Padre Pio. C. Bernard Ruffin
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to visit with a young soldier, wounded in the battle of Adowa (in which Italy, desperately seeking colonies, experienced the abject humiliation of having its armies crushed by the military forces of Ethiopia in March 1896). The soldier was being attended by a priest and a nursing nun, who were trying to cheer him. But the wounded man kept calling his absent mother, moaning, “I’ll never see her again. I feel I’m dying and I’d like to see my family, especially my mother, who loves me so much, for the last time.”
Many mothers would have spared a nine-year-old boy such a scene, but Beppa kept Franci with her. Just as the nun told the soldier, “Oh, come on now, don’t upset yourself so. You must live, and be the joy of your parents,” he “suddenly bowed his head; he remained stock-still; and after a few minutes, he died.” For two days, Franci was so upset that he could not eat.25
“I Want to Be a Friar with a Beard”
In later years, Padre Pio insisted, “I always wanted to be a friar.” His parents were first aware of this when he told them, after hearing a particularly inspiring sermon, that he wanted to be a priest.
When Franci was ten, he encountered twenty-six-year-old Fra Camillo of Sant’Elia a Pianisi, cercatore di campagna for the Capuchin friary at Morcone, about thirteen miles from Pietrelcina. The job of the cercatore was to go through the countryside, soliciting provisions, in the spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the order. Camillo carried with him a large sack for donations of wheat, grain, flour, eggs, and similar goods, as well as a coffer for cash donations. Fra Cami’, as he was called, was a merry little man, a favorite with the children, to whom he handed out pictures, medals, chestnuts, and walnuts. Franci was attracted to this happy and genial friar and was especially fascinated by his beard. When Fra Cami’ told him that all Capuchins wore beards, Francesco was determined to become a Capuchin, because, as he said, he wanted one day to have a beard like Fra Cami’.
When he discussed his desire to become a Capuchin with his parents, they told him that they would prefer that he become a parish priest, promising to finance his studies to that end.
“No, no,” insisted the boy, “I want to be a friar with a beard!”
“With a beard!” his mother laughed. “Why, you’re still a little kid. You don’t know anything about having a beard or not having a beard.”26
The next time she saw Fra Camillo, Beppa told him, “Fra Cami’, we’ve got to make this boy a monk.”
“May St. Francis bless him,” the Capuchin said, “and help him to be a good Capuchin.” He invited her to visit the friary and talk to the authorities there. So she and Orazio went to Morcone to speak to the superior there and inspect the place. When they returned, Franci asked, “Do they want me?” When his parents nodded, the ten-year-old jumped up and down in joy, crying, “They want me! They want me! They want me!”27
There was a problem. If Franci was to become a priest, he needed more formal education than the three years available in Pietrelcina. This meant that the boy would have to go to private school. His parents could pay the doctor and the shoemaker in goods such as grain and eggs, but they would have to pay for Francesco’s education in cash, and they had little. Orazio, once he became convinced that Franci was serious, decided to go to America to earn money sufficient to pay for his son’s education.
Orazio Goes to America
By the late nineteenth century, huge numbers of southern Italian men were crossing the Atlantic to work in North and South America, as there were no jobs to be found in their region, except as farm laborers. It was said that at one time 30 percent of the males in Pietrelcina were working in other countries. Most of these men had no intention of remaining in the Americas permanently, but engaged in a sort of commute across the ocean to provide for their wives and children in Italy. It was probably in late 1897 or early 1898 that Orazio, leaving Giuseppa to run the farm, sailed from Naples to Brazil or Argentina (no one seems clear on which), but shortly he was back, without money. According to some accounts, he had become ill; according to others, he had been unable to find employment. (It would have been shortly after his return that he fathered his eighth child — if in fact there was an eighth child.) It was probably in 1899 that he sailed away again, this time to the United States.
Immigrant passenger lists show that dozens of Forgiones arrived in America from Pietrelcina, mostly at Ellis Island, but none of them was named Grazio or Orazio or anything similar. He may have arrived at another port; he may have been illegal. In 1901, he was writing to his family from Mahoningtown, Pennsylvania, where he shared a frame house on Montgomery Avenue with some fellow Pietrelcinese immigrants and worked as foreman of the hands on a farm,28 sending home nine American dollars a week at a time when the average worker earned about eleven.29 In this way Orazio provided Francesco the equivalent of a high school education, purchased two more tracts of land, and acquired more livestock. On November 12, 1902, he dictated a letter to his wife, telling her, “Dear wife … put aside a good demijohn of wine for, when the feast of the Most Holy Mary comes (the one in August) next year, I return to Italy.”30 His stay at home was brief. On his return to the United States, he worked in Queens, New York. In later years, he lamented he never got to know his younger daughters well. On his brief trips home, it is said they never seemed comfortable in his arms.
School Days
Franci was enrolled first in a private school run by Domenico Tizzani on Via Caracciolo, where he studied reading, writing, and elementary Latin. Don Domenico,31 a quiet, melancholy man in his fifties, was a married former priest. After a while, Franci’s mother was not satisfied with his progress, and her husband concluded that it was not a good idea to have a boy who wanted to be a priest instructed by a man who had left the priesthood. In later years, Padre Pio said that Don Domenico never talked about his personal life and was a good teacher.
Giuseppa then enrolled Franci in a private school run by Don Angelo Caccavo. He was not a particularly religious man (in later years, Padre Pio wrote him, telling him that he prayed every day for his conversion), but he was an excellent teacher. He brooked no nonsense, however. Whenever a student got a lesson wrong, he had to take it home and copy it over several times by the next morning. Unruly children were made to hold out their hands to receive the whack of a short ruler on the open palm. If that didn’t work, Caccavo would put the child “in jail” — making him kneel in front of the class, facing the blackboard. He was not averse to cracking a recalcitrant child on the head. Most Pietrelcinese respected Don Angelo and accepted his methods of discipline.32
Franci was once the undeserving object of Don Angelo’s wrath. Several of the boys drafted a passionate love letter, signed Francesco’s name, and delivered it to one of the girls, who, indignant, handed it to Caccavo. In fury, he ordered Franci to the front of the room, and, in front of the class, began to beat the boy with his fists, until his victim crawled under the desk to take cover from the blows. Hearing the commotion and knowing her husband’s violent temper, the teacher’s wife interposed herself between her husband and the boy, saving him from serious injury. When Don Angelo learned that the note was a forgery, he was horrified. For the rest of his life — he died in 1944 at the age of seventy-five — he said he regretted beating the future Padre Pio, who later declared, “All his remorse could not take away the black and blue marks that I carried about for days!”33
At fourteen, Francesco wrote to his father in Pennsylvania: “Now I am under the guidance of a new teacher [Caccavo]. I see that I am progressing day by day, for which I am happy, as is Mama.” He continued, “We, too, are well, thanks be to the Lord, and I, in a special way, send continual prayers to our gracious Virgin, in order that she may protect you from every evil and restore you to our love, safe and sound.” He promised to study, reported a lack of rain and poor wheat crops, and said his mother and siblings were doing well. Some time earlier he and several school friends had made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii — without asking permission of his mother, who, understandably, was furious and had reported the incident in a letter that she had dictated to his father. Francesco admitted that his father was right to reprove him,