crucified Christ for fifty years, spent up to sixteen hours a day hearing confessions, and built a hospital, Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, out of nothing but trust in providence. He is one of the most beloved saints of the modern Church, and the day set aside to honor him is kept by millions who know him simply as Padre Pio.

When Is Padre Pio's Feast Day

Saint Pio's feast day is September 23, fixed to that date on the General Roman Calendar because it is the day he died, in 1968, not the day the stigmata first appeared. The Roman Catholic Church, like most calendars of saints, keeps a feast on the dies natalis, the day of a saint's birth into eternal life, and September 23 marks the morning Padre Pio passed from this world with the wounds of his fifty-year Passion already closed and healed. This is a Western Catholic feast. Padre Pio lived and died within the Latin Church and was canonized by Pope John Paul II; he does not appear on the calendars of the Eastern Orthodox churches, which keep their own communion of saints, so his day belongs properly to Roman Catholic practice everywhere from Pietrelcina to parishes far from Italy.

What Is Padre Pio the Patron Saint Of

Padre Pio is invoked as patron of civil defense volunteers, of adolescents, and of those seeking relief from stress and anxiety, a patronage that grows naturally from a life spent absorbing the anguish of others in the confessional. He is also a natural intercessor for the sick, since the hospital he founded still treats patients today, and for those who feel unheard in their suffering, since he himself endured years of restriction, suspicion, and physical agony before the Church fully recognized what God had done in him. People do not turn to Padre Pio for an abstract cause. They turn to him the way they might turn to an old confessor who is still, somehow, listening.

How the Feast Day Is Kept

September 23 is kept above all with Mass and confession, since those two sacraments were the whole shape of Padre Pio's priesthood. Parishes with any devotion to him will offer a Mass in his honor, often followed by veneration of a relic, a glove he wore, a fragment of cloth touched to his wounds, and many dioceses see longer confession lines that day, a quiet echo of the hours he spent in the box at San Giovanni Rotondo. Pilgrims travel to his shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo itself and to his birthplace in Pietrelcina, where processions carry his image through the streets he walked as a barefoot boy. There is no fixed liturgical menu for his feast, no official dish the way some saints have their bread or their cake, but in Pietrelcina and the towns of his native Campania, families mark the day with the plain, generous cooking of southern Italy, shared at a table the way he shared himself at the altar and in the confessional: simply, and for as long as anyone needed him.

The novena to Padre Pio, nine days of prayer asking his intercession, is traditionally prayed in the days leading up to September 23, but it is not reserved to that window. It can be prayed at any time of year, in any need, which suits a saint whose own motto was pray, hope, and do not worry. Many keep it before the feast as a season of preparation and then return to it whenever grief or illness or fear presses close.

What to Read for His Feast

The man behind the wounds is easy to sketch in outline and hard to know in full, which is exactly why his feast is a good day to read him properly rather than settle for the holy card. Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio traces the whole arc, from a barefoot child in the hills of Pietrelcina who already saw what others could not, through fifty years of visible stigmata and a confessional that drew the whole world to his door, to the death that only opened his intercession wider. The series begins with a free Invitation volume, Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio, for readers who want to meet him before committing to the fuller shelf.

Those who want the boyhood first should start with The Boy Who Saw Angels, the volume that follows Francesco Forgione before the world knew the name Padre Pio. For the wounds themselves, the fifty years of blood and confession and the hospital raised on faith alone, there is The Wounds That Healed the World. And for the death that became a feast, the canonization that filled a square with three hundred thousand people, and the intercession that has never slowed, there is Pray, Hope, and Do Not Worry. All three stand together as the complete trilogy, and readers who want every life the house keeps, across every tradition, can find them through membership.