Saturday,
October 27, 2007
Padre Pio a
Fraud, Pope John XXIII Believed
The
ANNOTICO Report
Documents in the
Pope
John XXIII believed Padre Pio, the hugely popular
Capuchin monk who was canonised in 2002, was a fraud
who had "incorrect" relations with women and whose soul was in
danger, according to a
Sergio Luzzatto, whose book on Padre Pio
"The Other Christ" is to be published next week after six years of
research, has also found documents in the Vatican archives suggesting that
Padre Pio may have faked his stigmata, the marks of
the wounds of Christ, with acid.
Mr Luzzatto
said his discoveries did not detract from Padre Pio's
importance in religious history or his power to attract millions of followers.
He said Benedict XV and Pius XI had also been sceptical
about the monk, but Pius XII had encouraged the Padre Pio
cult, as did
Mr Luzzatto
told Corriere della Sera he had found a note written
by John XXIII dated 25 June 1960 recording his receipt of "very serious
information on PP (Padre Pio) at San Giovanni Rotondo" from a
The note says
Monsignor Parente "looked, and was, broken
hearted". The Pope wrote: "I am sorry for PP, who has a soul to be
saved, and I pray for him intensely. What happened - that is, the discovery
because of the films - si vera
sunt quae referentur (if it
is true what they say) - of his intimate and incorrect relations with the women
who constitute his Pretorian guard, which even now
stands firm around him, leads one to think of a vast disaster of souls which
has been diabolically set up to discredit the Holy Church in the world, and
especially in Italy."
John XXIII added:
" In the calmness of my spirit I humbly persist in believing that the Lord
faciat cum tentatione provandum (is doing
this as a test of faith), and that from this immense deception will come a
teaching of clarity and health for a great many."
Monsignor Parente named three of Padre Pio's
"most faithful female followers" as Cleonilde
Morcaldi, Tina Bellone, and
Olga Ieci, as well as a "mysterious
countess", telling the Pope he suspected their devotion to the monk was
"not merely spiritual".
Aldo Cazzullo, a writer on religious affairs, noted that John
XXIII - the former Angelo Roncalli - had "disliked and mistrusted"
Padre Pio since he travelled
in Apulia in the 1920s, regarding the friar's "almost medieval mystical
faith" as at odds with his own modernist outlook. In the 1960 memorandum
the Pope says he feels "privileged to be free of the contamination which
for forty years has clung to hundreds of thousands of souls who have been
stupefied and disturbed to an unbelievable degree."
In another
document which formed part of the Holy Office investigation Maria De Vito, the
cousin of a local pharmacist at
She said she had
spent a month with him at San Giovanni Rotondo.
"Padre Pio called me to him in complete secrecy,
and telling me not to tell his fellow brothers he gave me personally an empty
bottle, and asked if I would act as a chauffeur to transport it back from
Foggia to San Giovanni Rotondo with four grams of
pure carbolic acid. He explained that the acid was for disinfecting syringes
for injections." The
A doctor
appointed by the
Padre Pio, whose real name was Francesco Forgione,
died in 1968, and is universally revered in
Followers of
Padre Pio believe he exuded "the odour of sanctity", had the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once), healed the sick
and could prophesy the future. He is said to have told the young Karol Wojtyla he would one day be elected Pope.
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