![]() ![]() ![]() He was assigned to the remote monastery of this branch of the Franciscans on the bleak Gargano peninsula, at San Giovanni Rotondo. Born as Francesco Forgione to a poor family in the south in 1887, this Capuchin seminarian was often ill, and his theological preparation for the priesthood was left scanty. ![]() The subtitle, “Miracle and Politics in a Secular Age”, may seem at first glance at odds with the intensely Catholic folk traditions and mindsets of this friar’s native and rural Italy. Not a hagiography, this lively and thorough study surveys and scrutinizes this Franciscan priest’s cultural and political impact during the publicly proclaimed duration of his stigmata, from September 1918 until just before his death in the fall of 1968. Sergio Luzzatto writes with verve, insight, and diligence. Instead, this Turin historian places Padre Pio’s career within his nation facing the Great War, fascism, communism, anarchism, WWII, postwar reconstruction, and modernization. Whether or not his “literal stigmata” and his powers to not only heal but to bilocate were genuine or not remain, in this scholarly account, unresolved. ![]() Padre Pio’s fame spread rapidly from Italy worldwide his claims as a miracle worker and “living saint” aroused both support and suspicion in the Vatican. This unsophisticated, testy friar bore the signs of Jesus’ own wounds. ![]()
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