The Problem of Padre Pio: The Saint Who Was Too Medieval to Be Anything But Modern

There exists a peculiar modern difficulty in discussing Padre Pio - the problem lies not in explaining the extraordinary things, but in explaining why we find them extraordinary at all. The twentieth century, which prided itself on having finally escaped the shadows of medieval superstition, found itself confronted with a most embarrassing reality: a saint who refused to be modern. And not merely a saint who was old-fashioned in his habits or dress (though he was certainly that), but one who insisted on manifesting those very phenomena that enlightened people had decisively explained away several centuries before.

It is rather like finding a dinosaur in one's garden. The difficulty lies not so much in the size of the creature or its peculiar habits, but in the fact that it exists at all when we have been assured with such certainty that it cannot. Yet there he was - Padre Pio of Pietrelcina - bearing in his flesh the wounds that science had declared impossible, reading the souls that psychology had reduced to mere mechanisms, and bilocation when physics insisted firmly on the unity of place.

The common solution to this problem, attempted by both his admirers and critics, has been to divide Padre Pio neatly in half. His devotees often speak only of his miracles, while his skeptics speak only of his more mundane characteristics. It is rather like having two competing biographies of a man, one insisting he was very tall, the other that he was very short, when the simple truth is that he had both a head and feet. The real Padre Pio was neither a collection of supernatural phenomena nor a simple country priest, but rather that most dangerous of all things - a complete human being who was also a complete saint.

Consider the matter of his confessional, which operated rather like a spiritual emergency room. Here sat a man who could, by all reliable accounts, see straight through to the souls of his penitents. One might expect such a gift to produce lengthy spiritual dissertations or profound mystical insights. Instead, it produced such startling statements as "You forgot to mention the argument with your mother-in-law" or "That business contract you signed last Tuesday requires immediate attention." A woman once decided to test him by inventing elaborate false sins, only to find herself stunned into silence as he recited her actual transgressions with the calm precision of a heavenly accountant. It was the sort of thing that makes skeptics quite cross and believers rather uncomfortable - being both too supernatural to dismiss and too practical to romanticize.

His stigmata presented a similar paradox. Here was a man who bore the very wounds of Christ, yet his greatest struggle was not with the pain (though it was considerable) but with the publicity. He wanted to hide these most visible of marks, to keep secret what was literally written in flesh. It is rather like having a sun that tries to shine in private, or a bell that attempts to ring quietly. The modern mind, which is so fond of public displays of private matters, finds itself utterly bewildered by a man who treated the most extraordinary of signs as if it were a family secret.

But perhaps his most confounding characteristic was his thoroughly unfashionable habit of being practical about supernatural things and supernatural about practical things. To the woman agonizing over her spiritual life, he might suggest better cooking for her family. To the man proud of his religious devotions, he might prescribe getting more sleep. To the wealthy socialite obsessed with mystical visions, he would say, "Go home and raise your children." He treated heaven and earth rather like a man who lives in a house with two stories, who finds it quite natural to use both the bedroom and the kitchen, and would think it very odd to insist on sleeping in one or dining in the other.

This combination of mystical insight and practical wisdom particularly confounded his critics, who had been carefully taught that one must choose between being spiritual and being sensible. They were prepared for either a fraudulent miracle-worker or a deluded mystic, but not for a man who could bilocate and still give sound advice about business matters. It is rather like being prepared to debate whether a man is a mathematician or a musician, and finding instead a composer who uses mathematics to write his symphonies.

Consider the young priest Karol Wojtyla who visited him in 1947. Padre Pio did not launch into prophecies about this man's future papacy - that would have been far too obvious. Instead, he simply stated that he would ascend to "the highest post in the Church," and then immediately told him to dress more warmly because Italian winters can be quite cold. It was exactly the sort of thing that makes perfect sense only after you stop trying to make sense of it.

The crowds that flocked to his monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo were not seeking medieval superstition but modern truth. They came because in him they found what the modern world had promised but failed to deliver - healing, understanding, and a sense that their lives had meaning. They found a man who could see their problems clearly precisely because he saw them in an eternal light. It is rather like discovering that the best way to read a map is by daylight, even if one's destination is only the corner shop.

What his critics found most irritating about Padre Pio was not his supernatural gifts but his supernatural common sense. While learned men wrote treatises about the impossibility of his miracles, he went about healing actual people. While theologians debated the proper balance between divine grace and human effort, he simply told people to pray and do their duty. While psychiatrists developed elaborate theories about the human psyche, he looked into souls and prescribed either confession or a good night's sleep, whichever was actually needed.

In an age which prides itself on being too sophisticated for medieval miracles, his very medievalism was precisely what made him modern. His wounds spoke to a century that was itself wounded. His ability to read souls addressed a time that had lost its own soul. His insistence on the reality of sin came just when people had convinced themselves that sin was not real, and therefore found themselves unable to explain why everything had gone wrong.

And here we arrive at what might be called the final proof of Padre Pio's sanctity - that he remained thoroughly humble while being absolutely right. He never claimed to be anything more than a simple priest who tried to do God's will, even while doing things that simple priests are generally not expected to do. He treated the extraordinary as if it were ordinary, and the ordinary as if it were extraordinary, and by doing so restored both to their proper place.

For those who prefer their reality in separate compartments, properly labeled and never mixing, Padre Pio will always be a problem. But for those who suspect that reality might be both bigger and simpler than our categories suggest, he stands as a thoroughly practical mystic, a thoroughly modern medieval, and a thoroughly human sign of divine things. Which is, after all, what a saint is supposed to be.

-The Seeker's Quill