St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio)

Francesco Forgione was born in 1887 to a farming family in the southern Italian village of Pietrelcina and entered the Capuchin Franciscans as a teenager, taking the name Fra Pio. Ordained a priest in 1910, he spent almost his entire life at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo in the region of Puglia. On September 20, 1918, while praying before a crucifix, he received the stigmata — the visible wounds of Christ’s Passion in his hands, feet, and side — and he carried them for roughly fifty years. The phenomenon drew immense attention and, for a long period, caution from Church authorities, who at times restricted his public ministry while his case was examined; he accepted these restrictions in obedience. What most defined his life was not the extraordinary but the relentlessly ordinary demand of the confessional: Padre Pio heard confessions for many hours a day, year after year, and pilgrims came from across the world to confess to him and to attend his Mass. He was a man of intense prayer, devotion to the Rosary, and practical charity — in 1956 he opened the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, "the Home for the Relief of Suffering," a hospital that still operates today. His letters and spiritual direction, gathered in his published correspondence, are marked by a robust realism about the spiritual life, including his own accounts of severe trials and what he described as physical and spiritual assaults from the devil. These accounts come from his personal letters and testimony — the ardent record of one friar’s inner life — and should be read as pastoral and devotional witness rather than as the defined teaching of the Church. He died on September 23, 1968. After a thorough examination of his life and heroic virtue, Pope St. John Paul II beatified him in 1999 and canonized him as St. Pio of Pietrelcina on June 16, 2002 — recognizing the sanctity of his life and the miracles attributed to his intercession, which is what the Church’s canonization actually declares.

Padre Pio speaks with unusual directness to an anxious generation, and the saying most associated with him, usually given in English as "Pray, hope, and don’t worry," is almost a whole spirituality. He is proof that the front line of the spiritual life is not the dramatic confrontation but the confessional — that the Church’s ordinary, unglamorous means of grace are exactly where souls are actually defended and healed. For anyone weighed down by fear, scruples, or the sense of being under spiritual pressure, Padre Pio’s counsel is bracingly practical: go to confession, receive the Eucharist, pray the Rosary, entrust your worries to God, and stop rehearsing them. His own accounts of struggle with the enemy are told from the inside of a life utterly surrendered to Christ, and their lesson is never fascination with evil but confidence in God and fidelity to the sacraments. He is invoked today by the suffering and the sick, by those preparing to confess, by young people, and, popularly, by the anxious and the simply overwhelmed — a saint of our own century who understood both the reality of spiritual combat and the peace that outlasts it.

Padre Pio is a saint for the confessional and for the anxious heart — pray to him before going to confession, in seasons of fear or scruples, for the sick and suffering, and for young people. His counsel was to entrust everything to God, and it is usually summed up in English as "Pray, hope, and don’t worry." Because he lived and died in the twentieth century, prayers to him are in the modern languages rather than in a fixed Latin text. A traditional practice is to name one intention and carry it in a novena; many Catholics also pray the "Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus," which Padre Pio himself is said to have prayed daily for those who asked his prayers, and the prayer beginning "Stay with me, Lord," long associated with his thanksgiving after Communion (its exact authorship is uncertain, so it is best received simply as a prayer connected with his devotion). All of these are petitions to God through St. Pio’s intercession. If you feel yourself under real spiritual pressure, follow the path Padre Pio himself pointed to for a lifetime: confession, the Eucharist, the Rosary — and, in serious cases, the counsel of your parish priest.

A novena to St. Pio is nine consecutive days of prayer for his intercession, often prayed before his feast on September 23 or before a specific need — a confession, an illness, a burdened conscience. Each day the faithful bring one named intention, ask St. Pio’s prayers, and commonly add an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be. Padre Pio’s own daily practice points to a related devotion: he is widely reported to have prayed the "Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus" every day for the many people who begged his prayers — a novena addressed to Jesus, drawn from the Gospel promise "ask and you shall receive." Whether praying to the Sacred Heart in Padre Pio’s manner or asking St. Pio’s intercession directly, the form is the same: persistent petition to God, carried faithfully over nine days, in the spirit of his own words — "Pray, hope, and don’t worry."