Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age: Miracles & Politics in a Secular Age - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sergio Luzzatto is the author of numerous books on French and Italian history, including The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy. He is a professor of modern history at the University of Turin, Italy, and a regular contributor to the leading Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore.

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Prologue: September 20, 1918

For a Capuchin friar hidden away in the half-empty San Giovanni Rotondo monastery on the remote Gargano Peninsula in southern Italy, September 20, 1918, was a fateful day. Around nine that morning, while Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was praying before a crucifix in the monastery chapel, "a mysterious personage" materialized before him, a figure bleeding from his hands, his feet, and his side. Alarmed, the thirty-one-year-old priest begged for God's assistance. The figure disappeared immediately, but Padre Pio's alarm only grew when he saw that Jesus's stigmata were now visible on his own body. "I look at my hands, feet and side and see they are wounded and blood is pouring out," he wrote to his spiritual adviser.1 "All my innards are bloody and my eye must resign itself to watch the blood gushing out," so much of it that "I fear I will bleed to death."2

Over the next ninety years, the minuscule Capuchin monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo would become a leading place of pilgrimage in Europe, as crowded with worshippers as Santiago, Lourdes, Fatima, or Medjugorje. Padre Pio would become the most venerated saint in twenty-first-century Italy, more popular than St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis of Assisi, more popular even than the Virgin Mary or Jesus of Nazareth.3 And questions about the meaning—if there was one—that the Lord intended to transmit to mankind with the friar's five stigmata would trouble believers and nonbelievers alike.

Was the Capuchin friar from this remote corner of Puglia a holy man capable of inspiring other Catholics? Was he a throwback to an archaic version of faith untenable in the twentieth century? Was he merely a fraud? Authorities within the Church and outside it, high prelates and clever con men, leading intellectuals and committed Fascists would all take sides on the matter. The Holy Office—what was once called the Inquisition—would ponder the matter of Padre Pio's legitimacy at length. This book is one historian's attempt to disentangle the skeins of old and new, of sacred and profane, that made Padre Pio a twentieth-century legend.

Padre Pio's stigmata did not appear at just any moment. Although the friar had long been telling his superiors that Christ's Passion was renewing itself in his body,4 the timing of the event was powerfully cued to the public sphere. The autumn of 1918 was a special moment in collective awareness, a time heavily in need of the sacred. The immense trauma of the Great War—a war so unbearable that everywhere around Italy there abounded rumors of young maidens with mysterious powers to end the fighting5—had ripened into the conviction that the conflict was a never-ending crucifixion, in which the soldiers' unspeakable suffering would providentially save mankind.6 The equally unspeakable suffering of the soldiers' mothers was likewise represented by the figure of the Mater dolorosa, the Holy Mother holding the dead Christ in her arms in the supreme act of grief.7

The ultranationalist Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio captured this theme of the soldier as Christ, the war as his Passion, in his Songs of the Latin War, which was crammed with biblical citations.8 And it was not only poets who took to interpreting the war in Christian terms. Deep in the trenches, the rude material world of the soldiers teemed with crosses, nails, and crucifixes; between the boom of the cannons and the blast of the grenades, Jesus was ever-present in an immediate, ambiguous set of symbols.9 Was this an end or a rebirth, destruction or resurrection? Trench warfare had confounded the very notions of life and death.10 Soldiers at the front had an obsessive fear of being buried alive; they had recurrent fantasies of being the living dead. The Italian poet Clemente Rebora thought that the Great War had begotten a new existential dimension, vitamorte, "death-in-life."11 All across Europe, millions of disfigured and wounded veterans testified to that condition, men upon whose faces and bodies devastating military technology had impressed its indelible mark, the cruel stigmata of modernity.12 After the war, some of these men would brandish their injuries like patriotic slogans. In Italy, their ranks included wounded veterans like Giuseppe Caradonna and Carlo Delcroix, soon to be leading Fascists.

Padre Pio's wounds, meanwhile, had no patriotic significance. Although the Capuchin friar was enrolled as a soldier-priest, he managed to live out the entire conflict far from the front lines. Nevertheless, some of the words he wrote in autumn 1918 curiously echo the thoughts of the trench fighters. In November, just after the victory of Vittorio Veneto, Padre Pio wrote to his spiritual adviser that he considered himself among the "living dead."13 In a sense, he too counted himself a survivor of the greatest of wars. In the inferno of the Dolomites trenches and on the cruel heights of the Carso, Italian soldiers had won their battle against the Teutonic devil, but they had been scarred in body and in spirit. And in the inferno of a monastery cell in Puglia, the Capuchin friar had won his battle with Satan, but he too had been wounded, in spirit and in body.

Of course, the wounds of the veterans were different from those of Padre Pio. The first were metaphorical stigmata: they were the "tattoos" that the Great War had inscribed on an entire generation, as one war-wounded poet, Nicola Moscardelli, so memorably put it.14 The second were literal stigmata, the marks that the Lord had placed on one specific individual. From metaphorical stigmata, only profane happenings could come. Padre Pio's literal stigmata promised amazing, sacred developments.

The Great War was not the only affliction that set the stage for the dramatic events in the remote Capuchin monastery. As the summer of 1918 drew to a close, a new horror arose: the "Spanish" flu, which began its grim harvest in August and which in just seven months would kill more Italians than all of World War I.15 While the war had decimated the men, the spagnola attacked mostly women, particularly where hygiene and nutrition were poor. Among these places was Puglia, and especially the province of Foggia. There, in the town of San Giovanni Rotondo, home to fewer than ten thousand people, some two hundred died between September and October 1918.16

Padre Pio thus received his stigmata as death was knocking on the doors of San Giovanni Rotondo, of the Gargano Peninsula, of Puglia, of Italy, and of Europe. It was a moment when believers everywhere were saying heartfelt prayers for clemency and protection. Of course, a man of God could try the argument used by one priest in a ravaged Veneto town, who told his faithful that death had come because "the Carnival went on too long, so now perhaps we'll have a long Lent."17 Still, as the war drew to an end, Christian men and women could reasonably expect something more than the usual moralizing. As good Christians, they could hope that some exceptional individual—a saint—would come along to rescue them from all the evil in their midst: from disease, from destitution, from grief. They might even, as in other apocalyptic moments in the history of Christianity,18 convince themselves that the Lord had made himself flesh a second time, so that sinning humanity could once again be redeemed.

The unknown friar in his Gargano monastery who, praying one morning, receives the five wounds of Christ on his body must therefore be situated in the spiritual climate of Italy and Europe at the end of the war's slaughter and the epidemic's devastation. Many centuries earlier, the arrival of the Black Death had stirred a kind of faith that was more anxious than before, more impatient and imploring.19 Something like this, too, happened after the Great War when Padre Pio's fame as a holy man...