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KeyserXSoze

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
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944
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=573&e=13&u=/nm/20031204/od_nm/odd_italy_blood_dc]
Pilgrims Flock to See 'Weeping Statue'
Thu Dec 4,10:04 AM ET
ROME (Reuters) - Faithful and curious flocked to a town in southern Italy on Thursday after reports that a bronze statue of a saint was weeping blood.

Local officials in the southern town of Brancaleone said a red liquid was seen coming out of the eyelids of a life-size statue of Padre Pio, a mystic monk who died in 1968 at the age of 81 and was made a saint last year.

The town's deputy mayor, Gentile Scaramozzino, said tests showed there was some kind of blood in the liquid that stained the statue and the pavement in a town square on Wednesday.

Further tests were being carried out to determine if it was human or animal blood.

While local Catholic Church officials urged the faithful to be cautious about what some people were calling a miracle and others a hoax, Scaramozzino said the town was getting ready to provide hospitality services for pilgrims.

A national consumer protection group warned against a possible hoax, saying devotees of Padre Pio had been swindled in the past. "Let's be careful before shouting 'miracle'," the Codacons consumer group said in a statement.

During his life, Padre Pio had the stigmata -- bleeding wounds in the hands and feet similar to those of Christ. Scientists could not explain the wounds.

Edit: Link fixed. P_M
 
Monumental church dedicated to controversial saint Padre Pio

John Hooper in Rome
Friday July 2, 2004
The Guardian




His bearded face can be seen everywhere in Italy - tucked into the frames of mirrors behind bars; taped on to taxi drivers' dashboards; in beggars' bowls.

Since his canonisation in 2002, he has been St Pius. But for his devotees - it is estimated there are 15 million worldwide - he will always be Padre Pio, an ill-educated Capuchin monk with supernatural powers who bore the marks of Christ's crucifixion.

Yesterday, his global cult acquired a shrine of appropriate size and splendour, when a huge basilica designed by the Genoese architect Renzo Piano was consecrated on the mountainous promontory where Padre Pio lived his simple, though intensely controversial, life.

The new church of San Giovanni Rotondo can hold a congregation of 7,000, with space for more than 30,000 outside.

The €35m (£23m) cost of the building, which took 10 years to design and build, has been met entirely by contributions from the faithful.

Mr Piano said he had tried to arrange the vast spaces and surfaces in such a way that the gaze of visitors "can be lost between the sky, the sea and the earth".

That theme was echoed by Pope John Paul in a message read to the congregation yesterday.

He said: "The limits of the cult to this humble son of St Francis have become the ends of the earth."

San Giovanni Rotondo in Puglia has become the world's second-most visited place of pilgrimage after Guadalupe in Mexico.

Last year, the number of visitors soared by more than a third after the Pope announced that pilgrims qualified for a total remission of their sins.

The cult of Padre Pio has generated a £35m tourist business in a once-poor area. It has also given rise to an ugly sprawl of cheap hotels and trinket shops that Mr Piano's elegant, low-lying dome will do much to dignify.

Celebrated for his designs for the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Osaka airport, Mr Piano initially turned down entreaties from the Capuchin monks. Yesterday, he admitted to continued mixed feelings. "It's a mixed-up world that surrounds Padre Pio," he said.

"There is confusion between the sacred - himself and his miracles - and all the commercialisation that surrounds him."

Many liberal Catholics, including the late Pope John XXIII, were sceptical of Padre Pio, and hostile to the traditional faith he represented. He was twice investigated by the Vatican in the 1930s and at one stage was banned from saying mass.

He was said to have received the stigmata - the five wounds of the crucifixion - in 1918, by which time he was in his early thirties. His followers claimed he had about him the "odour of sanctity", a fragrance like roses.

Padre Pio has rarely been out of the news since his death in 1968. Last month, he was claimed to have interceded in the release of three Italians held hostage in Iraq. One of the men was at yesterday's ceremony.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1252249,00.html
 
The strange case of Padre Pio is reopened, along with his tomb
No sign of stigmata as monk's body is exhumed after 40 years
Sunday, 9 March 2008


The tomb was opened just after midnight, in the bitter cold. The Vatican did not want too many people around as it exhumed Padre Pio, a man whose millions of followers say he could foresee the future and be in two places at once. "As soon as we got inside we could clearly make out the beard," said Domenico D'Ambrosio, the archbishop who led the ceremony early on Monday morning. "The top part of the skull is partly skeletal, but the chin is perfect and the rest of the body is well preserved."

The feet were bare, as is the tradition for Capuchin monks. There was, however, a problem – a big one – for the clerics and medical experts peering at the body: no stigmata.

Neither his feet nor his hands showed any sign of the wounds expected of a man who the church says bled as Christ did on the cross – spontaneously and without cause, on and off for more than 50 years. Was this, as sceptics immediately claimed, proof that Padre Pio was a fake?

He died in 1968, aged 81, but the bleeding (and miracles recorded in his name) led to the monk being made a saint six years ago. One author has suggested he was a self-harmer who used carbolic acid to create the wounds, but after years of scorning him the Vatican now insists they were not caused by "external forces".

Born Francesco Forgione in a small town near Naples in 1887, he joined the Capuchin order and took a name that means "pious" in Italian. The wounds started to appear when he was 23, but their nature – and the cult that grew up around him – alarmed the Catholic authorities. Padre Pio was banned from celebrating mass in public; but one of those who made a pilgrimage to Foggia for confession with him was a young Pole who became Pope John Paul II – and who made Padre Pio a saint.

His image can be seen in windows and on vehicles throughout Italy. Seven million people a year visit his tomb at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Rotondo, near the friary where he lived.

The body will be put on display for several months from April – even after Domenico D'Ambrosio was forced to say, after examining the body again in daylight on Monday: "The signs of the stigmata were not visible." And so the strange case of Padre Pio, closed on the authority of the last Pope, has been reopened along with his tomb.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/e...o-is-reopened-along-with-his-tomb-793358.html
 
rynner said:
The feet were bare, as is the tradition for Capuchin monks. There was, however, a problem – a big one – for the clerics and medical experts peering at the body: no stigmata.

That's not a problem; far from it. A major point about stigmata is that it disappears without leaving trace. So the real question is, if Padre Pio's stigmata was self-inflicted, why is there no scar tissue, and why are there no signs of it on his corpse? And if there are no signs of it, how can the position that it was self-harm be maintained? And that being the case - what, then, was it?

Also bear in mind eye-witness testimony which states that the holes in Padre Pio's hands were wide enough to allow people to see through them. Anecdotal evidence, I suppose, and as such, easily dismissed and ignored.

Oooo damned data, one might even say! ;)
 
Ravenstone got there first!

sulk grump stamp....

I was even going to say damned data!

Ha! and grump again! :lol:

Kath
 
You can say it again. I'm sure you'll do it with far more grace and subtle aplomb.

You know me - I don't do subtle ;)
 
Details of first investigation into Padre Pio’s stigmata revealed

St. Padre PioRome, Sep 22, 2008 / 12:39 pm (CNA).- In an article published by the L’Osservatore Romano, Francesco Castelli, a biographer of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, has revealed details of the first investigation in 1921 by the Holy Office—now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—into the life of the Italian priest and the authenticity of his stigmata.

Castelli explained that the recent opening of the archives that contain the information on the first investigations show that it is not true that the Holy Office was suspicious of Padre Pio, but rather that there was admiration and appreciation for him.

In 1921, the Holy Office charged Bishop Carlo Raffaello Rossi, who would later be made cardinal, with visiting Padre Pio to investigate his life and the origin of his stigmata. In his report, Bishop Rossi wrote that Padre Pio “held his head high and was serene, his look lively and sweet, his words gleamed with kindness and sincerity.”

The task that began on June 14 of that year lasted for eight days, during which Bishop Rossi observed Padre Pio in detail. He wrote that he was very gentle with his brothers, beloved by his superiors for being a “great example and not a gossiper.” He spent 10-12 hours a day in the confessional and he celebrated the Mass with “extraordinary devotion.”

Bishop Rossi said the observations were not sufficient and he decided to interview Padre Pio, who responded to 142 questions under oath with his hand on the Gospels. Castelli says his answers almost constituted a complete biography.

Questions such as, “Who gave you the stigmata? For what reason? Were you given a specific mission?” were answered serenely by the Italian saint in the following manner:

“On September 20, 1918 after celebrating Mass, while I was giving thanks in the Choir, I was repeatedly overcome by trembling. Later I became calm again and I saw our Lord as if He were on the cross—but I did not see if He did have a cross—lamenting the lack of response from mankind, especially from those consecrated to Him who are His favorites. He was showing that He was suffering and that He desired to unite souls to His Passion. He invited me to enter into His sufferings and to mediate upon them: and at the same time to concern myself with the health of the brothers. Immediately I felt full of compassion for the sufferings of the Lord and I asked Him what I could do. I heard this voice: ‘I unite you to my Passion’. And immediately, the vision having disappeared, I came to and I saw these signs from which blood was flowing. I did not have them before.”

Castelli said Bishop Rossi went even further. He asked to examine the wounds and as he did so he asked Padre Pio about them. He saw that the wound in his side “changed aspects frequently and at that moment was in the shape of a triangle, never before seen. Regarding the wounds of Padre Pio, he gave me precise and detailed answers explaining in addition that the wounds in his feet and side had a sort of radiant aspect.”

Bishop Rossi concluded that the wounds were not “the work of the devil” nor were they the result of “deceit, fraud or a malicious or evil ability. Much less were they the result of external suggestion, nor do I consider them to be the result of suggestion.” The distinctive elements “of true stigmata were found in those of Padre Pio,” he added. Other details such as his high fevers and perfume-like scents confirmed the veracity of the phenomenon.

Castelli said the first thing that emerges from these investigations is that the “feared Roman dicastery was not, in these circumstances, an enemy of Padre Pio, but rather the complete opposite! Bishop Rossi showed himself to be an absolute inquisitor but he was also a mature man of true valor, devoid of unjustified harshness towards the one he was questioning.”

Thanks to these investigations, the former Holy Office possesses a history of Padre Pio written by his “spiritual father, Benedetto, a document extremely rich in information that up to now had been almost completely ignored.”

Upon writing that after 1939 there is no clear way to tell what happened to the Capuchin friar who died on September 22, 1968, Castelli recalled how Bishop Rossi would remember the saint in his own words: “Padre Pio is a good and exemplary religious, trained in the practice of virtue, given over to piety and perhaps elevated in degrees of prayer that go beyond the external, resplendent in particular with a profound humility and singular simplicity that have never waivered even in the most difficult of times, in which these virtues have been tried in a serious and dangerous way.”

Francesco Castelli is professor of History of the Contemporary Church at the Romano Guardini Institute of Religious Science and Director of the Historical Archives of the Diocese of Taranto.


http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/utile ... /print.php
 
Padre Pio on tour!

The-exhumed-body-of-the-mystic-saint-Padre-Pio-lies-in-a-glass-sepulchre-40-years-after-his-death-in-the-crypt-of-Santa.jpg


The body of one of the most popular Roman Catholic saints, the mystic monk Padre Pio, has begun an overland journey in a crystal coffin to go on display at the Vatican.

The Capuchin monk, who died in 1968, is said by the Catholic Church to have had the "stigmata" - the bleeding wounds of Jesus and his hands and feet.

His body was exhumed in 2008 in San Giovanni Rotondo, the small town in southeastern Italy where he spent most of his life, and was partially reconstructed with a lifelike silicone mask and preserved in a large, temperature-controlled glass reliquary so the faithful could view it.

Pope Francis wanted the body of man who spent most of his life hearing confessions and who was declared a saint in 2002, to be displayed in St Peter's Basilica during the Catholic
Church's current Holy Year on the theme of mercy.


But not all of the locals in this small town whose economy revolves around the pilgrim trade were happy that the saint was going on the road.

"Personally for me it is a sad day," said Auro Mizza, one of the hundreds of people who turned out to see the coffin off, many of them with tears in their eyes.

"A saint doesn't go on pilgrimage, it is the others who go on pilgrimage to the saint."

The shrine draws close to a million people every year.

The body, along with that of another, less famous saint that is being transported to the Vatican from northern Italy, will be displayed in a Rome church before both are moved in procession to St Peter's on Friday.

They will return to their regular locations later this month.

Many people said the brown-robed Padre Pio was able to predict events in their lives and knew what they were about to confess.

There are thousands of "Padre Pio Prayer Groups" around the world.

Padre Pio was dogged during his life and even after his death by allegations that he was a fake, but Church investigators cleared him each time.


http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/body-mystic-monk-padre-pio-7302454
 
His body was exhumed in 2008 in San Giovanni Rotondo, the small town in southeastern Italy where he spent most of his life, and was partially reconstructed with a lifelike silicone mask and preserved in a large, temperature-controlled glass reliquary so the faithful could view it.

Aaah, I thought he was looking well considering.
 
Padre Pio on tour!

The-exhumed-body-of-the-mystic-saint-Padre-Pio-lies-in-a-glass-sepulchre-40-years-after-his-death-in-the-crypt-of-Santa.jpg


The body of one of the most popular Roman Catholic saints, the mystic monk Padre Pio, has begun an overland journey in a crystal coffin to go on display at the Vatican.

The Capuchin monk, who died in 1968, is said by the Catholic Church to have had the "stigmata" - the bleeding wounds of Jesus and his hands and feet.

His body was exhumed in 2008 in San Giovanni Rotondo, the small town in southeastern Italy where he spent most of his life, and was partially reconstructed with a lifelike silicone mask and preserved in a large, temperature-controlled glass reliquary so the faithful could view it.

Pope Francis wanted the body of man who spent most of his life hearing confessions and who was declared a saint in 2002, to be displayed in St Peter's Basilica during the Catholic
Church's current Holy Year on the theme of mercy.


But not all of the locals in this small town whose economy revolves around the pilgrim trade were happy that the saint was going on the road.

"Personally for me it is a sad day," said Auro Mizza, one of the hundreds of people who turned out to see the coffin off, many of them with tears in their eyes.

"A saint doesn't go on pilgrimage, it is the others who go on pilgrimage to the saint."

The shrine draws close to a million people every year.

The body, along with that of another, less famous saint that is being transported to the Vatican from northern Italy, will be displayed in a Rome church before both are moved in procession to St Peter's on Friday.

They will return to their regular locations later this month.

Many people said the brown-robed Padre Pio was able to predict events in their lives and knew what they were about to confess.

There are thousands of "Padre Pio Prayer Groups" around the world.

Padre Pio was dogged during his life and even after his death by allegations that he was a fake, but Church investigators cleared him each time.


http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/body-mystic-monk-padre-pio-7302454

He has lots of groupies!
 
So if it's a silicone mask... that means more of them can be made... Anyone want to wear one with suitable monk robes and subtly photobomb the tour so people will take photos, look at them later, notice "Padre Pio" lurking in the background and send the ghost/bilocation photo to the tabloids?
 
So if it's a silicone mask... that means more of them can be made... Anyone want to wear one with suitable monk robes and subtly photobomb the tour so people will take photos, look at them later, notice "Padre Pio" lurking in the background and send the ghost/bilocation photo to the tabloids?


Could have a Zombie Pio Parade!
 
A 2002 Fortean Times article examined the curious case of Padre Pio. This article was once available among the now-defunct FT online offerings. The MIA article can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine ...

BLOOD BROTHER
Perfect Christian or a psychopath possessed by the devil? Malcolm Day reviews the life of the recently canonised bleeding saint, padre Pio (1887-1968).
From FT 162
SEPTEMBER 2002

Early version (with images):
https://web.archive.org/web/20030206095018/http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/162_padrepio.shtml

Later version (without images):
https://web.archive.org/web/2008062...res/articles/228/blood_brother_padre_pio.html
 
First place I heard about Padre Pio and his stigmata was in Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers on TV. Proper freaked me out, especially the idea that struck me he was the world's champion scab picker.
 
Some rare footage of Padre Pio:

The YouTube description reads:

This was filmed at Our Lady of Grace Capuchin Friary which is located in the Gargano Mountains at San Giovanni Rotondo. At times there is an atmosphere of playfulness redolent of the Fioretti of St Francis. At the end, they are obviously teasing him about the camera and he hits the cameraman with his cincture. We see him in the refectory and in the Church, and there are scenes of his brothers dealing with the massive postbag which he generated. Starting at 4'23" there is some footage of Padre Pio as celebrant at Tridentine Latin Mass.

 
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