Sister Maria Patricia. | Photo by Nathan Vickers.

Roman Catholics travel to the south of Italy to visit the shrine of a popular saint in San Giovanni Rotondo because they believe this journey will change their lives. It is the second-most visited Catholic shrine in the world and it centers on the tomb of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin friar and priest known for his unwavering devotion to God, care for the sick and supernatural gifts.

During a pilgrimage to the quaint town of over 26,000 residents, it is customary to visit Padre Pio’s tomb — located in the basement of the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Visitors touch the casket of the revered saint, asking for miracles. A touch so powerful, Sister Maria Patricia never left San Giovanni Rotondo after her brush with the saint.

“I’m very happy because Padre Pio is a great saint,” Patricia said with a slight smile. “I came from a poor family, but God brought me here.”

Patricia is from Tamil Nadu, India and became a nun a little over 20 years ago. She had always hoped to move to Italy after she first visited in 1999. She said that God allowed her to serve in Rome and the Philippines before her most recent journey to this city on the hill in 2004.

“I was thinking, how can I go to Italy,” said Patricia. “That location is the gift of God. God chooses, not you.”

Patricia said her faith in the power of Saint Pio stemmed from the Capuchin friar’s piety. She said his closeness with God was a model for all believers.

“Padre Pio was very prayerful,” she said. “If we are not prayerful we don’t have that experience with God. You can’t make that experience for yourself, you have to talk with God.”

Patricia, who comes from the Apostles of Jesus Crucified order, went on to say that she believed in Pio’s power as a second iteration of Christ.

“[Pio] saved many souls,” she said. “Christ is living, but Padre Pio is a symbol like that. Padre Pio is now in Christ.”

Patricia had just left the Saturday morning mass which she routinely attends to ponder the many miracles reported by Pio’s followers. She said she was particularly inspired by the saint’s ability to heal both the physically and spiritually ill, something she hopes to do in her own work as a nun. For that, Padre Pio is her inspiration.

“We must meditate on the saints,” she said as the noon bells rung in the church behind her. “Because we cannot help ourselves, especially for our soul.”

The following story was carried on the cover of the Travel section of Mail Today‘s Sunday paper. Mail Today is Delhi’s third-largest paper and fastest growing daily, which recently launched an edition in London. (Inside section here) 

Padre Pio is virtually a living presence in Angelina Jadanza and Cardone Anjelo’s San Giovanni apartment. | Photo by Neha Tara Mehta.

ANGELINA JADANZA’s third-floor apartment on Via S. Chiara, San Giovanni Rotondo, a charming drive away in her green Fiat from the church of Padre Pio — an anonymous friar who shot to cult status as the “living image of Christ” — resembles a shrine. Porcelain images of Jesus, Virgin Mary and Fatima embellish every nook and cranny of her house, which has a luminous quality to it in the warm spring light.

Padre Pio, who passed away nearly half a century ago, is a virtual living presence in the apartment Jadanza, 64, shares with her husband and twin sister, a nun. He is there is watercolor on the walls, in brass on the bookshelves and in carefully-preserved blood-stained gloves and clipped finger nails in the drawers.

Padre Pio is a cottage industry in San Giovanni Rotondo, selling everything from cigarette lighters to keychains and hotel rooms. | Photo by Neha Tara Mehta.

Padre Pio’s spiritual ascendance began in 1918, when as a Capuchin monk in the sleepy, remote town of San Giovanni Rotondo in Southern Italy, he reluctantly reported five wounds on his body — just when Italy was counting its dead in the World War I, and San Giovanni was fighting a Spanish flu epidemic. In the years to come, Padre Pio would be catapulted into the limelight – both as a miracle healer and as a fraudster with fake stigmata. The Vatican settled the matter by canonizing him in 2002.

The friar’s five wounds changed the fate of San Giovanni Rotondo forever. The obscure town that few had heard of now draws over 4 million pilgrims every year. A gigantic and grandiose church designed by Renzo Piano, on Time magazine’s 2006 list of the most influential people in the world, stands testament to the large crowds – and wealth that Padre Pio has created for San Giovanni Rotondo.

Padre Pio is a cottage industry here. You are as likely to run into the saint’s devotees here as his life-size statues. He is streaming out of a 24-hour cable TV station that is watched by viewers across four continents. He is there in the dozens of souvenir shops that line the sloping streets — on key chains, photo frames, necklaces, paintings – always with that piercing gaze. He even lights your cigarettes here, quite literally, with Padre Pio lighters being quite the rage.

The saint that Jadanza, 66, lovingly nurtures in her home, is also reportedly present in less likely quarters – the home of scandal magnet Silvio Berlusconi. But for Jadanza, Padre Pio goes beyond the euros he gets into San Giovanni Rotondo and his celebrity stature. She met him just six months before he passed away in 1968 as a 20-year-old weary from a long journey from her home town, Pietrelcina, 92 km away, also the birth place of Padre Pio.

In San Giovanni Rotondo, you are as likely to run into life-size statues of Padre Pio as his pilgrims. | Photo by Neha Tara Mehta.

“As soon as I met him, he said, ‘It was such a long journey,’” remembers Jadanza. “He knew without us telling him what we had been through,” she adds, bringing out the family’s most carefully preserved possession: the saint’s trademark half-gloves stained with blood and pieces of scabs in a tightly sealed bag.

Jadanza never returned home – something which the saint had predicted, she says. With no medical training, she was taken on as a nurse in Casa Sollievo della Soffrenza, a hospital established by the saint. In founding the hospital, Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto writes, Padre Pio had headed “not from science towards miracles but from miracles toward science”. The hospital was to shape Jadanza’s professional and personal life – she met her husband Cardone Anjelo, who worked in the research department of the hospital, while at work.

The interiors of the church dedicated to Padre Pio by Renzo Piano. The walls of the church are lined with pictures of Padre Pio, Jesus and Saint Francis -- all of whom received the stigmata. | Photo by Neha Tara Mehta.

“I am so happy that I found a religious husband,” she says, looking at Anjelo, who sits perfectly framed against a Padre Pio portrait.

Jadanza’s last meeting with the saint was just four just days before he died. “He told me I had to continue to carry the cross and see Jesus in every patient.”

She adhered – delivering 30 children in the maternity ward, but never having one of her own. “These are my 30 children,” says Jadanza, now retired, pointing towards a large picture frame which stands out on walls covered with Padre Pio paraphernalia.

She brings out a platter overflowing with freshly baked cookies and tiny cups of afternoon espresso to go with the stories about her life lived in faith. Both she and Anjelo insist that we take the cookies with a light sugary glaze on top.

As we comment on how delicious the cookies were, Anjelo smiles, saying, “She had left them in the oven a little longer than she normally does.”

Rose, who is on a two-day pilgrimmage to San Giovanni Rotondo, clutches a framed picture of her daughter Michelle. | Photo by Teresa Mahoney.

Rose leaned over the bannister in front of the blinding yellow Padre Pio shrine into a pile of letters and coins. She was reaching for the framed photo of her daughter, Michelle, which she had placed there while she ate lunch at a nearby pizzeria.

Originally from Cameroon, Rose, who didn’t give her last name, was visiting Padre Pio’s shrine to gather blessings for her daughter’s success at business school in London. Rose kissed her hand and touched the base of the shrine, whispered a prayer under her breath and genuflected. Her short stature made it difficult to retrieve the portrait from the scattered pit; she asked for my assistance and carried the photo away with her.

She will stay in San Giovanni Rotondo for two days and return home to France, her residence for over 20 years.

Valentina Franzese came to the Padre Pio shrine on a "journey of faith, to figure out answers to her existential dilemma." | Photo by Aby Sam Thomas.

20-year-old Valentina Franzese looked out of place in the throng of visitors to the Padre Pio shrine at the Santa Maria delle Grazie Church on a sunny Saturday morning in San Giovanni Rotondo. With a snazzy sense of style, which today showcased a chic scarf and large dangling earrings, Franzese, with her hair pulled back in a pony-tail, could have easily passed or a fashion model.

In fact, Franzese herself says that most of her friends would have thought she was wasting her time at San Giovanni Rotondo and that she should have gone shopping instead. However, Franzese swum against the tide of her peers and chose to take on the role of pilgrim instead. She has been travelling with her family to various destinations in Europe, all of religious significance.

“It’s a journey through faith for me,” she said, having made stops in Rome earlier before coming to pay her respects to Saint Pio. Pointing at the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the hospital which Padre Pio set up, she said that seeing people from different backgrounds coming together to help the needy gave her a lot of satisfaction and hope for the future.

However, Franzese said she was surprised at the display of wealth in the relatively new Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church, built next to the original shrine of Padre Pio. Designed by the Genoan architect Renzo Piano, the church also houses a magnificent crypt covered with gold mosaics, holding the body of Saint Pio in a decorated Pharaonic sarcophagus.

Milena Ercolino stands beside the door of the Padre Pio shrine, ready to greet the pilgrims and help them out with their questions. | Photo by Aby Sam Thomas.

According to Franzese, the excessive display of wealth seemed vain and materialistic, which was in stark contrast to the humility that was paramount to the saint’s life. But for others like San Giovanni native, Milena Ercolino, the beauty resplendent in the new church was something that made her proud.

The bespectacled, short-haired Ercolino, who has been working as a guide at the Padre Pio shrine for more than 12 years, said that while the original church was something that Padre Pio built for the little town, the new church was the town’s gift to the memory of the venerated saint. “It’s the only thing that is beautiful here,” she said of the new church.

Her job greeting and helping visitors to the church had enabled Ercolino to see both the positive and negative aspects of pilgrims. She mostly got irritated at people who are loud and noisy in the church, showing a lack of respect to the sanctity of the church. Ercolino also added that it was important for the faithful to remember that they needed to pray to God, and not to Padre Pio.

Ercolino however was quick to add that there had been a lot of good that she had both seen and heard of at the church as well. Ercolino retold the story of when the previous pope, John Paul II, wrote to Saint Pio on the condition of Paul’s dear friend, Wanda Poltawska, a psychiatrist who had been diagnosed with throat cancer.

The story then says that once the saint received the letter, Poltawska’s cancer had been miraculously healed, with doctors unable to explain the phenomenon. With stories like these to tell the hordes that come to pay homage to the saint, Ercolino hopes to stay on in her current job with the church, having recently signed a full-time contract. Her reasons for staying on though are hardly religious or spiritual though.

“It’s hard to find other jobs here,” she said. “I hope to work here until they fire me.”

San Rafaelle Articoli Religiosi souvenir shop was one of the first to open 45 years ago in front of the old church in San Gioavanni Rotondo. It moved down to its current storefront down the street and competes with nearly two dozen other vendors. | Photo by Teresa Mahoney.

The legacy of a saint has inspired the founding of a hospital with over a thousand beds, the construction of a mega church with over 6,500 seats and a flurry of new residential developments that have together expanded San Giovanni Rotondo. But Padre Pio of Pietrelcina also created a new faith-fueled economy in this small town in southern Italy, which though home to only 26,000 inhabitants, has become the pilgrimage site for over four million believers each year.

Rodolfo San Raffaele has seen this evolution since his family opened a small souvenir shop in 1967. Originally from Africa, his father moved to Rome after the Second World War, where he crossed paths with the budding saint. His father was originally skeptical of Pio as he was unfamiliar with Catholic customs. But on a business trip to San Giovanni Rotondo several years later, Pio greeted him with a kiss on the hand. Somehow, Pio remembered who he was from their original encounter.

They remained friends until the day Rodolfo’s father died.

“Padre Pio put his hand on my head and said to me, ‘Worry not for your father, because your father is in heaven with God,’” San Raffaele said of his most powerful moment with the venerable priest. After his father’s death, he looked to Pio for guidance. “This makes me grande happy. Grande happy.”

Rodolfo San Rafaelle (right) and his wife (left) at their small souvenir shop in San Giovanni Rotondo. | Photo by Teresa Mahoney.

In the 45 years since, Rodolfo has continued to run the Chiosco San Raffaele Articoli Religiosi shop alongside his wife, selling Italian-crafted rosaries, Padre Pio sculptures, photo frames, pendants, necklaces, bracelets, talismans, icons and other trinkets. The store used to be right across the town’s main square from its original church, but in 1968, the year San Raffaele’s mother and Padre Pio died, the store relocated down the street, where it has since been in competition with an increasing number of vendors.

“There were only three or four shops back then,” he says. “Now it is difficult.”

Over two-dozen shops within a one-block radius alone have capitalized on Pio’s stature since his death and canonization in 2004, selling many similar souvenirs that have challenged San Raffaele to stay competitive.

San Raffaele, brushing back his silvered hair, says, “I’m not young anymore,” explaining the physical exhaustion of running the shop. “Maybe next year we’ll close.”

Check out this video of Rodolfo San Raffaele, speaking about his first-hand encounters with Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, after his parents died. (Produced by Teresa Mahoney.)

Some of the pilgrims who travel to San Giovanni Rotondo every year come to ask Padre Pio for a cure or to thank him for being healed. Many of the miracles attributed to San Pio da Pietrelcina are related to impossible healings and mysterious cures, and the hospital built by the Capuchin friar in San Giovanni Rotondo, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, is filled with believers who trust Padre Pio’s health-giving powers.

Agnes Reyes, 54, immigrated six years ago to Italy from the Philippines. Brought up in a very religious family, Reyes survived cancer and came to San Giovanni Rotondo for the first time this spring. She decided to embark on the pilgrimage as a means to thank the saint for her recovery and to pray for ill members of her family.

Maria Persichetti, on the other hand, is a 75-year-old from Veroli, four hours away from San Giovanni Rotondo. She comes every year with her family to Saint Pio’s shrine. She says her son-in-law was saved from a coma by Padre Pio, who appeared to him in dreams while he was in the hospital. “A miracle has happened,” she insists with a smile. “We have a lot of faith in Padre Pio.”