ST. PADRE PIO

Some friars living with Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo once heard a mysterious sound in the friary. "It sounded," one friar said, "like voices singing in beautiful harmony." No one could find the source.

At the time, Padre Pio was deep in prayer. When someone approached him to ask about the singing, he roused as if from a deep sleep and answered, “Why are you all so surprised? They are the voices of the angels, who are taking souls from purgatory into paradise.”

This story and others, told in the book "Padre Pio: The True Story" by C. Bernard Ruffin, illustrate Padre Pio’s supernatural sensitivity to the angelic world and the souls in purgatory.

Padre Pio could not only hear but also see souls from the other world. At times, he was given the gift of knowing the eternal condition of those who had died. It is said that the widow of a man who died by suicide once inquired about her husband’s soul, and Padre Pio replied, “He’s saved. Between the bridge and the river he repented.”

His supernatural gifts did not come easily. They marked a life of intense suffering, including Padre Pio’s bearing the wounds of the stigmata for 50 years.

In his suffering, Padre Pio had a special devotion to the souls in purgatory. Early in his priesthood, he wrote to his spiritual director, “For some time I have felt the need to offer myself to the Lord as a victim for poor sinners and for souls in purgatory. This desire has grown continuously in my heart, until now it has become a powerful passion. I made this offering to the Lord, imploring Him to lay on me the punishments that are prepared for sinners and for souls in purgatory, even multiplying them upon me a hundredfold as long as He converts and saves sinners and quickly releases the souls in purgatory.”

Padre Pio said that suffering increasingly and without comfort was “all his joy” because it made the pains of Jesus lighter.

I NEED A HOLY MASS

In 1922, Padre Pio told a bishop and several friars the story of a soul who had visited him from purgatory.

On a snowy winter evening, Padre Pio was praying by the fireplace in the friary when an old man sat down beside him. Padre Pio could not imagine how he could have entered the friary at that time of night.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Padre asked.

The man said his name was Pietro Di Mauro and that he had died in the friary on September 18, 1908, when it was a poorhouse. He had fallen asleep with a lighted cigar, which set the mattress on fire, and he died, suffocated and burned.

“I am still in purgatory,” the old man said. “I need a holy Mass in order to be freed. God permitted that I come and ask you for help.”

“Rest assured that tomorrow I will celebrate Mass for your liberation,” Padre Pio answered, and then walked him to the door, which had been closed and locked.

Padre Pio offered Mass for the old man as promised. A few days later, he went with another friar to the town hall and looked at records from 1908. There they found that on September 18 of that year, a man named Pietro Di Mauro had indeed died of burns and asphyxiation in the place which at that time was a poorhouse and now was the friary.

“We must empty Purgatory with our prayers.” – Saint Padre Pio