More than Wounds

Galatians 2:19-21

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• I have been crucified with Christ
• no longer I, but Christ lives in me
• who has loved me and given himself up for me

Applying the Word to My Life:
By the time a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyła reached San Giovanni Rotondo in 1947, Padre Pio was already famous enough that people crossed countries to see him. Wojtyła had come from Rome simply because he wanted to meet the Capuchin friar everyone was talking about. He went to confession to him, and tradition later remembered that Pio told him he would one day rise to the highest office in the Church, though blood and violence would mark the road there. Decades later, Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II and survived an assassin's bullet in St. Peter's Square.

That was the kind of story people told about Padre Pio. They said he knew things penitents had never told him. They came asking for prayers for sickness, marriages, children, fear, grief, and every other kind of burden people drag into a church. Some came because they'd heard about miracles. Others came because they'd heard what it was like to go to confession to him. Pio could be gentle, but he could also be blunt enough that people left knowing exactly what they needed to change.

None of that was the life anyone would've predicted for Francesco Forgione. He'd grown up poor and sickly in Pietrelcina, entered the Capuchins while still young, took the name Pio, and became a priest. His health remained so bad that for years it was unclear whether he'd even be able to remain in community life.

Eventually he settled at the friary in San Giovanni Rotondo, a remote place in southern Italy.

Then people started coming.

Before long, the crowds became large enough to bring attention, suspicion, and investigation. Church authorities restricted parts of his ministry for periods of time, including the work people most wanted from him.

That had to hurt. His life had become wrapped around giving himself to people, and now the Church he loved was telling him what he couldn't do.

He obeyed.

That may be one of the most revealing parts of his life. A man with crowds behind him could easily have decided that popularity proved he was right. Pio didn't. He prayed, waited, submitted to the restrictions, and kept doing whatever good remained available to him. When the restrictions were lifted, he went back to work.

By then, he'd also become deeply concerned about the physical suffering around him. San Giovanni Rotondo was poor, and serious medical care was difficult to reach. Padre Pio decided the people needed a hospital—not a small charity clinic, but a modern hospital where the sick could receive excellent treatment and still be cared for as people whose suffering mattered to God.

It sounded like an absurd project for a friar who owned almost nothing.

It happened anyway.

In 1956, the House for the Relief of Suffering opened its doors. The priest who had spent years listening to suffering in the confessional had helped build a place where suffering could be treated with medicine, skill, dignity, and love.

And then there were the wounds.

In 1918, while praying after Mass, wounds appeared in Padre Pio's hands, feet, and side. They resembled the wounds of Christ, and he carried them for the next fifty years. People stared at them. Doctors examined them. Pilgrims came because they'd heard about them.

But after looking at the rest of his life, I'm not sure the wounds were the most extraordinary thing.

Paul says today, "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me." Padre Pio carried that sentence in a way almost no one else ever has. The wounds of Christ appeared on his body, but Christ had already been becoming visible through his life for years.

You could see Him in the hours Pio gave away in confession, in the obedience he held onto when he was misunderstood, in the hospital he helped build for people who were hurting, and in the prayers he kept offering for people who arrived carrying more pain than they knew what to do with.

The stigmata made Christ's wounds visible on Padre Pio. His life made Christ visible through him.

That's where Paul's words reach us. Most of us will never carry the wounds of Christ in our hands, but if Christ really lives in us, those hands should still begin to look like they belong to Him. Our time should become more available to people who need it. Our money should begin to relieve suffering. Our patience should last longer when we're misunderstood. Our attention should turn toward people we might otherwise walk past.

If Christ really lives in us, eventually someone should be able to recognize Him in what we do with the life He has given us.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll give Christ one part of my life to use for someone else.

ABOUT ST. PADRE PIO

• Name: St. Padre Pio (Francesco Forgione)
• Lived: May 25, 1887 – September 23, 1968, Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy
• Feast Day: September 23
• Patron of: adolescents, civil defense volunteers, Pietrelcina
• Title: Priest, Stigmatist
• Read more: Franciscan Media