"VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Padre Pio, the 20th century Italian mystic monk
and miracle worker who for 50 years is said to have had the stigmata -- the
bleeding wounds of Christ -- had for many people always been a saint.
Pope John Paul formally declared his sainthood on Sunday at a solemn ceremony
attended by hundreds of thousands in a sweltering St. Peter's Square and watched
on screen by millions in Italy and around the world.
For many, this was simply the Church rubber-stamping a status they had always
believed in.
Padre Pio's fame centers on the stigmata, which he had for 50 years from 1918
until his death in 1968 at the age of 81.
Padre Pio had wounds in the hands, feet and side that corresponded with the
wounds Christ suffered in the crucifixion. He used brown fingerless gloves to
absorb the blood and cover the wounds except when he said mass.
Doctors were at a loss to explain the wounds, which never produced gangrene
or infection.
When they examined him they were able to feel their fingers pressing in from
either side. When he held up the host at mass, the faithful were able to see
light coming through the wounds.
When he was first investigated by a Vatican inquisitor in 1927, a report suspected
that he inflicted the wounds on himself with nitric acid. But devotees said
it was ridiculous to think he could have done this for 50 years.
Friars who lived with him like to tell the story of a man who told Padre Pio
of a doctor who believed that the monk had willed the wounds on himself by always
contemplating a crucifix.
Padre Pio told the man: "Tell your doctor friend to go stare at a cow and
see if horns grow on his head."
Pio lost a cup of blood a day from the stigmata, ate one Spartan meal a day
and slept three hours each night. Yet he was not anemic and did not lose weight.
The stigmata started fading toward the end of his life and disappeared when
he died.
WRESTLING WITH THE DEVIL
Padre Pio is said to have had a stern look in his eyes that could scare even
the devil and, some say, it sometimes did.
Padre Pio had no sympathy for the devil and the devil certainly had none for
him. His biographers say he wrestled with the devil, literally, and one of the
many books written about him is called "The Devil in the Life of Padre
Pio."
According to monks who lived with him, the last big demonic tussle was in July,
1964, when, at 10 o'clock at night the friars heard him calling out from his
cell.
They found him on the floor, his forehead slit open. He told a priest later
"the devil tried to scratch out my eyes."
The next day, the devil is said to have spoken through a possessed person, saying
"I went to visit somebody. I took revenge."
Many people said Padre Pio was able to predict events in their lives or knew
what they were about to confess.
He was also said to be seen in two places at the same time -- a mystic ability
the Church calls "bi-location"
The Vatican investigated and rehabilitated him twice and cleared him of charges
of sexual misconduct and fraud. In the 1930s he was ordered not to say mass
in public or hear confessions.
The ban was lifted after three years. A new investigation began in 1960 but
he was cleared and rehabilitated in 1965.
PILGRIM BOOM TOWN
The bearded, brown-robed Padre Pio spent nearly all his life in a simple monastery
in the hilltop town of San Giovanni Rotondo in Italy's rugged southern Puglia
region.
When he arrived in 1918, it was a dusty dot of a village of peasants connected
to the outside world by a mule path.
Today, it is the Lourdes of southern Italy, a pilgrim boom town of some 27,000
residents and 7.5 million visitors a year. Its economy revolves around souvenir
shops, hotels and the huge hospital which Padre Pio built.
He is credited with performing two miracles after his death for people who prayed
to him.
Before his beatification -- the penultimate step before sainthood -- he was
credited with the medically inexplicable healing of an Italian woman who had
a lung disease.
The second miracle was the curing of an 11-year-old Italian boy who had meningitis
and whose mother prayed to Padre Pio while her son was in a coma."
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