It is 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning at San Giovanni Rotondo in Puglia, close to the southern Adriatic. On a fresh, sunny morning the atmosphere seems charged with that peculiar sense of expectant energy generated when large numbers of people gather together for a single purpose.
Hundreds of people are queuing in front of a church in what is clearly the focal point of the town. Others are heading towards an impressive-looking, cemented walkway that rises steeply up the hillside.
Welcome to the spiritual home of Padre Pio. The crowds gathered here this Saturday morning are just some of the millions (seven million in 1998, to be precise) who this year will make a pilgrimage to the Capuchin monastery of San Giovanni, where Francesco Forgione, better known as the Capuchin friar Padre Pio, lived, prayed and bore his celebrated stigmata (bleeding wounds on his hands, feet and side, similar to those suffered by Christ on the cross).
When Padre Pio first arrived at San Giovanni in the early years of this century, he came to a small, poor village that clung to the side of an inhospitable, arid hillside, dominated by a small monastery with just two friars. Photographs from the early 1920s depict the original monastery in an idyllic setting, nestling behind a splendid olive tree at what is clearly the end of the road. The 1920s San Giovanni looks tranquil and quiet, the sort of place ideally suited to mystical pursuits and spiritual retreats.
The 1999 San Giovanni, however, is rather different. Look down the main street from the "new" Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, built in the 1950s, and the one-time sleepy hamlet of San Giovanni appears to be a huge, chaotic building-site with its skyline dominated by cranes as the town rushes to build 15 new hotels and other buildings in preparation for the expected influx of pilgrims in the Holy Jubilee Year of 2000, many of them eager to buy the kind of Pio kitsch available in local stores - keyrings, lighters, pencils, plaques . . .
Walk round behind Santa Maria delle Grazie and you are confronted with the biggest building site of all, the $20 million (or more) Renzo Piano-designed new church for Padre Pio - an imposing amphitheatre that takes its spidery, spiral design from the idea of the shell worn by medieval pilgrims and which will one day (it is hoped to consecrate the new church during the millennium year) seat 7,500 faithful and provide standing room for another 30,000, inside and outside.
It is, of course, just a bit too easy for the non-believer to look at today's San Giovanni and conclude that it is more Klondike than holy place. For a start, the cult of Padre Pio has brought more than just busloads of pilgrims (850 buses on a busy day). It has also set up a splendid hospital, which stands across the piazza from the church.
For a second, there is the fact that all around you, people act in ways which suggest that, for them at least, San Giovanni retains a spiritual charge that fortifies their faith. Groups of varying sizes are doing the stations of the cross up the imposing, cemented walkway. Close to the church, three women stand to recite the rosary in front of a statue of Padre Pio. As they pray, another women puts her arms around the statue and shivers with emotion, tears running down her face. Maybe she is recalling a recent, private tragedy, the loss of a husband or parent or child. What is clear is that for her, Padre Pio has special powers.
On Sunday, May 2nd, Pope John Paul will make those special powers official when he beatifies Padre Pio in a Vatican service due to be attended by more than 300,000 pilgrims. The ceremony will mark a significant step along the road to seemingly inevitable sainthood. The poor boy from Pietrelcina, near Benevento in Campagna, has come a long way.
Born to a peasant family in 1887, Padre Pio had just finished conscript service in the first World War when he first reported the stigmata (Greek for marks) in 1918. From that day, through to his death in 1968, he remained a highly controversial figure, considered a saint by many and a charlatan by some.
At the Vatican reaction was decidedly cool, with the Holy See setting in motion the first of 25 church inquiries into his "condition". Detractors claimed it was a conjuring trick and that Padre Pio used phenol or carbolic acid or something else to simulate Christ's wounds. But no one has ever explained why his wounds oozed blood without any apparent laceration, nor why the wounds closed to leave no visible trace or scar within hours of his death.
While sceptics doubted, and the Vatican investigated, the Padre Pio cult grew and grew, with millions of Catholics writing letters to him or going to visit him at San Giovanni, where he lived for nearly all his life. Significantly, among those who went to visit him in 1947 was a young, recently-ordained Polish priest called Karol Wojtyla, one day to become Pope John Paul II. Sixteen years later, the then auxiliary Bishop of Cracow was in Rome for the second Vatican Council when he sent a little card down to Padre Pio, asking him to pray for a Polish psychiatrist friend, Wanda Poltawska, then suffering from apparently terminal cancer of the throat. Some time after Padre Pio's prayers, Poltawska recovered; she is alive and well, if elderly, and living in Warsaw today. Padre Pio had gained an influential ally. Unlike some of his predecessors, Pope John Paul has always been at ease with the mystic and the supernatural.
ANOTHER person entirely at ease with the figure of Padre Pio is Father Joseph Pius, a Brooklyn-born American of Irish origin (Waterford) who is one of three Capuchin friars still alive who lived, worked and prayed with Padre Pio at San Giovanni. He is still based in San Giovanni, and his office is now in what was once the monastery's kitchen garden. As you look out his window while chatting to him, you see signs for Stefanel clothes and for a Bancomat.
Despite the honky-tonk kitsch all around, Father Joseph Pius still feels San Giovanni is a place of immense spiritual peace. Likewise, he has no doubts about Padre Pio's claim to sainthood, recalling him as a man who devoted his life to God, who slept only two hours a day and who ate less than a child.
"I knew he was a saint even before he died . . . As the scriptures say, God chooses the weak to confound the strong . . . He was a very simple and humble man. When I first saw him, being helped up steps arm-in-arm with another friar, I wouldn't have known who he was, except for the gloves . . ."
Indeed, the gloves. Padre Pio wore a pair of mittens to cover his wounds, taking them off only when saying Mass. Father Joseph Pius has no doubts about the authenticity of the stigmata: "These were not marks, these were wounds. I know only too well because often I wiped up the bloodstains that dripped on to the ground. When he said Mass, people would see a light shining through a hole in his hand . . . From the cradle to the grave, he shared our Lord's suffering, not only spiritually but also physically."
The beatification of Padre Pio will not result in a mass exodus to Rome. When the announcement was made in December, travel agents braced themselves for the second coming. Figures of 5,000 and 6,000 were being suggested as minimum numbers travelling to Rome. As it is, despite the popularity of Padre Pio, we will barely muster 1,000.