Pilgrims and Padre Pio – it’s big business

Sydney
14 April 2002

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Pilgrims and Padre Pio – it’s big business

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Pilgrims and Padre Pio – it’s big business

By John Norton

Padre Pio, the Italian ‘stigmata’ priest, will be made a saint in June. San Giovanni Rotondo, the once modest village where he lived, is now Europe’s No 1 pilgrimage destination – and will soon be home to one of Europe’s biggest churches.

San Giovanni Rotondo was a typical southern Italian village, cut off from the rest of the world in remote rocky hills near the Adriatic Sea.

That isolation was destined to end, though, after a young priest named Padre Pio was transferred to the Capuchin monastery on the village outskirts in 1916.

It became the birthplace of a worldwide spiritual movement. And today the village of San Giovanni Rotondo has been transformed into one of the most developed pilgrimage complexes in the world.

Padre Pio will be named a saint in June.

Even before his death in 1968, Padre Pio’s reputation for holiness and extra ordinary spiritual gifts – most remarkably, the stigmata – travelled the world, eventually drawing hundreds of thousands of people each year, including the future Pope John Paul II, to seek his advice and blessing.

The flow of devotees has surged to nearly eight million people a year, making San Giovanni Rotondo the No 1 pilgrimage destination in Europe, second worldwide only to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

The town is also home to dozens of commercial and charitable activities carried out in Padre Pio’s name, including a large state-of-the-art hospital, a television station, homes for the elderly and an olive-oil business.

To accommodate the spiritual needs of the ever-growing crush of pilgrims, the Capuchins have begun construction of one of Europe’s largest and most architecturally ambitious churches, with a 6000-pipe organ, 50 confessionals and seating for 8000 people. It is scheduled to be completed in May 2003.

For devotees of Padre Pio, the growth is proof that the friar’s message of penance and prayer hits home with modern men and women.

Others are concerned, though, that the message is being obscured by the industry that has sprung up in his wake – an industry which, they say, the saint would not have wanted.

Padre Pio was known for spending 10–12 hours a day hearing confessions and much of the rest of his time in prayer in a small, bare cell or before a wooden crucifix in the monastery church.

He put Christ’s sacrifice on the cross at the centre of his prayer life and for most of his life bore wounds in his hands, feet and side like those suffered by Christ.

Capuchin Fr Gerardo Di Flumeri, vice-postulator for Padre Pio’s canonisation cause, says that suffering is central to his appeal.

“People saw and see in him the imprinted stigmata of Christ crucified,” he said. “And Jesus never fails to attract.” he said.

Others are drawn to Padre Pio because he is known as a powerful intercessor for divine favours, Fr Di Flumeri said.

“The Lord certainly concedes many graces to Padre Pio,” he said.

The future Pope John Paul II, as Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, wrote to Padre Pio in 1962 to ask him to pray for a Polish woman with throat cancer. He wrote again 11 days later to report that she had suddenly and inexplicably been cured.

Even today, such cures are reported regularly in Italian newspapers.

Among the latest is the case of a 30-year-old Sicilian woman, paralysed for five years after a car accident, who baffled doctors in February by suddenly being able to walk. She said Padre Pio had appeared to her in a dream.

Requests for physical healing are especially popular in San Giovanni Rotondo because Padre Pio’s hospital is just a short wheelchair ride across a flagstone square to the church where he is buried.

It is not unusual to see patients in hospital gowns in the church crypt, whispering prayers through a grate to where he is entombed under a 3½-ton black granite block.

But Capuchins at the shrine, who offer pilgrims request cards to place on Padre Pio’s tomb, say visitors mostly ask for spiritual favours.

“There are requests for material graces,” said Fr Di Flumeri. “But the majority are spiritual requests: ‘Make me love Jesus’; ‘make me have a good and holy death’; ‘call my son back from the evil path’.”

Fr Di Flumeri said Padre Pio had been well aware of the superstitious and exaggerated devotion towards him from some of his followers.

He had joked that the streets outside the shrine were full of mentally ill people and “I am their president”.

Charitable works begun by Padre Pio have flourished under a steady stream of pilgrims’ donations.

Most of what he founded is no longer in Capuchin hands.

Before his death, Padre Pio ceded all his activities – including the hospital, The House for the Relief of Suffering – to the Vatican.

The Vatican also owns and oversees ex tensive olive orchards and dairy and cattle farms that produce olive oil, meat and dairy products for the hospital and for the commercial market.

Antonio Squarcella, mayor of San Giovanni Rotondo, said Padre Pio “has made this area of 30,000 inhabitants one of the most prosperous and wealthy towns in the whole south (of Italy) today”.

He said annual economic activity related to the friar – from the hospital to souvenir stands – was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Half of the town’s180 hotels had been built in the past three years and there were 34 more under construction now.

“This town enjoys a special privilege on the part of providence,” he said.

Local church authorities accept the commercialisation that has sprung up around Padre Pio as inevitable, but some pilgrims are bothered by it.

“Look! All you see are hotels, restaurants, cafes,” said Sicilian Giannetta Alida, 27.

She said they had been fascinated with Padre Pio since seeing an Italian television movie on his life last year and decided to make the pilgrimage.

“I expected to find a place of peace,” she said, “lots of greenery and nature. But instead it’s all hotels. We’re very disappointed.”

Her fiancee, Domenico Verona, added: “Padre Pio didn’t want all this. But since we humans are beasts, we have to commercialise everything. - CNS