Who is Padre Pio?

About Padre Pio

Padre Pio, was a humble Capuchin priest who lived the last 50 years of his life in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, at Our Lady of Grace Friary. He was blessed by God in many wonderful and mysterious ways; The most dramatic was the stigmata and he bore these wounds of Christ for fifty years.

Among his other gifts were perfume, bilocation, prophecy, conversion, reading of souls, and miraculous cures. People are still being cured through his intercession in ways that cannot be explained by medicine or science.

More important, if less spectacular, are the spiritual healings that take place in all parts of the world. Saint Pio is a powerful intercessor.

Padre Pio’s Life

He had prophesied endless things during his lifetime, including his own death, nine years before it happened, to the exact day. Seeing that moment coming, he got up from his bed, put on the habit, confessed, sat down in the chair and whispered “I see two mothers!” An hour later he was in Heaven. His was a calm and peaceful death.

Alongside the chair, on a little table, are the things that were in his habit when he died: a relic of the true cross which he always carried on his person, and medals that he would give to the faithful as he would go through the crowds. There were a few little white mints that someone gave him and they happened to be in the pocket of his robe.

Padre Pio’s Cell

Painting of “Our Lady of Purity” that hangs over the foot of Padre Pio’s bed. He didn’t want it to hang there because he considered it too rich for his cell, but his superiors insisted, so there it is. And that was good because he could lay in bed and look up to her during his hours of sleeplessness; he only slept about two hours a night.

As you look into his room from the door, you see that to the right of his bed is the window from which he would wave and bless people who came to visit. Directly in front of the window is the armchair on which Padre Pio was sitting when he died. It will be 28 years next September. He was 81 years and four months old when our Lord called him home at the end of his extraordinary mission of suffering.