With Padre Pio When the Worst That Could Happen Happens

Inspired by Padre Pio’s surrender to sacrificial suffering, this priest wrongly imprisoned for 29 years still sees signs and wonders even in life’s darkest corners.

September 21, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I write this week in honor of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, more popularly known as Padre Pio. He is one of the two Patron Saints of Beyond These Stone Walls and one who has had a living presence in my life behind these walls. The other, of course, is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Pornchai Moontri and I share a somewhat mystical connection with both. A little time spent at “Our Patron Saints” in the BTSW Public Library might demonstrate how they have come to our spiritual aid in the darkest times of our lives here.

Though they were 20th Century contemporaries, Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe did not know each other except by reputation. Among the many letters of Padre Pio to pilgrims who wrote to him are several in which he urged suffering souls to enroll in the Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross, the two spiritual movements founded by Maximilian Kolbe. I stumbled upon this after Pornchai Moontri and I enrolled in both. It is ironic that both saints were canonized by another saint. The lives of St. Padre Pio, St. Maximilian and St. John Paul II were lived with heroic virtue even as they suffered. I wrote of the latter two in a recent post that touched the hearts of many: “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II.”

Padre Pio also had a global reputation for doing remarkable things, but he did them in the midst of remarkable suffering. After bearing the wounds of Christ for a half century he passed from this life on September 23, 1968, the date upon which the Church now honors him. On that same date, 26 years later, I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison for life after having tossed aside three chances to save myself and my freedom with a lie.

Since that day, September 23, 1994, Padre Pio has injected himself into my life in profoundly grace-filled ways. I have written of these encounters in multiple posts, but the two that seem to stand out the most are “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls” and one that delves into the deeper mysteries of his life and death, “I Am a Mystery to Myself! The Last Days of Padre Pio.” We will link to them again at the end of this post and invite you to read them in his honor this week.

Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane

As long as our lives are tied to this world, we will never resolve the mystery of suffering. Like so many of you, I, too, have been confronted with the paradox of suffering. We are trapped in it because, unlike God, we live a linear existence. We see only what has come before and what is now, but we can only imagine what is to come.

But God lives in the '“nunc stans,” the “eternal now” seeing all at once our past, present, and future. Some believers expect God to be the Director of the play that is our lives, but He is more a participant than a director. He allows suffering as a means toward a specific end, but the end is His and not necessarily ours. In my post, “Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane,” Jesus discovers that the very first of his suffering is that he is inflicted with a human heart. He asks God to take away the great suffering that is to come, “but Thy will be done.” It is an aspect of the truth of the Resurrection that Jesus brought both His Divinity and the human heart with him when He opened the Kingdom of Heaven to us.

I have encountered this same paradox about suffering, and did so again on the night before writing this post. It comes in the night as a nagging litany of “What-Ifs.” It consists of a series of inflection points, points at which, in my own history, my current state in life could have been avoided had I turned left instead of right. I have identified about five such times and places in my life when a different decision would likely have prevented all the unseen suffering that was to follow.

But “What-Ifs” are spiritually unproductive. They deny the sacrificial nature of at least some of what we suffer and they disregard the plan God has for our souls. During my most recent nighttime Litany of “What-Ifs,” I was reminded of that prayer by St. John Henry Newman that I wrote about in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare”:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next …”

I do not have the gift of foresight, but my hindsight is clear. Had I allowed myself to take any of those five alternate steps that I have been reminiscing about, then the work committed to me and no other could not have taken place, and a life and soul may have been lost forever. That life and soul became important to me, but only because it was a work God committed to me and no one else. It was the life and soul of my friend, Pornchai whom God has clearly called out of darkness. It is my great honor to have been an instrument of the immense grace that transformed Pornchai, but to be such an instrument means never to ask,”What was in it for me?”

So, if given the chance now, would I trade Pornchai’s life, freedom, and soul to erase the last 28 years of my own unjust imprisonment and vilification? Our Lord answered that question with one of his own: “What father among you would give his son a stone if he asks for bread?” (Matthew 7:10). This verse is followed just a few verses further by one that I wrote about recently in “To the Kingdom of Heaven Through a Narrow Gate”:

“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

— Matthew 7:13-14

I could not have foreseen any meaning in what I suffered during my own agony in the garden. Such clarity is only in hindsight. Being sent to prison on false charges seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen to a person — certainly the worst that could ever happen to a priest because a priest in such a circumstance is almost equally reviled by both Church and State. But today, when recognition of the alternative dawned — recognition that the life and soul of my friend would have been lost forever — I find that I can bear this suffering. I do not choose it. It chose me.

When Padre Pio Stepped In

The story of how Padre Pio stepped into my life as a priest and prisoner came also through Pornchai Moontri. Like Padre Pio himself, I had been shunned and vilified by Catholic activists in groups like S.N.A.P. and V.O.T.F. Out of fear, many other priests and Church officials joined in that shunning during my first decade in prison. The police, the courts, the news media, and the rumor mill in my diocese all amounted to a perfect storm that I was powerless to overcome. In 2002, the storm became a hurricane, first in Boston, then in New Hampshire and from there across the country.

In 2005, The Wall Street Journal’s explosive 2-part publication of “A Priest’s Story” altered the landscape. After it was published, Catholic League President Bill Donohue reached out to me with an invitation to write an article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. My article, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” was published in the November 2005 issue.

When I received that month’s issue, I was more stricken by its front-page revelation than with my own centerpiece article. It was “Padre Pio Defamed.” I was shocked to learn, for the first time, that Padre Pio suffered more than the visible wounds of the crucified Christ. He also suffered a cascade of slander from both secular and church officials with wild suspicions and accusations that he sexually abused women in the confessional resulting in multiple Church investigations. In 1952, the Congregation of the Holy Office placed in its Index of Forbidden Books all books about Padre Pio.

Heaven can be most forgiving. The bishop who suspended the priestly faculties of Padre Pio based on the rapid spread of false information was Bishop Albino Luciani. Just a few weeks ago after a miracle attributed to his intercession was confirmed, he was beatified as Blessed Pope John Paul I.

It is ironic — not to mention boldly courageous — that Pope John Paul II canonized Padre Pio in 2002 at the height of media vitriol during the clergy abuse scandal in the United States. One of the last investigations against Padre Pio was a 1960 report lodged by Father Carlo Maccari alleging, with no evidence, that Padre Pio had sexual liaisons with female penitents twice per week.

In the same month my Catalyst article was published, Tylor Cabot joined the slander in the November 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly with “The Rocky Road to Sainthood.” He wrote, “despite questions raised by two papal emissaries — and despite reported evidence that [Padre Pio] raised money for right-wing religious groups and had sex with penitents — Pio was canonized in 2002.”

Fr. Maccari’s original slander also found its way into The New York Times. Maccari went on to become an archbishop. On his deathbed, Maccari recanted his story as a monstrous lie born of jealousy. He prayed on his deathbed for the intercession of Padre Pio, the victim of his slander.

A Heaven-Sent Blessing from Padre Pio

Also in November of 2005, Pornchai Moontri arrived in this prison after his experience of all the events I described in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio teamed up to reverse in him a road to destruction in ways that I was powerless to even imagine. A few years later, in 2009, this blog was born and some of my earliest posts were about what Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe suffered in life on the road to becoming the spiritual advocates they have been for us and millions of others. Just after I wrote about Padre Pio for the first time, I received a letter from Pierre Matthews from Ostend, Belgium who had been writing to me since reading of me in The Wall Street Journal.

Learning of my faith despite false charges and imprisonment became for Pierre the occasion for his return to faith and the Church after a long European lapse. When he read my early posts about the plight of Padre Pio, Pierre excitedly told me of a mystical encounter he had with Padre Pio as a young man. A letter from his father to him at his boarding school in Italy instructed him to go to San Giovanni Rotondo to ask for the blessing of the famous stigmatist, Padre Pio.

When 16-year-old Pierre got there, a friar answering the door told him this was impossible. He then gave Pierre a blessed holy card and ushered him toward the door. Just then, while inside the cavernous Capuchin Friary, an old man with bandaged hands came slowly down a flight of stairs and walked directly to the surprised teenager. Padre Pio held Pierre there firmly with his bandaged hands while he spoke aloud a blessing and prayer. Pierre was stunned, and never forgot it.

Sixty years later, Pierre had a dream that this blessing from Padre Pio was for us, and he wanted to pass it on. He insisted that he must be permitted to become Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather when Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010.

Pierre left this life in 2020 just as Pornchai was awaiting his deportation to Thailand, his emergence from prison and the start of a new life. To this day, we both hold Padre Pio in awe as a mentor and friend. He gave us spiritual hope when there was none in sight. His advice is profoundly simple and characteristically blunt:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading. Please share this post so it may come before someone who needs it. And please Subscribe if you have not done so already. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

I Am a Mystery to Myself! The Last Days of Padre Pio

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

“I Am a Mystery to Myself.” The Last Days of Padre Pio

For half the 20th Century, Saint Padre Pio suffered the wounds of Christ. All of them, including the cynicism of doubt and the tyranny of false witness.

In the August-September 2012 issue of Inside the Vatican magazine, Australian journalist Paul MacLeod has a fascinating article reviewing two books by Paul Badde, The Face of God (Ignatius Press 2010) and The True Icon (Ignatius Press 2012). The two books “read like detective stories,” MacLeod wrote, as they examine in great depth two of the Church’s most revered treasures, the Shroud of Turin and the “Volto Santo,” the image of the Holy Face hidden for 400 years and believed to be the second burial cloth of Jesus, the sudarium.

The origin of the veil can be one of two sources, or a combination of both. Though the story never appears in Sacred Scripture, there is an ancient legend that a woman offered her head-cloth to wipe the face of Jesus on the way to Golgotha. When he gave it back to her, as the story has it, an impression of his face remained on the veil. What is now the Sixth Station of the Cross was legendary in Rome since the 8th Century. The name tradition has given to that woman is Veronica, a name that appears nowhere in the Gospel narrative of the Passion of Christ. The name comes from “Vera Icon,” Latin for “True Image,” a great treasure of the Church now preserved at the Shrine of the Holy Face at Manoppello in the Abruzzi region of Italy.

The veil is believed to be one of two burial cloths of Jesus, though it’s possible that both accounts are behind this treasure. On the morning of the resurrection, the Gospel of John (20:7) reports, the smaller burial cloth of Jesus — the veil covering his face — was rolled up in a place by itself as witnessed by Saint Peter and Saint John. In Jewish custom in the time of Jesus, such a veil covered the faces of dignitaries, such as the high priest, in death before being entombed. It is this veil that many now believe is enshrined at Manoppello. In contrast to that other, larger burial cloth — believed by many to be the Shroud of Turin — the image on the veil is not that of a dead man, however, but of a man very much alive, his eyes wide open. It is Jesus the Christ, having conquered death. In Inside the Vatican, Paul MacLeod described the Veil of Manoppello as:

“. . . a delicate, transparent piece of expensive material, measuring just 28 cm by 17 cm, in which the face of Jesus seems to float in light, even to store light.”

Paul MacLeod reported in the article that Capuchin priest, Father Domenico de Cese, formerly custodian of the shrine, was killed in an accident while visiting the Shroud of Turin in 1978. A decade earlier, however, Father Domenico wrote of a rather strange occurrence. On the morning of September 22, 1968, Father Domenico opened the doors of the shrine, and was startled to find Padre Pio kneeling in prayer before the image of the Holy Face. Padre Pio was at the same time 200 kilometers away at San Giovanni Rotondo, gravely ill, and near death.

“With My Body or Without It”

It was his last known occurrence of bilocation, a phenomenon that, like his visible wounds, became a source of skepticism about Padre Pio both in and outside of the Church. At 2:30 AM on the next morning — September 23, 1968 — Padre Pio died.

The two stories placed together — Padre Pio’s death and his prayer before the Veil of Manoppello — make perfect sense to me. In the hours before his death, Padre Pio contemplated the burial cloth of Christ. After fifty years of bearing the visible wounds of Christ, Padre Pio’s own soul sought out this visible link to Jesus beyond death; not Jesus crucified — a reality Padre Pio himself had lived for fifty years — but the image of the face of the risen Christ.

Padre Pio seemed most hesitant to discuss either his wounds or the reported incidents of bilocation. He seemed hesitant because in life he did not understand them at all. In fact, a Vatican investigator learned that all the events of bilocation were reported by others, and never by Padre Pio himself. It wasn’t until he was directly asked by the investigator that he described bilocation:

“I don’t know how it is or the nature of this phenomenon — and I certainly don’t give it much thought — but it did happen to me to be in the presence of this or that person, to be in this or that place; but I do not know whether I was there with my body or without it . . . Usually it has happened while I was praying . . . This is the first time I talk about this.”

— Padre Pio Under Investigation, Ignatius Press, 2008, p. 208

Those September days preceding Padre Pio’s death in 1968 must have been the strangest of his life. The visible wounds became so central to his sense of self for a half century that I imagine he had difficulty even remembering a time when the wounds were not present. Even a great burden carried for years upon years — I have learned the hard way — can become a part of who and what we are. We cannot imagine Padre Pio without these wounds. We would have never even heard of Padre Pio without these wounds. So in that sense, the wounds were not for him. They were for us.

But in the days before Padre Pio died, the wounds on his hands and feet and in his side began to close. He received those wounds on the morning of September 20, 1918. Fifty years later, on September 20, 1968, after a few days of the wounds slowly diminishing, all traces of them were gone. The wounds were then only within Padre Pio. Visible or not, they were a part of his very self.

In a previous post about Padre Pio I wrote of the day those wounds were given to him. I told the story of how this saint among us struggled with what had happened to him, and the lifelong trials that were set in motion by those visible wounds. It is a moving account of the Stigmata in Padre Pio’s own words in a letter to his Capuchin spiritual advisor, Padre Benedeto, a month after receiving the wounds.

“On the morning of the 20th of last month, in the choir, after I had celebrated Mass . . . I saw before me a mysterious person similar to the one I had seen on the evening of 5 August. The only difference was that his hands and feet and side were dripping blood. The sight terrified me and what I felt at that moment is indescribable. I thought I should die and really should have died if the Lord had not intervened and strengthened my heart which was about to burst out of my chest.

“The vision disappeared and I became aware that my hands and feet and side were dripping blood. Imagine the agony I experienced and continue to experience almost every day. The heart wound bleeds continually, especially from Thursday evening until Saturday.

“Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment I feel in my soul. I am afraid I shall bleed to death if the Lord does not hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition.

“Will Jesus, who is so good, grant me this grace? Will he at least free me from the embarrassment caused by these outward signs? I will raise my voice and will not stop imploring him until in his mercy he takes away . . . these outward signs which cause me such embarrassment and unbearable humiliation.”

— Letters 1, No. 511

But it was the stories of bilocation that caused so much skeptical doubt. In May of 1921, the Vatican commenced its first of several investigations into Padre Pio’s life. The investigator, Monsignor Raffaelo Carlo Rossi, tried to refuse the assignment because he admittedly went into it with a “prejudice against Padre Pio.” After months of interrogations, depositions, interviews with other friars, and testimony by many laypeople, Bishop Rossi’s file was ordered sealed, and it remained sealed as a secret Vatican file for decades. The investigator concluded his file: “The future will reveal what today cannot be read in the life of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.”

That investigator, we now know, left San Giovanni Rotondo with no doubt whatsoever about the true nature of Padre Pio, but it wasn’t enough to curtail years of further suspicion and persecution from within the Church. The story of Padre Pio’s treatment is best summed up by Father Paolo Rossi, former Postulator General of the Capuchin Order, and it seems a bit familiar:

“People would better understand the virtue of the man if they knew the degree of hostility he experienced from the Church… The Order itself was told to act in a certain way toward Padre Pio. So the hostility went all the way up to the Holy Office and the Vatican Secretariat of State. Faulty information was being given to Church authorities, and they acted on that information.”

— Making Saints, Simon and Schuster, 1990 p. 188

A Face on My Wall

If you look at the end of the “About” page at Beyond These Stone Walls, you may notice that this blog is published under the patronage of Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio, champions of truth, justice, and fidelity to the Risen Lord. The impact of Saint Maximilian on these prison walls is easy to see. How Saint Padre Pio insinuated himself here is a bit more mysterious.

It started with an awareness that we share an important date. The day I was convicted and taken to prison was September 23, Saint Padre Pio’s feast day and the last day of his earthly life. Only 26 years passed between those two events. Padre Pio just showed up here again, but that story needs a little background.

Despite its small size, the typical prison cell can seem a barren place. Like every prison this one has rows upon rows of cells, tiers upon tiers of them, all perfectly uniform, none with any evidence of human individualism. The whole point of prison is that its inhabitants are forced to view themselves as humans in degraded form, living a day to day existence that is entirely uniform, and devoid of any sense of the self.

The inside of these 6-by-10-foot walled and barred cells is composed of nothing but concrete. The four walls, the floor and the ceiling are bare concrete. The bunks upon which we sleep are concrete (and they hurt if I sleep too long), and so is the small counter upon which this prisoner is writing at this moment. Prison cells are distinguishable from other prison cells solely by the number above each solid steel door.

There is one small exception to the absence of human evidence, and I’ve written of it before. In “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed,” I described the sole evidence of individualism in a prison cell. There are two rectangles, exactly 24 inches by 36 inches, painted on one wall with 12 inches of space in between them. Within these dark green rectangles, the two prisoners living in each cell may post a calendar, photos of their families and friends, and religious items. Nothing else.

You can learn a lot about a man from what is posted within this rectangle on his cell wall. In my first years in prison, commencing 28 years ago, I had lots of photos of family and friends, evidence of the life I once knew beyond these stone walls. Like every prisoner over time, that evidence slowly diminished. In my first five years in prison, I was moved 17 times, often with just minutes notice. Each time, I would take down all my evidence of a life, and then put it back on the wall in another cell on another tier in another building with other people. Each time, something of myself would be lost forever. Then the day came that I was moved, and nothing went back up onto the wall. The wall remained an empty space for many years.

This was true of my friend, Pornchai Moontri, as well. After 21 years in prison, beginning when he was barely 18 years old, Pornchai only vaguely recalls a life beyond and the people in it, but he no longer possesses any evidence of it. His uprootings were much more severe than mine. As you know from reading “Pornchai’s Story” he was ripped from a culture, a country, and a continent. Much was taken from him, and then, finally, so was his freedom. You know of that story which I wrote of in “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.”

When we were moved to the same cell many years ago, Pornchai and I both stared each day at two green rectangles with nothing in them. Then Beyond These Stone Walls began a year later, and ever so slowly our wall became filled with images sent to us from readers. (Alas, such images are no longer allowed in mail, but the ones already on our wall can stay). Every square inch of Pornchai’s rectangle, even after he has left prison, is still filled with evidence of his very much alive Catholic faith.

But one day, I noticed that a very nice photograph of Saint Padre Pio that was in my rectangle on the wall somehow migrated over to Pornchai’s wall. On the day I noticed that my treasured image of Padre Pio “defected,” I also mentioned that I didn’t have another one and wished that someone would send me one. An hour after voicing that, the mail arrived. I opened an envelope from my friend, John Warwick, a reader in Pittsburgh.

I opened John’s envelope to find a beautiful card enrolling me and my intentions in a novena to Saint Padre Pio, and the image on the card was the very same one that took up residence over on Pornchai’s wall. It is my first experience of this great Patron Saint’s bilocation, and I treasure it. Thank you, John!

“Stay with me, Lord, for it is getting late: the day is ending, life is passing; death, judgment, eternity are coming soon … I have great need of you on this journey. It is getting late and death is approaching. Darkness, temptations, crosses and troubles beset me in this night of exile.”

— Saint Padre Pio’s Communion Prayer

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