A Novena to Saint Pio of Pietrelcina
Prega, spera e non ti agitare
The Twentieth of September
On 20 September 1918, in the choir loft of the Capuchin friary of Our Lady of Grace at San Giovanni Rotondo, the wounds appeared on his hands, his feet and his side. He wrote about them a month later, on 22 October, in a letter to his spiritual director, Padre Benedetto da San Marco in Lamis, and what he described first was not the wonder of it but the pain and the embarrassment.
Francesco Forgione
He was born on 25 May 1887 at Pietrelcina, a farming village in the province of Benevento, and baptised Francesco Forgione. He entered the Capuchin novitiate on 6 January 1903 and took the name Pio.
Ordained at Benevento
He made solemn profession on 27 January 1907 and was ordained a priest in the cathedral of Benevento on 10 August 1910. He said his first Mass four days later in the parish church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Pietrelcina, the village he had been born in.
Private, Tenth Medical Corps
The First World War took him out of the friary and put him in uniform. He was called up on 15 November 1915, assigned that December to the Tenth Medical Corps at Naples, and discharged on 16 March 1918 as unfit for service. His health was poor for most of his life and never became the reason he was famous.
The Transverberation
In the first week of August 1918, some six weeks before the visible wounds, he described an interior wounding of the heart, what the mystical writers call a transverberation and what St. Teresa of Avila had described three and a half centuries earlier. The tradition is that the invisible came first and the visible followed.
Silenced
In 1931 the Holy Office withdrew his priestly faculties. He could not hear confessions, could not celebrate Mass in public, and could not answer the letters that arrived for him. He obeyed without protest and without appeal. The restrictions were lifted in 1933, and the faculty of hearing confessions was returned to him in stages over the following year.
Never Grow Weary of Praying
During the Second World War Pius XII repeatedly asked the faithful to gather and pray together for peace. Padre Pio took up the appeal, and from 1947 the groups that formed around it settled into a stable shape as the Gruppi di Preghiera, the prayer groups, each with a priest attached so that the link to the Church was not left to chance.
The Relief of Suffering
He wanted a hospital on the mountain, and he got one. Ground was broken in 1947 and the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering, opened at San Giovanni Rotondo on 5 May 1956. It is a working general hospital still, not a shrine building, which is the point of it.
Fifty Years
He died at San Giovanni Rotondo on 23 September 1968, fifty years and three days after the wounds of 20 September 1918 appeared, having lived in that one friary since 1916. He was beatified on 2 May 1999 and canonised on 16 June 2002 by John Paul II.
No classic novena prayer is given, and the omission is deliberate. Francesco Forgione died in 1968 and was canonised in 2002; every prayer addressed to him, and everything he himself wrote, is modern and in copyright. The same rule that keeps the diary of St. Faustina off the Divine Mercy novena applies here, and there is no ancient collect that belongs to him the way that one belongs to mercy. Pray the novena in your own words, or with any older prayer you keep — the Anima Christi will serve. No plate is given either: he is a photographed man of the twentieth century, and the art registry admits only painters dead more than a hundred years — the same reason St. Thérèse’s card is blank. What follows each day is a fact from his life or from the record the Church kept about him, one per day.