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Chapter Two

A Boy Who Talked to the Angels

The “Beautiful Francesco”

Unfortunately, there is little contemporary documentation about Padre Pio’s childhood, except some essays he wrote in school, but these are limited help in providing a picture of the boy and his life. He kept no diary, and neither did those around him — most of whom were illiterate. Although his father worked most of the year out of the country, only a couple letters between father and son have survived the ravages of time. Pio’s father, however, when he was in his eighties and living with Mary Pyle at San Giovanni Rotondo, provided numerous anecdotes from the childhood of his famous son, which she recorded. But, of course, the doting father who practically worshiped his son was not a totally unbiased witness.

The most extensive work in reconstructing Padre Pio’s childhood was done immediately after his death, when Padre Alessandro of Ripabottoni and Padre Lino of Prata undertook to interview elderly persons who had known Padre Pio as a boy, taking down their oral histories. There is always the possibility that the good fathers were told what they wanted to hear. The only one of Pio’s siblings who survived him was his baby sister Graziella, who outlived her brother by only seven months. Nobody seems to have interviewed her.

According to those who were interviewed, the child Franci Forgione, with his blond hair and brown eyes, “was so beautiful he looked like an angel.”¹ Neighbors referred to him as “il bello Francesco” (“beautiful Francis”), as much for his temperament as for his appearance.

A Shaken Baby!

Like most children, Franci could be exasperating at times. His father told Miss Pyle that Franci passed through a spell when he kept the whole house awake by crying all night long. One night Tata, as the children called their father, was so upset by the baby’s continuous crying that he leaped from his bed, grabbed the baby, and shook him, screaming, “The good Lord must have sent a little devil into my house instead of a baby!”² To make things worse, Orazio lost his grip and the baby fell to the brick floor. His hysterical mother gathered the shrieking child into her arms and screamed at her husband, “What are you trying to do, kill my child!”³

As an adult, Padre Pio recalled having terrible nightmares as a little boy. He told a friend that when his mother put him to bed when he was a toddler and turned off the oil lamp, he would start crying, and his mother would turn on the light to quiet him. “I was surrounded by frightening monsters!”⁴ Although his experience was not unusual for a little child, Padre Pio reportedly concluded, “The devil was tormenting me.”⁵ It was reported that he claimed, as an adult, that as early as he could remember, he could communicate with his guardian angel and had visions of Christ and Mary. The supernatural world was close at hand for the farm folk of the Mezzogiorno, but extraordinarily so for young Franci Forgione.

The Dog That Ate the Peppers

Franci was a sickly child. “I’ve suffered since I was at my mother’s breast,” he remarked to a friend in later life.⁶ When he was two, suffering from stomach problems, he was taken by his mother to a local witch. Beppa feared that someone had put the “evil eye” on the child. According to Padre Pio, the witch “took me by the legs and held me upside down [as if] I were a lamb,” making nine crosses over his stomach, massaging it, and chanting eerie incantations.⁷ The treatment seemed to work.

When he was about ten, Franci became seriously ill with an illness usually described as typhoid fever, a bacterial infection usually caused by poor sanitation or contaminated food. A local physician, Don Giacinto Gudagna, told the boy’s parents that he had only days to live. Bluntly, the parents told Franci that he was dying. The sick child answered calmly, “If I’m dying, I want to see my beloved Piana Romana once more.” Gra and Beppa agreed, and his brother Michele, then fifteen, put his little brother on a donkey and took him to the cottage on the farm. Now it was harvest time, and Beppa had prepared fried peppers as a treat for her farmhands. The peppers were so hot that the workers had eaten comparatively few, and a large pot remained on the table. Alone with Michele, Franci asked for some peppers. Michele refused. Later Beppa arrived at the cottage, and Franci said to her: “Close the door, Mammella. The light is bothering me. Now please leave me. I want to be alone for a little bit.” So she left him alone in the house. Thereupon Franci jumped out of bed, devoured every single pepper, and downed a half a bottle of milk. When Beppa returned Franci was in a deep sleep and the pot was empty. She upbraided Michele for letting the dog get to the peppers. Next morning Franci awoke perfectly well and confessed that he had been the “dog” that ate the peppers.⁸ Both Padre Pio and his brother recounted this story in later years.

Dedicated to Christ and Mary

Only three years of public school were available in Pietrelcina in the 1890s. Classes were held at night so that the children could work during the day. Michele continually played hooky and remained completely illiterate. His draft registration card in September 1918, when living in Flushing, Queens, New York, reveals that he signed his name with an “X.” Franci, however, was an eager student. His first teacher was Cosimo Scocca, a fourteen-year-old boy from the adjacent farm. The next two years Franci was instructed by Mandato Saginario, who worked by day as a rope maker.

Franci’s spiritual precocity manifested itself very early in life, which is not surprising, since both of his parents were extremely devout and reared their children to be saints. Of Franci’s siblings, only Pellegrina rejected the faith in which she was reared. The other children enthusiastically embraced Gra and Beppa’s piety.

At baptism, Beppa dedicated Franci (as she must have done with the other children) to Christ and the Virgin Mary. When Franci was five, Beppa encouraged him to dedicate himself to Christ, Mary, and his patron, Francis of Assisi.⁹ From the time he could talk, Franci was always asking to be taken to church. He liked to hear stories about Jesus, Mary, and the saints, and, rather precociously, he was aware of sin. One day, when he was a very little boy, he was walking with his mother past a field of turnips. When Mammella remarked, “Look at those beautiful turnips. I’d sure like to eat some,” Franci, with grave and solemn demeanor, looked up at her and said sternly, “That’s a sin.” A few days later, however, when mother and son were walking past a stand of fig trees, Franci begged his mother to pluck some figs. “Wait a minute now,” she said. “It was a sin to eat the turnips, and now it’s not a sin to eat the figs!”¹⁰

An “Unsalted Piece of Macaroni”

As a little boy, Franci was given the chore of minding the family sheep — all four or five of them. The families on the neighboring farms combined their flocks, with the result that their children played together. When interviewed in later years, Franci’s surviving childhood playmates had varying recollections. Luigi Orlando recalled: “When he was with us, he never prayed. There was nothing particularly outstanding about him. With us he was a boy just like any other, [though] well-mannered and reserved.”¹¹ Ubaldo Vecchariano characterized him as somewhat of a “nerd” — “submissive and reserved,” an “unsalted piece of macaroni.”¹² Antonio Bonavita recounted, “The rest of us children were wicked, but he was always good.”¹³ Mercurio Scocca recalled that Franci loved to play Mass and sculpt clay figures of Christ and the saints for the various religious festivals. Riparta Masone, a playmate of Franci’s youngest sister, remembered that her older brother Vincenzo, who played with Franci, complained that he was “always preaching” to the other boys.¹⁴

Some of Franci’s playmates recalled how it was customary for mothers to give their children a chunk of bread to carry to the fields to eat for breakfast. While most of them shoved it into a pocket and gulped it down unceremoniously, Franci’s mother gave him bread in a white linen napkin. Kneeling down, he would pray before he ate, and if a morsel fell to the ground, he would pick it up and kiss it before consuming it. Whenever another boy cursed or swore, Franci would run away. The same Luigi Orlando who described him as “a boy like any other,” recalled that once, when the two were wrestling, Luigi let escape from his lips “a strong expression,” whereupon Franci, who had pinned him to the ground, jumped up, and fled.¹⁵ Riparta Masone recalled that Graziella Forgione would, like her brother, leave the company of any child who cursed or misbehaved. This is what their mother trained them to do. Beppa forbade her children to associate with others who used vulgar or blasphemous language. In fact, whenever she heard anyone curse, she would “repair” it with the expression, “Blessed be God!” — a practice she tried to instill in all her children.¹⁶

Franci was exceptionally devout as a child, but his piety was not unique in his family. His sisters Felicita and Graziella were said to have been just as pious. Riparta Masone recalled that Graziella never wanted to play with the other girls. “She’d carry her jug to the well to get water and never look to the left or to the right or say anything to the other children. She spent all her time praying.”¹⁷ Franci, too, at times, would go off by himself and sit under the shade of an elm tree to pray and study. In school, it was said that he was the only boy among his companions who consistently completed all his homework. But he also liked to play and tease (even as an old man). The boy loved to sneak up quietly behind his sister Felicita while she was taking her bath in the portable tub on the kitchen floor and dunk her head in the water. Felicita, a gentle, sweet-natured girl whom Padre Pio would later characterize as “a saint” and “the best of all the family,” never complained, but merely looked at him, smiled, and said, “Hey, Franci, you never stop playing, do you?”¹⁸

One day when Franci was taking his siesta under an elm tree, Mercurio Scocca decided to bury him in corn shocks. When Franci awoke in darkness, screaming for his mother, Mercurio burst out laughing. The next day at siesta time it was Franci who found Mercurio sound asleep on top of a small farm wagon. Pulling the wagon to the crest of a nearby hill, Franci pushed it over the brink with Mercurio still in it. The wagon crashed into a nearby tree; fortunately, Mercurio was unhurt.¹⁹

Franci also tried smoking — once. A neighbor gave him money to go to town to fetch a cigar. On his way back, Franci lit the cigar and took a puff. He became so ill that he never smoked again (although as an adult he used snuff).

Franci developed early a deep concern for the poor and the sick. Although he later remembered never lacking for anything as a child, he was deeply moved and troubled when he accompanied his mother on one of her frequent errands of charity and saw poor peasants without adequate food, clothing, and shelter. His school compositions reveal compassion for persons like “little Silvio,” an orphan, shivering with cold, whom he described as kneeling with his grandfather at the tomb of his parents, weeping bitterly.²⁰ In another composition he described “little Anselm” who, at twelve, had neither mother nor father nor sisters nor brothers, who lived alone at home, and, “in order to eke out a living,” was forced “to go from door to door, to beg for charity.”²¹

Franci Witnesses a Miracle

When Franci was eight, he witnessed an event that remained indelibly imprinted in his mind for the rest of his life. For vacations, the Forgiones went to nearby shrines, such as that of Our Lady of Grace in Benevento and Our Lady of Pompeii near Naples (thirtysome miles away). On August 25, 1895, Orazio took his younger son to the town of Altavilla Irpina, about twenty miles south of Pietrelcina, to the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo, which contained the relics of Saint Pellegrino, an early Christian martyr. The church was frequently the site of flamboyant displays of excessive piety. Padre Alessio Parente, Padre Pio’s assistant in his old age, recalled seeing in that very church in the 1940s or 1950s a young man crawling around, licking the floor with his tongue!

On that summer day, Franci and his father were in a crowd of worshipers, amidst the smells of incense, garlic, and wine, when a “raging, disheveled woman” forced herself up to the altar area, where stood a statue of Saint Pellegrino. In her arms she carried a deformed, mentally disabled child. According to some versions, the boy had a grossly enlarged head; according to another he had only stumps for limbs. He ceaselessly vocalized a horrible, raucous graak! graak! graak! like a crow. Hysterically, the disheveled mother implored Saint Pellegrino to heal the child. Nothing happened. The child continued his obscene and pathetic litany: Graak! Graak! Graak!

The worshipers watched in horror as the frantic mother, with a bloodcurdling shriek and gruesome oaths, began to curse the saint. Finally, she screamed, “Why don’t you cure him? Well … keep him! He’s yours!” Thereupon, she threw the child at the statue. He hit the image, bounced off, and crashed to the floor. Then, to the stupefaction of everyone, the child, who had never walked or talked, got up and ran to his mother (on his stumps?), crying, in a clear and normal voice: “Mother! Mother!”

Cries of “Miracolo! Miracolo!” filled the church. Men, women, boys, and girls surged forward to behold what Saint Pellegrino had wrought. Franci and his father were nearly trampled in the pandemonium, but they were both so moved that they exchanged scarcely a word on the way home. As long as he lived, Padre Pio would remember that episode at Altavilla Irpina as a demonstration of God’s mercy and love.²²

“Don’t You See the Madonna?”

The miracle of Saint Pellegrino was not the first time that Franci saw the hand of God break into the physical world. As Fra Pio he once told his friend Padre Agostino of San Marco in Lamis that from early childhood he had seen and spoken to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and his guardian angel. He said this as if he did not realize it was unusual. “Don’t you see the Madonna?” he asked. When Agostino replied that he did not, Fra Pio replied, “Surely, you’re saying that out of humility.”²³

Franci also saw and communicated with his guardian angel. In letters, he sometimes referred to his celestial protector as “the companion of my infancy.” The boy claimed that Jesus also visited him and guided him.

Margherita DeCianni, a childhood friend, recounted in later years how one day Franci was with his father, who was attempting to dig a well at Piana Romana. After the elder Forgione had dug forty feet without finding water, Franci announced, “You won’t find any water down there.” When Orazio asked him how he knew, the child said bluntly, “Jesus told me, if you want to find water, you must dig over there.” The boy pointed to a precise spot in another part of the field. “All right,” said his father. “I’ll dig where you tell me, but, if there’s no water there, I’ll throw you in the hole!” Orazio dug three feet … four feet … five … six … seven — and then there burst forth an abundant spring of water!²⁴

Today, a boy such as Franci probably would be taken to a psychiatrist, diagnosed with some sort of mental illness, and drugged. Or perhaps he would simply be accused of lying. Orazio and Giuseppa and their relatives and neighbors recognized that some people who claimed to have visions were liars or crazy. But, as in the case of the spring, Franci’s paranormal experiences corresponded to a concrete reality. Moreover, other members of Franci’s family seem to have had some sort of mystical experiences, albeit less spectacular than his. Padre Pio’s niece Pia Forgione affirmed that, although her father, Michele, never had any supersensible experiences, she was of the firm belief that her aunt Graziella was characterized by an “enhanced spirituality.” There are also reports from several sources that once when Orazio was visiting his son Padre Pio, he claimed to see the soul of a dead person there in front of the door to his room.

As far as we know, it was in his tenth year that Franci had his first experience of the death of a close relative. On August 22, 1896, his grandfather, Fortunato De Nunzio, died in Pietrelcina at the age of seventy-five. We know nothing of Franci’s relationship with him or whether he was present at the old man’s deathbed, but, from one of his school essays, we do know that a few months earlier he had seen a man die.

He and his mother had gone to the hospital at Benevento to visit a relative. It seems to have been the custom of Giuseppa De Nunzio to circulate through the wards, providing a word of cheer and comfort and a prayer for the various patients. Mother and son stopped to visit with a young soldier, wounded in the battle of Adowa (in which Italy, desperately seeking colonies, experienced the abject humiliation of having its armies crushed by the military forces of Ethiopia in March 1896). The soldier was being attended by a priest and a nursing nun, who were trying to cheer him. But the wounded man kept calling his absent mother, moaning, “I’ll never see her again. I feel I’m dying and I’d like to see my family, especially my mother, who loves me so much, for the last time.”

Many mothers would have spared a nine-year-old boy such a scene, but Beppa kept Franci with her. Just as the nun told the soldier, “Oh, come on now, don’t upset yourself so. You must live, and be the joy of your parents,” he “suddenly bowed his head; he remained stock-still; and after a few minutes, he died.” For two days, Franci was so upset that he could not eat.²⁵

“I Want to Be a Friar with a Beard”

In later years, Padre Pio insisted, “I always wanted to be a friar.” His parents were first aware of this when he told them, after hearing a particularly inspiring sermon, that he wanted to be a priest.

When Franci was ten, he encountered twenty-six-year-old Fra Camillo of Sant’Elia a Pianisi, cercatore di campagna for the Capuchin friary at Morcone, about thirteen miles from Pietrelcina. The job of the cercatore was to go through the countryside, soliciting provisions, in the spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the order. Camillo carried with him a large sack for donations of wheat, grain, flour, eggs, and similar goods, as well as a coffer for cash donations. Fra Cami’, as he was called, was a merry little man, a favorite with the children, to whom he handed out pictures, medals, chestnuts, and walnuts. Franci was attracted to this happy and genial friar and was especially fascinated by his beard. When Fra Cami’ told him that all Capuchins wore beards, Francesco was determined to become a Capuchin, because, as he said, he wanted one day to have a beard like Fra Cami’.

When he discussed his desire to become a Capuchin with his parents, they told him that they would prefer that he become a parish priest, promising to finance his studies to that end.

“No, no,” insisted the boy, “I want to be a friar with a beard!”

“With a beard!” his mother laughed. “Why, you’re still a little kid. You don’t know anything about having a beard or not having a beard.”²⁶

The next time she saw Fra Camillo, Beppa told him, “Fra Cami’, we’ve got to make this boy a monk.”

“May St. Francis bless him,” the Capuchin said, “and help him to be a good Capuchin.” He invited her to visit the friary and talk to the authorities there. So she and Orazio went to Morcone to speak to the superior there and inspect the place. When they returned, Franci asked, “Do they want me?” When his parents nodded, the ten-year-old jumped up and down in joy, crying, “They want me! They want me! They want me!”²⁷

There was a problem. If Franci was to become a priest, he needed more formal education than the three years available in Pietrelcina. This meant that the boy would have to go to private school. His parents could pay the doctor and the shoemaker in goods such as grain and eggs, but they would have to pay for Francesco’s education in cash, and they had little. Orazio, once he became convinced that Franci was serious, decided to go to America to earn money sufficient to pay for his son’s education.

Orazio Goes to America

By the late nineteenth century, huge numbers of southern Italian men were crossing the Atlantic to work in North and South America, as there were no jobs to be found in their region, except as farm laborers. It was said that at one time 30 percent of the males in Pietrelcina were working in other countries. Most of these men had no intention of remaining in the Americas permanently, but engaged in a sort of commute across the ocean to provide for their wives and children in Italy. It was probably in late 1897 or early 1898 that Orazio, leaving Giuseppa to run the farm, sailed from Naples to Brazil or Argentina (no one seems clear on which), but shortly he was back, without money. According to some accounts, he had become ill; according to others, he had been unable to find employment. (It would have been shortly after his return that he fathered his eighth child — if in fact there was an eighth child.) It was probably in 1899 that he sailed away again, this time to the United States.

Immigrant passenger lists show that dozens of Forgiones arrived in America from Pietrelcina, mostly at Ellis Island, but none of them was named Grazio or Orazio or anything similar. He may have arrived at another port; he may have been illegal. In 1901, he was writing to his family from Mahoningtown, Pennsylvania, where he shared a frame house on Montgomery Avenue with some fellow Pietrelcinese immigrants and worked as foreman of the hands on a farm,²⁸ sending home nine American dollars a week at a time when the average worker earned about eleven.²⁹ In this way Orazio provided Francesco the equivalent of a high school education, purchased two more tracts of land, and acquired more livestock. On November 12, 1902, he dictated a letter to his wife, telling her, “Dear wife … put aside a good demijohn of wine for, when the feast of the Most Holy Mary comes (the one in August) next year, I return to Italy.”³⁰ His stay at home was brief. On his return to the United States, he worked in Queens, New York. In later years, he lamented he never got to know his younger daughters well. On his brief trips home, it is said they never seemed comfortable in his arms.

School Days

Franci was enrolled first in a private school run by Domenico Tizzani on Via Caracciolo, where he studied reading, writing, and elementary Latin. Don Domenico,³¹ a quiet, melancholy man in his fifties, was a married former priest. After a while, Franci’s mother was not satisfied with his progress, and her husband concluded that it was not a good idea to have a boy who wanted to be a priest instructed by a man who had left the priesthood. In later years, Padre Pio said that Don Domenico never talked about his personal life and was a good teacher.

Giuseppa then enrolled Franci in a private school run by Don Angelo Caccavo. He was not a particularly religious man (in later years, Padre Pio wrote him, telling him that he prayed every day for his conversion), but he was an excellent teacher. He brooked no nonsense, however. Whenever a student got a lesson wrong, he had to take it home and copy it over several times by the next morning. Unruly children were made to hold out their hands to receive the whack of a short ruler on the open palm. If that didn’t work, Caccavo would put the child “in jail” — making him kneel in front of the class, facing the blackboard. He was not averse to cracking a recalcitrant child on the head. Most Pietrelcinese respected Don Angelo and accepted his methods of discipline.³²

Franci was once the undeserving object of Don Angelo’s wrath. Several of the boys drafted a passionate love letter, signed Francesco’s name, and delivered it to one of the girls, who, indignant, handed it to Caccavo. In fury, he ordered Franci to the front of the room, and, in front of the class, began to beat the boy with his fists, until his victim crawled under the desk to take cover from the blows. Hearing the commotion and knowing her husband’s violent temper, the teacher’s wife interposed herself between her husband and the boy, saving him from serious injury. When Don Angelo learned that the note was a forgery, he was horrified. For the rest of his life — he died in 1944 at the age of seventy-five — he said he regretted beating the future Padre Pio, who later declared, “All his remorse could not take away the black and blue marks that I carried about for days!”³³

At fourteen, Francesco wrote to his father in Pennsylvania: “Now I am under the guidance of a new teacher [Caccavo]. I see that I am progressing day by day, for which I am happy, as is Mama.” He continued, “We, too, are well, thanks be to the Lord, and I, in a special way, send continual prayers to our gracious Virgin, in order that she may protect you from every evil and restore you to our love, safe and sound.” He promised to study, reported a lack of rain and poor wheat crops, and said his mother and siblings were doing well. Some time earlier he and several school friends had made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii — without asking permission of his mother, who, understandably, was furious and had reported the incident in a letter that she had dictated to his father. Francesco admitted that his father was right to reprove him, but, “You should think about next year when, God willing, all festivities and amusements will be over, for I shall abandon this life to embrace a better one [in the religious life].”³⁴

Francesco was remembered as a handsome teenager, with fair, rosy skin and auburn hair, and a winning smile. Steadfastly he ignored the flirtations of his female classmates, lowering his eyes when they spoke to him. He was also very fond of reading. To a spiritual daughter, he wrote: “I never felt the least attraction for the type of reading that might sully moral innocence and purity, for I held quite naturally in greatest abhorrence even the slightest obscenity. In my readings, which were not improper, but were invariably worldly, I sought merely scientific satisfaction and the pastime of honest mental recreation.” He regretted, however, that such reading never helped him “acquire a single virtue” and, on the contrary, according to him, diminished his love for God.³⁵

A note Franci wrote to his childhood friend Luigi Orlando on March 9, 1902, when he was two months shy of his fifteenth birthday, reveals a sensitive, affectionate boy who wanted to be loved. “Luigino” evidently had been snubbing him.

My good dear Luigino,

If you find any fault in me, I beg you explain it to me.

I know that you were angry with me yesterday evening, and I can’t understand the reason. I don’t think I’ve done anything bad to you; therefore I’m writing this letter, lovingly asking you for the reason for your new attitude towards me.

I’m sure that you’ll give me an explanation for acting this way because I want to be friends with everybody.

Goodbye, today, seeing you in school or church, I hope that you don’t act in the same way towards me. If you’re angry with me concerning what happened yesterday evening, it wasn’t I, but you should know that it was your friend Bonavita who told Sagginario to push you down.

Many regards and a hearty embrace from your most affectionate friend,

Francesco Forgione³⁶

Already Francesco was beginning to adopt some of the self-denying practices for which he was later famous. While one school composition reveals that he liked to sleep late on days when he did not have to go to school, he already practiced mortification in eating. It seems as if, during certain times of the year, Francesco stayed in town while his mother lived at Piana Romana, where she supervised the farmwork. She returned to Pietrelcina, however, once a day, to prepare Francesco’s meals. (It isn’t clear if the other children were there with him or elsewhere.) Sometimes she left him food to cook. When she noticed that he was leaving uneaten much of what she left him, she was deeply hurt. She was especially upset when he failed to touch “a magnificent and perfumed dish of zucchini alla parmigiana.” In fact, she burst into tears. Francesco was deeply contrite. In later years he remarked, “If I had realized that Mother would have been hurt, I would have eaten all the zucchini.” After that he tried to eat whatever his mother left for him, for her sake.³⁷

Pati

As Francesco neared the time of his entrance into the Capuchin order, he nearly got cold feet. The decision to abandon home and family for a life of prayer, obedience, and rigid self-discipline was not an easy one for the sensitive boy. Later in life, Padre Pio said that at that time he had drunk “great draughts of the world’s vanity.” He was unsure how he would face the prospect of having to forgo the innocent pleasures of secular life in the harsh austerity of the friary.

At this point in his life, Francesco found a friend and confidant who was to assume great importance in his life during the next few years. Salvatore Maria Pannullo, a fifty-two-year-old former college and seminary professor, became head pastor of the parish of Pietrelcina in 1901. Lively, cultured, and learned, “Zi’ Tore,” as he was known to his parishioners, had a photographic memory and could recite the Gospels by heart in their entirety. With Orazio in Pennsylvania, Pannullo became like a second father to Francesco, who called him “Pati” or “Little Father.”

By the fall of 1902, Francesco’s plans to become a Capuchin were nearly derailed.

Pannullo received an anonymous letter accusing Francesco of having a sexual relationship with the daughter of the stationmaster. He called his staff together, and they decided to suspend Francesco from his duties as an altar boy. Francesco, for his part, had not the slightest idea what was going on and thought this must be normal practice. Pannullo conducted a thorough investigation and discovered that some schoolmates of Francesco’s had written the letter. The boys admitted they made everything up. Only after he was allowed to resume his duties as altar boy was Francesco told what had transpired. Many years later, Padre Pio’s friend Padre Agostino asked him if he ever thought of taking revenge. “On the contrary,” said Pio, “I prayed for them and I am still praying for them.” Yet, he conceded, “At times I did mention to God, ‘My Lord, if it is necessary to give them a whipping or two to convert them, please do it, as long as their souls are saved in the end.’”³⁸

When he was a middle-aged man, Padre Pio told George Pogany, a Hungarian priest, “When I was a teenager, I didn’t even know how human beings came about. None of the teenagers in Pietrelcina knew anything about sex in those days.”³⁹ Around the same time, Padre Agostino, who often heard Padre Pio’s confessions, wrote, “I can swear that [Padre Pio] has conserved his virginity up to the present and that he has never sinned, even venially, against this angelic virtue.”⁴⁰

“You Must Fight a Formidable Warrior”

On New Year’s Day 1903, Francesco was meditating on his vocation, wondering how he could find the strength to bid farewell to his family and the world to devote himself entirely to God in the cloister. Suddenly, he experienced what is known as an “intellectual vision,” in which the physical senses are not involved. He was made “to gaze with the eye of his intellect on [things] quite different from those seen with bodily eyes.”

Describing the vision, he speaks of himself in the third person:

At his side he beheld a majestic man of rare beauty, resplendent as the sun. This man took him by the hand and said, “Come with me, for you must fight a formidable warrior.” He then led him to a vast field where there was a great multitude. The multitude was divided into two groups. On the one side he saw men of the most beautiful countenance, clad in snow-white garments. On the other … he saw men of hideous aspect, dressed in black raiment like so many dark shadows.

Between these large groups of people was a great space in which that soul was placed by his guide. As he gazed intently and with wonder … in the midst of the space that divided the two groups, a man appeared, advancing, so tall that his very forehead seemed to touch the heavens, while his face seemed to be that of an Ethiopian, so black and horrible it was. [Francesco had no doubt seen unflattering depictions of Ethiopians in connection with Italy’s abortive campaign to set up a colony in East Africa.]

At this point the poor soul was completely disconcerted that he felt that his life was suspended. This strange personage approached nearer and nearer, and the guide who was beside the soul informed him that he would have to fight with that creature. At these words the poor little soul turned pale, trembled all over and was about to fall to the ground in a faint, so great was his terror.

The guide supported him with one arm until he recovered somewhat from his fright. The soul then turned to his guide and begged him to spare him from the fury of that sinister being, because [the guide] said [the creature] was so strong that the strength of all men combined would not be sufficient to bring him down.

“Your every resistance is vain. You must fight with this man. Take heart. Enter the combat with confidence. Go forth with courage. I shall be with you. In reward for your victory over him I will give you a shining crown to adorn your brow.”

The poor little soul took heart. He entered into combat with the formidable and mysterious creature. The assault [of the creature] was ferocious, but with the help of his guide, who never left his side, [the soul] finally overcame his adversary, threw him to the ground, and forced him to flee.

Then his guide, faithful to his promise, took from beneath his robes a crown of rarest beauty, a beauty that words cannot describe, and placed it on his head. But then he withdrew it again, saying, “I will reserve for you a crown even more beautiful if you fight the good fight with the creature you have just fought. He will continually renew the assault to regain his lost honor. Fight valiantly and do not doubt my aid. Keep your eyes wide open, for that mysterious personage will try to take you by surprise. Do not fear his … formidable might, but remember what I have promised you: that I will always succeed in conquering him.”

When that mysterious man had been vanquished, all the multitude of men of horrible countenance took to flight with shrieks, curses, and deafening cries, while from the other multitude of men came the sound of applause and praise for the splendid man, more radiant than the sun, who had assisted the poor soul so splendidly in the fierce battle. And so the vision ended.⁴¹

On January 3, 1903, Francesco had just received the Eucharist and was engaged “in intimate conversation with the Lord,” when his soul was “suddenly flooded with supernatural light,” and he understood in an instant that his entry into religion in the service of the heavenly king was to be a prolonged battle against the mysterious man of hell with whom he had done combat in the previous vision. Then he understood — and this was sufficient to sustain him — that although the demons would be present at his battles to ridicule his failures, the angels would also be there to applaud his victories. He understood his heavenly guide was Jesus Christ, who would sustain him in his battles and “reward him in paradise for the victories he would win, so long as he trusted in Him alone and fought gallantly.”⁴²

Two days later, the evening before he was to depart from Pietrelcina to Morcone, Francesco felt his “very bones crushed” by the impending separation from his mother and siblings, to the point that he nearly collapsed. Then he experienced his third vision in five days. “The Lord came to comfort him,” he wrote, and he “beheld in all their majesty Jesus and His Blessed Mother. They encouraged him and assured him of their love. Jesus, at length, placed a hand on his head. This was sufficient to make him strong in the higher part of his soul, so that he shed not a single tear at his painful parting, although at the moment he was suffering agonies in soul and body.”⁴³

On January 6, 1903, Francesco bade farewell to his mother and siblings. Giuseppa, in tears, blessed him and told him that henceforth he belonged, not to her, but to Saint Francis. Then, accompanied by his teacher Don Angelo Caccavo, along with two friends, Vincenzo Masone and Antonio Bonavito, who also aspired to the priesthood, Francesco boarded the train. An hour later, they arrived at the station at Morcone, a town nestled on the slopes of Mount Mucre in the Matese Mountains, overlooking the Tammaro River Valley. Don Angelo and the three boys alighted and walked the unpaved, rocky path that led to the friary of Saints Philip and James of the Capuchin province of Sant’Angelo. Fra Cami’ answered the door and instantly remembered the boy who had wanted to be a Capuchin so he could have a beard. “Ah, Franci! Bravo! Bravo! You’ve been faithful to your promise and to the calling of St. Francis!”⁴⁴