Saint Pio of Pietrelcina: How Catholics Keep His Feast Day

In the hill town of San Giovanni Rotondo, the friars still ring the bells on the twenty-third of September, and the line at the tomb grows long before the sun is fully up. This is the day the Church keeps for Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, the Capuchin friar known to the world as Padre Pio, who died on this date and was raised to the altars by Pope John Paul II. The Roman Catholic Church observes it as an obligatory memorial. There is no parallel commemoration in the Eastern calendars; Padre Pio belongs to the Latin Church's own communion of saints, and his feast is kept where that calendar is kept, from the shrine in the Gargano to parish churches across the world that bear his name.

Who he was

He was born Francesco Forgione in 1887, in the small Campanian town of Pietrelcina, to a family of farmers who sent him, barefoot as a boy, to tend the few sheep they owned. He entered the Capuchin order young and was ordained a priest, and from early on he carried something the seminary could not teach and the world could not quite explain: visions, and a physical suffering that shadowed him from childhood. Readers meeting him for the first time, before the fame and the wounds, will find that early life told in The Boy Who Saw Angels, the opening volume of the house's account of his life.

In 1918, at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, the wounds of the crucifixion appeared in his hands, feet, and side, and remained, visibly and painfully, for fifty years. He would spend the rest of his life in that same friary, hearing confessions for hours each day, sometimes ten or twelve hours without rising, drawing penitents from every part of Italy and eventually every part of the world. He was tested, doubted, investigated, and at times restricted by his own Church, and he bore all of it the way he bore the wounds themselves, without complaint and without ceasing the work. He founded a hospital, the House for the Relief of Suffering, built on almost nothing but the alms of the poor and his own unbending will. The full weight of those fifty years, the stigmata, the spiritual combat, the confessional that became famous across the world, is the subject of The Wounds That Healed the World.

How the day is kept

At San Giovanni Rotondo, the feast begins with vigil and continues into a solemn Mass at the shrine that now holds his incorrupt body, visited each year by pilgrims who come to touch the tomb or simply to sit near it. Parishes that carry his name will often expose a relic, a glove he wore over the wound in his hand, for veneration. Many keep the day with confession itself, since that was his own great labor and his own great gift, and priests will note in their homilies that he sometimes waited in the confessional from before dawn until well past dark, refusing to leave a soul unheard. Others mark the day with the simple Franciscan habits he lived by: a prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, alms for the poor, a Rosary said with his own well-known intention in mind, that souls be brought back to God.

The phrase most associated with him, pray, hope, and do not worry, is not a slogan but a plain instruction he gave again and again to those who came to him frightened or grieving. It is the phrase that gives its name to the final volume of his life, Pray, Hope, and Do Not Worry, which follows him through his death in 1968 and into the decades after, when his tomb became one of the most visited in the Catholic world and his intercession one of the most invoked. Many who keep his feast do so by asking exactly what he asked of others: bring the worry to prayer, and leave it there.

What to read for it

A feast day is well kept by knowing the man behind it, not only the wounds and the miracles attached to his name after death, but the boy from Pietrelcina who saw what others could not and suffered what others could not explain long before any of it made him famous. The full three-volume account, from that hidden childhood through the fifty years at San Giovanni Rotondo to his death and lasting intercession, is gathered as Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio. Readers new to him, or wanting a way to mark the day itself, can begin with the free Invitation volume at Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio, which opens the story without cost and without obligation.

For readers drawn to the wider company he keeps, the friars and mystics and confessors whose feasts recur through the Church's year alongside his, the full library of lives is kept together through membership, one shelf for every saint the house has yet given a home.