Padre Pio Prayers: “Stay with Me, Lord” and a Prayer to St. Pio

“Stay with me, Lord” is known everywhere as Padre Pio’s prayer after Holy Communion, the prayer he said in thanksgiving after receiving the Eucharist. Every source we read presents it that way; none documents whether he composed it himself or made his own a prayer he had learned. We call it attributed to him, and it is certainly his in the sense that matters: it is what he prayed.

Its refrain echoes the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who did not yet recognize the risen Jesus and said to him, “Stay with us, for it is almost evening, and the day is almost over” (Luke 24:29). He stayed, and they knew him in the breaking of the bread.

The opening lines, which our narrated prayer above also closes with, are: “Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You. Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often. Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life, and without You, I am without fervor. Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light, and without You, I am in darkness.” The prayer goes on, in the same “Stay with me” pattern, to ask, in our own summary:

• to know God’s will and to hear and follow his voice;
• to love him more, and to be faithful to him;
• that the soul may be a place of rest and love for him, however poor;
• for his presence as life draws toward its evening, and against darkness, temptation and discouragement;
• for the grace to recognize him in the Eucharist, as the disciples did in the breaking of the bread;
• to be united with him at the hour of death;
• and, at the end, not for consolations, but for Jesus himself and his love.

“Padre Pio healing prayer” is the most searched Padre Pio prayer of all. The one circulating as “The Most Powerful Healing Prayer by St. Padre Pio” in videos and blog posts gives no source for that title, and “most powerful” is a label, not a judgment of the Church. What is true is that countless sick people went to him, and that the two miracles the Church accepted for his beatification and canonization were both healings, of Consiglia De Martino and of the boy Matteo Pio Colella.

So ask his prayers for healing with confidence, and keep every appointment with the doctor. The Church is honest: “even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses” (CCC 1508). Padre Pio himself built a hospital, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the “House for the Relief of Suffering,” opened on May 5, 1956.

Padre Pio told those who asked for his help to pray, and to keep praying. “In books we seek God, in prayer we find him. Prayer is the key which opens God’s heart,” he would say, according to the biography the Vatican published for his canonization. “Pray, hope, and don’t worry” is the motto most associated with him, and the narrated prayer above is built around it. This short prayer can be said each morning.

No prayer never fails, and Padre Pio never said one did. The phrase usually attaches to the Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he prayed every day for the people who asked his prayers; its three petitions each quote a promise of Jesus, the first being “Ask, and it will be given you.” That is a promise that God hears, not a guarantee of a particular outcome. The novena, and why he prayed it, is on our page for the Padre Pio novena.

The Catechism is plain about prayers sold as formulas: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). It asks a searching question of any prayer that is all about results: “What is the image of God that motivates our prayer: an instrument to be used? or the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?” (CCC 2735). And it gives the consolation that goes with it: “Do not be troubled if you do not immediately receive from God what you ask him; for he desires to do something even greater for you, while you cling to him in prayer” (CCC 2737).

St. Pius of Pietrelcina, Padre Pio, is remembered on September 23, the day he died, a memorial in the Church’s calendar. Many people pray his novena from September 14 to 22.

• May 25, 1887: born Francesco Forgione at Pietrelcina, near Benevento in southern Italy, and baptized the next day.
• January 22, 1903: receives the Capuchin habit at Morcone and the name Brother Pio.
• August 10, 1910: ordained a priest at Benevento; ill health keeps him at home until 1916.
• September 1916: sent to the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo, where he stays for the rest of his life, saying Mass, hearing confessions for more than fifty years, and bearing the wounds of Christ.
• May 5, 1956: opens the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, his hospital.
• September 23, 1968: dies at San Giovanni Rotondo, aged eighty-one.
• May 2, 1999: beatified by St. John Paul II, who names September 23 as his feast.
• June 16, 2002: canonized by St. John Paul II.

In the Vatican’s biography he describes himself in one line: “I only want to be a poor friar who prays.”

The Vatican’s biography says that the pinnacle of his apostolic life was the celebration of Mass, and that for more than fifty years he welcomed “countless people who had recourse to his ministry and his confessional.” He sent people back to the sacraments. The best way to honor him is to go where he pointed: to Confession, and to Mass.

If it has been a long time, you are exactly the kind of penitent he waited for. Our guide to how to go to Confession walks through it step by step, and the examination of conscience helps you prepare.