JOSEPH PRONECHEN

MEET PADRE PIO

by Patricia Treece Charis, 2001 144 pages, $9.99 To order: (800) 458-8505

Looking to make the acquaintance of one of the Church's most beloved and recognizable saints-in-waiting? Adults and youth will find an agreeable and satisfying encounter in Meet Padre Pio.

With the skill of a perceptive storyteller, author Patricia Treece turns our meeting into an absorbing overview of Padre Pio's life. Weaving together incidents, letters and anecdotes spanning his entire life, she shows how graced with sanctity he was— virtually all his days (1887-1968).

Ordinary people can take heart from these eyewitness accounts. The colorful portrait of Pio that emerges— from when he was little Francesco Forgione to his days as a stigmatic priest whose other extraordinary gifts included bilocation and reading souls— conveys that he was “cheerful and down to earth, retaining his love of pranks and telling jokes.”

“All his life Padre Pio was known among his friends as a man with a good sense of humor,” Treece writes. “Playing pranks on his sister and fellow novices, and later making his Capuchin brothers laugh by telling innocent little jokes and stories during recreation, Padre Pio fulfilled the paradox that a follower of Christ must both ‘pick up [his] cross and follow me’ and be filled with ‘the joy of the Lord.’”

Some of his simple jokes made me laugh out loud. Francis de Sales once observed, “A saint who is sad is a sad saint.” Pio wasn't sad.

On the other hand, well-chosen examples from Pio's voluminous letters of spiritual direction to his spiritual children “reveal Pio as a man steeped in the Scriptures, totally dedicated to Jesus Christ and exquisitely sensitive to the subtlest spiritual currents of the soul.”

His spiritual direction was uncompromising, yet gentle and full of love. The priest for whom Jesus and Mary were everything speaks to the heart on how and why to avoid spiritual dangers like vain-glory, and to bear crosses as a sign of loving God and accepting his will.

Although intended for specific individuals, the letters are so universal as to apply to any one of us. We can take this spiritual direction as if Padre Pio wrote it only for us.

The letters include a fascinating account the padre wrote about his trip home after his medical discharge from the WWI army. It combines his sensitivity, good cheer and down-to-earth observations with strong hints of supernatural intervention through unwavering trust in God.

Directly or indirectly, Padre Pio always told people to trust in God. The book recalls how he healed one young man on crutches who feared he'd fall without them. “At last, urged on by Pio, he dropped the crutches, but clutched fearfully at the wall to support himself,” writes Treece.

“‘Come on, walk,’ Pio laughed. Something in the confident laugh caught the crippled man's soul. He let go of the wall. He walked. His foot, mangled in an accident, had been healed.”

Treece has done a fine job selecting incidents that illuminate Pio's extraordinary gifts, his superhuman love for people, his chosen role from God— in short, the wonders of a great Christian soul.

Joseph Pronechen writes from Trumbull, Connecticut.