Padre Pio. C. Bernard Ruffin
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New York from Naples on the ship Madonna, reaching Ellis Island on May 12, 1909.29 Orazio also returned to the United States, although, as before, there is no record of him.
Pio and the Bible
By the time Fra Pio was beginning his studies for the priesthood, nontraditional religious thinking was making inroads in nearly all Christian denominations. Biblical scholars of the Modernist movement were seeking to reinterpret Catholic doctrine in light of modern science and philosophy. Questioning the inerrancy of Scripture, they contended that the writers of both Old and New Testaments were conditioned by the times in which they lived and that, therefore, religious truth was subject to a constant evolutionary process. Rather than spirituality and the inner life emphasized by many traditional religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, they tended to stress social reform. Pope Pius X clamped down severely on liberalism in the Catholic Church and condemned Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.” Eventually, the most intractable of the modernizers were forced from the priesthood or left voluntarily.
What effect the Modernist movement had on Padre Pio’s intellectual or spiritual growth is conjectural. Most likely it had none at all. The Capuchin order appears to have been extremely conservative at the time and a bastion of historical Christianity and traditional Catholicism. Fra Pio’s theological training centered on the Bible, the Church Fathers, and a handful of mystical theologians.
Knowledge of Sacred Scripture was considered essential. The numerous letters that Padre Pio wrote over the years to his spiritual directors and spiritual children make it clear he knew the Bible thoroughly — although he never quotes chapter and verse, and sometimes his quotations are slightly inaccurate, as if he was writing from memory. His letters are often a series of Bible quotations or paraphrases. He seems to have been as thoroughly familiar with the minor prophets as he was with the Gospels. Frequently, Padre Pio would tell a spiritual child that what he was advising was not his own opinion but God’s word, because it was from the Bible. If the Bible said something, that was the end of all argument. A statement from Scripture was, he insisted, “a sure and infallible argument.”30 At a time when few lay people, at least in southern Italy, had Bibles, he would insist that his spiritual children study Scripture. “As regards your reading matter,” he would write to one of his disciples, “there is little [contemporary literature] that is admirable and nearly nothing that is edifying. It is absolutely necessary for you to add to such reading that of the Scriptures, so recommended by all the Fathers of the Church.”31
A Victim of Divine Love
Besides the Scriptures and the early Church Fathers, Fra Pio studied thoroughly the teachings of the Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) and the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274). Fra Pio was probably influenced most by the Spanish Carmelite mystical theologians Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591). Their teachings about prayer, contemplation, self-detachment, and the inner life embodied the spirit of the Capuchin order at the time.
Through his study of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, two principles were reinforced for Fra Pio: total commitment to Christ and the embrace of suffering. So total must a Christian’s commitment be to God that he should be able cheerfully to renounce everything else in life, even innocent pleasures. Identification with Christ means identification with his cross. Suffering is beneficial, when joined to that of Christ. Saint Paul writes, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24). Saint Paul does not mean that Christ’s saving work is insufficient or that he really needs man’s help, but rather that when Christ offered himself for the sins of humanity, his oblation included the sufferings offered to God by his followers throughout the ages; that when Christians offer their sufferings to him, Christ, in eternity, joins them to his own. The more a Christian fully gives himself up to Christ, the closer he is drawn into the Savior’s love as well as into his sufferings.
Fra Pio was taught that suffering, therefore, might even be courted by some souls. Christ grants to his beloved the privilege of sharing his mission. For this reason, and not for any masochistic motive, suffering can be seen as desirable, because it brings about the salvation of souls. Saint John of the Cross encourages the Christian to “strive always to choose, not that which is easiest, but that which is most difficult; not what is most delightful, but what is most unpleasing; not that which gives the most pleasure, but what gives no pleasure.”32 Padre Pio no doubt had this counsel in mind when, in his fifties, he spoke of a deceased member of his religious community:
That blessed priest, when he was here in our family, almost every day, after dinner, when I was trying to get some rest, would come to talk about his troubles to me. It took a great deal of sacrifice to listen to him. Now, every day, at the same hour, as a reward for the sacrifices he forced me to make, I say a holy Rosary for his soul, even if I feel tired and exhausted.33
Fra Pio was drawn to offer himself as a “victim of divine love” to suffer with Christ in order to win souls. In the tradition in which Fra Pio grew to spiritual maturity, more souls were thought to be won to Christ through the suffering of devoted men and women than through preaching, writing, or personal persuasion. The idea of offering oneself as “a victim of divine love” is implied in much of what Saint Teresa and Saint John wrote, but it seems to have been only in Fra Pio’s time and shortly before that certain devout people came to make specific acts of oblation of themselves as “victims.”
One such victim soul was the then recently deceased French Carmelite nun Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus (1873–1897), who would be canonized in 1925. Her autobiography was published about the time that Fra Pio first decided that he wanted to be a Capuchin. He read The Story of a Soul when he was a student and learned that Thérèse, who died prematurely of painful tuberculosis, had made a special offering of herself as “a burnt sacrifice to the merciful love of Our God.” Another relatively recent “victim of divine love” was Gemma Galgani (1878–1903), known as “The Virgin of Lucca,” who, like Thérèse, died of consumption in her twenties. Fra Pio pored over her letters, committing many of them to memory, to the point that, in writing to his spiritual directors, he would express himself in her words.34 Gemma, who was canonized in 1940, had many visions and ecstasies, in one of which she claimed that Jesus told her, “My child, I have need of victims, and strong victims, who by their sufferings, tribulations, and difficulties, make amends for sinners and for their ingratitude.” Galgani responded, “I am the victim and Jesus the sacrificing priest. Act quickly. All that Jesus wills I desire. Everything that Jesus sends me is a gift.”35 As in the case of Saint Thérèse, Saint Gemma’s act of offering was followed by increased physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, which, in the last two years of her life, included the stigmata — bleeding wounds in the hands, feet, and breast, corresponding to those of Christ’s Passion.
Padre Pio several times quoted from a recently published book of Gemma’s letters in his writings to his spiritual directors. For instance, he wrote to Padre Agostino in March 1912: “My heart, hands, and feet seem to have been pierced with a sword, the suffering is so great…. And meanwhile the devil never ceased to appear before me in his hideous guises and to beat me in a terribly frightening way.”36
One biographer judged Pio’s quotations, virtually word for word, from Gemma’s work, as evidence of dishonesty on his part, especially since, in one of his letters, he expressed the desire to own a copy of Gemma’s Letters and Ecstasies. Padre Pio had a tendency, in his letters, to quote from other writers without any citation. He sometimes quoted passages from the letters of his spiritual directors when writing to people who asked for counseling. In some of them, making reference to medical procedures of an earlier time, he seems to be quoting from some earlier devotional work. He was, however, not preparing a thesis, nor was he writing for publication. In quoting others, he was simply trying to express how he felt or give counsel to others. Sometimes, especially when he was quoting the Bible, Padre Pio identified his source, at least generally; other times he did not. He evidently saw no reason to quote his sources all the time. Gemma Galgani’s writings obviously moved him tremendously,