St. Padré Pio Suffered much, including extreme high fevers

THE SECRET VATICAN FILES: ASTONISHING NEW REVELATIONS OF PADRE PIO INCLUDE HIS RUNNING TEMPERATURES OF UP TO 118 DEGREES

They call them the "Secret Vatican Files": In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI opened access to the records up until the year 1939 of what had been known as the Holy Office.

That edict made possible an examination of the Vatican's most fascinating "inside" information on a myriad of topics, including the deepest, most in-depth information on a Capuchin priest named Padre Pio from the east of the country known as the Gargano.

As it turns out, there are some real blockbusters in those once-secret records.

Although no one expected much to emerge that wasn't known about this stigmatic who has been the subject of countless books, documentaries, articles, and commentaries, fresh and surprising information has in fact emerged -- along with a new phenomenon not previously or at least widely associated with him.

"After studies, debates, and interviews, we thought we knew everything about him," writes Father Francesco Castelli in the astonishing new book,  Padre Pio Under Investigation: The Secret Vatican Files. "Buried among archived papers was a document of extraordinary importance, which now comes back from the past: the Acts of the first inquiry on Padre Pio ordered by the Holy Office. The document dates back to 1921, and contains the Capuchin's secret revelations -- six valuable depositions [interviews with Padre Pio], given under oath before an Inquisitor of the Holy Office. In them Padre Pio, reveals facts and phenomena never related to anyone, told his autobiography in  person, and handed it over to the Church and to history."

Among the revelations: in addition to the mystical wonders of stigmata, visions, the odor of sanctity, bilocation, reading of souls, healing, prophecy, and so forth, Pio also exhibited the phenomenon of "hyperthermia" -- ran temperatures so high that they burst a thermometer and they had to resort to use of a horse thermometer. That was discovered during an Apostolic Visitation by a Bishop Inquisitor named Monsignor Raffaello Carlo Rossi, who approached the matter with scientific indifference, expressing no initial belief in nor affinity for the monk he was called to investigate.

When he interviewed the superior of the convent, Father Lorenzo of San Marco, Bishop Rossi learned that Father Lorenzo had personally witnessed Padre Pio with fevers of 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit, then 113 degrees, and finally a mind-boddling and sizzling 118.4 degrees -- way beyond what causes fatality in normal humans.

Indeed, normal body temperature is 98 to 100 degrees. A temperature of 107 degrees for several hours is known to kill even healthy teenagers.

Yet Father Lorenzo -- also initially a skeptic of Pio's mystical manifestations -- recorded them personally.

The hyperthermia, notes Father Castelli, was described as "another of the facts which, if validated, 'would be most astonishing, like something miraculous,' since it is well known that the human body doesn't seem capable of reaching such high temperature. But in Padre Pio's case, it has happened more than once, and for a few years now, and Father Lorenzo, the superior, who was extremely dubious about it -- as he was about the rest -- had to convinced himself of the reality of it when the proof occurred in front of his very eyes and in his very hands. St. Pio himself described the experience as a "moral, rather than a physical, illness" and said it was like he was "in a furnace, still always conscious" -- and in fact able to go about the normal course of business.

"In fact," says Castelli, "a brother attests that even under the strain of this fever, Padre Pio is not knocked down, but gets up, moves about, and can do everything."

The investigator was also greatly puzzled by how little Padre Pio ate -- often just a cup of hot chocolate for dinner or a glass of beer and virtually nothing the rest of the day, despite an overwhelmingly vigorous schedule. Many days, he did not even take the dinner nourishment. 

So closely was Padre Pio scrutinized that Monsignor Rossi even timed how long Pio spent elevating the chalice (two minutes -- which the monsignor thought warranted criticism!).

Forcing Pio to uncover his hands and show the stigmatic "signs," the skeptical Rossi observed that blood stuck on the gloves and as a result it was obviously difficult for the monk to take them off -- although he did so obediently. The inquisitor stuck his own finger into one of Pio's hand wounds and later noted with evident astonishment: "The stigmata are there: We are before a real fact -- it is impossible to deny." Castelli notes that Pio's stigmata seemed different than that of Saint Francis, whose wounds had the look of fleshy excrescences [outgrowths] where Pio's showed no apparent opening or breaking up of the tissue. The Bishop Inquisitor had no choice but to draw a conclusion "fully in favor of their authenticity, and, in fact, of their Divine origin."

Have atheists ever really searched these things out?

If they did -- if they did not simply and conveniently refuse to even investigate phenomena like that of St. Pio's -- atheists they would be no longer.

OFFICIAL INVESTIGATING PADRE PIO WAS MOST IMPRESSED WITH ONE PARTICULAR PHENOMENON

According to a new, blockbuster look at recently released "secret Vatican files," the official Bishop Inquisitor in the first of three papal investigations of the great mystic and saint, Padre Pio, of Italy, seemed most impressed not with healings, bilocation, and the "reading of souls" for which the great Capuchin monk was best known; what seemed of the greatest conviction to Bishop Raffaello Carlo Rossi -- who in 1921 was asked to examine the 34-year-old monk in wake of a stir over stigmata -- was the fragrance that surrounded Pio -- popularly called the "odor of sanctity."

The reason the initially-skeptical inquisitor found it so impressive -- according to the files -- was that he himself experienced it and to such an extent and in such a way that it could not be an imagined or fabricated phenomenon.

"This very intense and pleasant fragrance, similar to the scent of the violet -- as it was well-described by the Bishop of Melfi -- is attested by everyone, and may the Most Eminent Fathers let me attest it, too," wrote Bishop Rossi. "I have smelled it, just as I have seen the 'stigmata.' And I can again assure the Most Eminent Fathers that I went to San Giovanni Rotundo with the resolute intention of conducting an absolutely objective inquiry, but also with a real personal unfavorable prejudice regarding what was said about Padre Pio. Today I am not a ... convert, an admirer of the Padre: certainly not; I feel complete indifference and I would say almost coldness, so much did I want to maintain a serene objectivity in writing my report. But, to clear my conscience, I have to say that, faced with some of the facts, I could not retain my personal unfavorable prejudice, even though I did not manifest anything on the outside. And one of these facts is the fragrance, which, I'll repeat, I have sensed, just like everyone else. The only one who does not notice it is Padre Pio.

"If he really, for whatever reason, used this fragrance on himself, the scent should be sensed more or less at all times," wrote the inquisitor. "But that is not the case: They say it is sensed at times, in waves, inside the cell and outside, when he walks by, in his spot in the choir, even from a distance."

Indeed, Bishop Rossi -- who interviewed St. Pio a number of times under oath -- examined the monk's cell and could find nothing that would cause such a scent. There was only plain soap -- and, noted the inquisitor, the scent remained with hair of Padre Pio's that had been cut two years before, as it also attached itself to the stigmatic blood and bandages.

The examination was one of several as Pio led a life plagued at least three times by serious persecution -- the first initiated by a pre-eminent psychologist, Father Agostino Gemelli, who claimed to know Padre Pio (but, as it was learned, had only met Pio once, and for a few minutes), and the second by Archbishop Pasquale Gagliardi of Manfredonia (the diocese to which San Giovanni belonged; Archbishop Gagliardi was virtually forced to resign in 1929 and had waged a heated campaign to discredit the monk, who nonetheless rebuked anyone who criticized the bishop).

The documents likewise reveal new details about the stigmata -- that unlike St. Francis, Pio's were not as if one side of the hand had been pierced with a protrusion as outgrowths of flesh on the other; rather, the hand-palm wounds seemed flat on the surface and his foot stigmata sometimes faded to the appearance of buttons of more delicate, whiter skin that would later "flourish" with blood.  There was no shoulder wound (as widely rumored) but there was a side wound that was triangular and the color of "red wine."

They caused Pio enormous pain. And the mystic revealed to Bishop Rossi that the wounds began with a vision of Jesus -- Who told Pio they would serve to unite Pio to His Passion. Previously, it was only known that a "mysterious" person or angel had appeared to him during prayer in the choir loft at the onset of visible stigmata. The wounds never suppurated -- discharged pus -- nor did they scar ("cicatrization"), although the hand wounds did scab.

And so the revelations tumble forth from this book that is at least as powerful and fascinating as any written on the saint -- making what seemed like an old story totally fresh, a book that inspires and is hard to put down (compiled by Father Francesco Castelli, with a preface by the well-known Italian writer Vittorio Messori).

Padre Pio -- who was canonized in 2006 -- was himself baffled by all that swirled around him. The monk remarked at one point, "I am a mystery to myself."