St. Pio of Pietrelcina
September 23
The world was flogging itself
with war,
using faster technology
and speedier destruction,
with mechanized monsters
that smashed to a roadway
all barriers before them;
or hailstorms from the sky,
as lethal as hurricanes;
or sharks by sea
that swallowed shipping whole.
This savage onslaught
inflicted its contagion
on every nook of life and joy,
in a world upturned
of concentrated imprisonment
and systematized extermination,
consuming from 1939 to 45
more helpless human sacrifices
than all the preceding conflicts of death
that turned farmland into graveyards.
A priest in Italy
absorbed the suffering
of all these bleeding tribes,
a padre named Pio
in his Capuchin brotherhood.
The GIs flocked to this Padre Pio
to get rid of crippling baggage
of guilt from sin,
and the shattering fear
of death from every side.
The priest of pain
enfolded each with hands that bled
as he lived with wounds of Jesus crucified,
and writhed with him from the pang of nails,
and wounds that dripped with lifeblood
that mingled with that
of the bleeding world,
which longed for the mercy
of a God
who was willing to bleed.
As stand-in for the Jesus of suffering,
the friar sought each person’s pain
and sanctified it with his own,
immersed in the flow from the cross.
With his beard at faded gray,
the wound-scarred priest
grew old in the ministry of ingesting pain,
becoming a magnet
attracting followers from across the world,
who prayed with him
and learned to live with suffering.
Unflinching
in bearing a Christ-measure of wounds,
the priest of prayer
requested lira, dollars and pence,
to fund a massive, fully-healing hospital
for his unpaved, unlighted country land,
where people died for lack of hands with skill.
Fra Pio’s mittened hands that hid his wounds
embraced, and sometimes brought healing
for people too frightened
to follow the way of suffering.
He recruited doctors
who added prayer to their prescriptions,
to bring the miracle healing
of modern medicine.
The memory of Saint Padre Pio
is itself a prayer,
conferring the healing of Jesus
for ones we hold with him in our hearts,
and lift to the transfiguration
of suffering love,
as long as we can love enough,
with Pio’s smile,
that we accept their suffering
as though it were our own..
September 2015
Bonaventure Stefun, OFM Cap.
See the reflections from the Lent-Easter series here.
Advent-Christmas reflections are also online.Â