During the weekend of Sunday, September
17th, relics of Padre Pio were displayed at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York
City. Cardinal Dolan was present. The journey for the relics was
sponsored by The Saint Pio Foundation and will proceed to other cities such as
Bridgeport, Connecticut, Milwaukee and Los Angeles. The relics
included a cloak and one of Padre Pio's fingerless gloves, such as he always
wore for over fifty years to cover the wounds of his hands. The great
cathedral was filled with thick lines of people streaming in from around the
city block, patiently waiting to see and venerate the relics of one of the most
popular saints in Christendom. The New York Times, The Daily News, CBS
and others covered the exhibition; New York Times details are here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/nyregion/padre-pio-st-patricks-cathedral.html?emc=edit_ur_20170917&nl=new-york-today&nlid=56839620&te=1.
Poor Padre Pio's great popularity is always referred to as that of a rock
star. I suppose he would faintly laugh it away, or maybe not; I don't
think he would appreciate the eardrum- shattering music. He liked the
great Italian opera star Beniamino Gigli singing Mamma, and
that gives you an idea of where his musical heart was, as well as with the
classical compositions . Gigli, as famous a tenor as there
was in those days, visited him often and would sing Mamma to
him, which always brought emotion to Pio. At any rate, when Padre Pio
comes to New York town on his mission, he brings out the faithful hidden force
that passionately supports and upholds his "real mission." He needs them, for they represent the prayers he needs for that mission. He must have shocked a lot of people who never heard of him, including Catholics, when they saw the outpouring. And those who
showed up were only the tip of the iceberg in this eastern corner. This hidden
force, some of them visibly chemotherapy patients with bald heads, waited to touch
the encased relics. Here is the reason why, quoting from a New York Times
article:
Jo’el Adifon, 25, a student at Columbia University’s Teachers College,
said he was born at Casa Sollievo
della Sofferenza, a hospital founded by the saint about two and a half
hours east of Naples. The glove and the cloak were, to him, a channel to God.
“When you live a certain way and you embody a certain amount of God,
everything you touch, you leave that essence behind,” Mr. Adifon said. “The
relic is almost like a portal, like a door.”
I
found this profound, yet simple enough for anyone to understand. We're not just
a bunch of superstitious, naive people touching a piece of cloth. The relics of
St. Pio of Pietrelcina have the essence of God within them, as Pio had God
within him. Pio had 50 years of continuously bleeding crucifixion wounds that
could not be explained by a parade of examining doctors, who even sealed the
bandages with wax so that Padre Pio could not affect them, were it all a hoax.
They could NOT stop the bleeding, and the wounds did not heal or become
infected, ever. Padre Pio had a chest wound, in his case an
inverted cross (such as made by a spear, from which water and blood spilled out
of Jesus). Anything Padre Pio wore near his wounds, including shirts and
the fingerless gloves, was drenched with blood. We touch these
relics, or in faith put our hands on the encasement protecting them, and now
the essence has permeated us . . .
I was not at St.
Patrick's, but I have been to San Giovanni Rotondo many times, once with my
family while Padre Pio was alive, and we had the astounding moment of kissing
his gloved hand http://www.first.padrepiosworld.net/page7.php. It is a tradition in Italy to kiss a priest's hand in greeting him, and so, many who
lived in San Giovanni Rotondo kissed Padre Pio's gloved hand hundreds of times, I
only once; but that "once" crystallized the moment as the greatest of
my life. I can still smell the aromatic scent of what seemed clean incense, and feel the softness of his
fingertips, which were not covered by the fingerless glove.
I also have numerous relics of Padre Pio. It is my belief
that the essence has carried me through the last years of my
life, especially the intensity of the very last year plus, in which I lost my
only sibling, my beloved sister Joan, aka my Mother Hen, who always looked after me, and my health cascaded into one illness after
another -- all of which kept me in a
nursing home and rehab for 8 months, while bearing the loss of Joan.
But I had, and have now, the essence of that one-time wound-kiss, and of the relics that have come to me ever since. . .
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