Today, September 23, is the memorial of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio).
Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgione to a southern Italian farm family in 1887. He was the son of peasant farmers Grazio Mario Forgione and Maria Giuseppa Di Nunzio Grazio, who was an avid devotee of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. He was already sickly as a child, suffering from various illnesses.
He received the name Pio, at age 15, when he entered the novitiate of the Capuchin friars in Morcone, Italy and joined the order at age 19. He was ordained at age 22 on August 10, 1910.
While praying before a cross, he received the stigmata on September 20, 1918, the first priest ever to be so blessed. Word about this matter spread like wildfire. Padre Pio himself became the center of pilgrimage for people from all walks of life.
Around this time, his extraordinary spiritual gifts became known: gifts of healing, bilocation, levitation, prophecy, miracles, extraordinary abstinence from both sleep and nourishment (a reliable eyewitness said Padre Pio subsisted only on communion wafers for at least 20 days), the ability to read hearts, the gift of tongues, the gift of conversions, and pleasant-smelling wounds.
Padre Pio would hear confessions for hours in the stuffy confessional. He would, in fact, know if a penitent is not giving full disclosure of his/her sins as Padre Pio had the gift of reading consciences.
He founded the House for the Relief of Suffering (Casa sollievo della sofferenza) in 1956, a hospital that serves 60,000 a year. He initiated and encouraged people to start prayer groups, some of which continue to exist to this very day.
Died in 1968. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified him in 1999 and then canonized him in 2002.