Padre Pio and the stigmata

Today's memorial of St Pio of Pietrelcina has reminded me of writing an article about him for a parish magazine at the time of his canonisation. At the time, St Pio was not someone about whom I knew much, and he was not someone to whom I had any special devotion.

One of the things I found unusual about him was that, as a man, he experienced the stigmata, the marking of his body with the wounds of the passion of Christ. Most of the other stigmatists I knew of at the time were women, so I had a sense of the stigmata as part of a feminine charism in the Church, certainly as far as the contemporary life of the Church is concerned. This is what I wrote about it at the time:

The core of Padre Pio’s active apostolate and his spiritual mission in the Church, however, is his being marked with the wounds of Christ, the stigmata.  The visible marks are an outward sign of a lived experience of the crucifixion, both as a willing self-offering on the part of the person involved and as a gift from God of being able to take part in the suffering of Jesus himself.  Padre Pio is distinguished from his contemporary stigmatists (Marthe Robin, Adrienne von Speyr, Therese Neumann) as a man and as a priest.  Where their experience of the Passion is associated with time - from Thursday evening to Sunday morning or the period of the Easter Triduum - Padre Pio’s experience is associated with his celebration of the Eucharist.  Eyewitness accounts describe the intense pain that he experienced in his hands, feet and whole body as he celebrated Mass.  At the words of Consecration, said hesitantly and with frequent repeating of words, “he is literally on the cross with Christ”.  Blood flowed from the wounds in Padre Pio’s hands, feet and side.  After his Mass, Padre Pio would spend many hours celebrating the Sacrament of Penance.  This aspect of his mission in the Church can also be seen in the light of the stigmata.  In this sacrament, the Church bears the burden of sin “for others” and for Padre Pio this was explicit in the way in which he offered himself as a victim for others.  Whilst there are many stories of Padre Pio’s supernatural insight into the lives of those who came to him for confession, he was for the majority of people simply a very good confessor and counsellor.

The Collect for his feast captures something of the essence of St Pio's mission in the Church:

Almighty ever-living God, who, by a singular grace, gave the Priest Saint Pius a share in the Cross of your Son and, by means of his ministry, renewed the wonders of your mercy, grant that through his intercession we may united constantly to the sufferings of Christ, and so brought happily to the glory of the resurrection.

[For those not familiar with the phenomenon of the stigmata, it is a rare occurrence in the life of the Church, but well attested in the lives of those who experience it. As I indicate above, it should not be seen as just a "wonder" but as an expression of a particular gift and mission given to an individual in the Church.]