Foggia slept in its dust. The morning star glistened over the railway station as I walked up there in search of a coffee at the buffet. In its wide porches and halls men were asleep on the marble floor, among packages wrapped in canvas or paper. Had I known it I had beneath my feet, as I picked my way towards the buffet—which was closed—a vivid image of the social history of modern Italy: that constant migration from south to north which is perpetually diluting the culture of the north without appreciably diminishing the population of the south. I was far too intent on getting my breakfast to take the hint just then. I finally, and tardily, got my coffee at the bus station, much annoyed at not having had the gumption to go there in the first instance. I found there a medley of pilgrims, poor, well off, young, old, country folk with scarves for headgear and big packages, a naval officer, two lovers. There were also half a dozen farm laborers who were my first glimpse of that peculiar southern Italian phenomenon, the landess laborer who lives in a town-slum by night and toils on the landlord’s farm, miles away, by day. Beside me I found an old, berry-brown, big-breasted peasant woman from Bologna. She wore a scarlet bandanna around her gray head. In her lap she carried a big black bundle, presumably her food and bedding. 

We set off, in the vague early-morning light, the olives mere veils of shadows on the level plain, through enormous farms which were clearly owned, or being run by, wealthy entrepreneurs, for not once, for mile after mile along the straight roads, did we pass a house. Being autumn the whole land was bare. Here and there in this vacancy we dropped a farm laborer. Presently we began to climb into the hills and the land became awesome and grim; no olives, only a few almonds; rocks everywhere, white, jagged, treeless. We were entering the barren Gargano, where a single almond tree was an event, and a grubby tavern was civilization. Had I seen the skeleton of a horse by the wayside I should have taken it for granted. Now and again, in the endless grayness, whiteness and dustiness, a hut, and always with each such a stone cistern. Water famine? The little bus grunted up and up, round and round in fearless style. The rising heat began to irk us but the spirits of the pilgrims rose with every contour. We began to talk to one another. 

My old peasant woman told me that this was her third effort to speak to Padre Pio. On her previous two visits the crowds had been so dense that she had been unable to reach the confessional. Apparently, on arrival, each pilgrim enters his name on an already lengthy list, and if his name is not called before his time to depart his visit will have been in vain. I anticipated a Chekhovian monastery, with hundreds of pilgrims trailing in across the steppe, sitting all night beside a foggy river, waiting for the ferryman, their faces flickering in the light of great bonfires. 

The village of San Giovanni is picturesque enough. There is a pleasant, dusty little piazza, with a few trees, washing out to dry, idlers, the usual political slogans on the wails, a cinema with a gaudy poster depicting Mr. Robert Taylor kissing a blonde in semi-undress. The road begins, then, to climb up the last incline to the little monastery, five hundred years old, once a hermitage in a wilderness. Half-way up we pass a colossal, blinding-white, modern hospital, such as would be normally proportionate to New York or Rome, to Paris or London. On this bleak mountain, overlooking that mighty, empty plain, miles from anywhere, it was as incredible as a glasshouse in the Arctic. It has been financed largely by American money, chiefly through the influence of an Italian-American, FioreUo La Guardia, one-time Mayor of New York; UNRRA was the canal for the cash. All along the road a new village has begun to sprout; new villas, new shops, new restaurants, new hotels; mostly hideous. It was like being in at the start of a new mining city or a new Lourdes; for Lourdes must have been like this when the news of the first miracles broke on the world while Bernadette was still alive. 

There at last at the top of the rise was the monastery, the old, weather-worn chapel, and a couple of tree- tops rose beyond the cloister wall. In the open space before the monastery were long-distance buses, a few motor cars, one taxi with a wheel-chair strapped on top and another with a pair of crutches stuck out of the window. Pilgrims hung about as patiently as dray horses. They were waiting for the holy man to come out, hear confessions and say Mass. Inside it was much more like a Chekhov picture. There was a continuous jostle in the dusty corridors. I could not make out what people were doing there. I doubt if they knew. In what looked like a sacristy there was a babbling mob. I came, and went, and came and went, and always it was the same. 

Then, suddenly, the holy man appeared, a bearded Capuchin of about sixty-two, brown robed, brown eyed, stern looking, rotund, thrusting his way through the crowd that surged about him, trying to touch his garment, blessing him with excited cries. They would, perhaps, have crowded in the same way about a famous boxer or film star, except that there was, here, no vulgar curiosity, no human admiration, no material desire. And then a queer incident occurred. A sallow, keen-eyed youth stood imperiously in the Capuchin’s path. The priest glared at him for a second, stretched out his arm, and cried out: “Va! Diavolo!” (“Begone, Satan!”) The youth wavered, paled, slunk back into the mob, and was lost in it. I chanced to meet this young man later in the evening and I asked him to explain what had happened. He said: “I am a clerk in Milan. I am not a believer. That is to say, I am an agnostic. I had a serious operation last year and my mother promised that if I recovered she would take me to Padre Pio. To please her I came here. I had said nothing to Padre Pio. I merely stood and looked at him, out of curiosity. I do not know how he knew that I am an agnostic. I can tell you he frightened me when he said ‘Begone, Satan!’ Do I believe now?” He shrugged. “It may have been a sort of second-sight. There is such a thing. I know what Hamlet said. ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth … . ’ Shall I ever believe? Who knows? I have plenty of time yet.” He was not perturbed as he spoke to me. Indeed, he seemed rather proud of his adventure. He pointed out his mother to me. The old lady sat apart, her beads be- tween her fingers, praying, it may be, for her son. 

What chiefly struck me about the priest was that there was nothing ascetic or neurotic looking about him. He is an ordinary, healthy, grizzled, stoutish, middle-aged, tired-looking man. Not that I formed any clear image of him just then. I sensed him rather than saw him. I was too struck by the blaze of warmth of his personality to see him with my bodily eyes. It was as when one senses rather than sees a lightning flash. His magnetism is undeniable, and it is, I find, unforgettable. No doubt the knowledge that he is a stigmatic is powerfully affecting, for a stigmatic is one who is in constant communication with the world beyond this world. The thin, gold lines wherewith painters depict the rays from the Son of God alighting on the hands of a Saint Francis were in that poor, dim, dusty room in that forlorn monastery of the Gargano, and all those lean brown hands thrust out towards the priest, all those bodies crushing against his were trying to intercept a light pouring from the body of God. 

In a few moments we could survey him more clearly. Freeing himself from those clutching hands, he entered the chapel and his confessional where he sat, as each penitent knelt in full view of everybody. The faithful stood about in a close, watchful, tight-packed circle, not more than ten feet away. (There is no privacy about Italian religion!) It seemed to me that the vibrations of the man’s person still obscured him, dazzled like a retreating storm, so that I was still unable to survey him objectively. He sat there for a long time, so long that I became exhausted merely from watching. What must the ordeal have been for him who must concentrate on every story whispered into his ear under those hundreds of watching eyes! 

It was all, in its own way, as abnormal a scene as one I saw in Naples when the blood of Saint Januarius liquefied; but it was utterly different, for here again was the Christian Church going about its normal business, and the only abnormal element here was that it is very much “about something” when a man’s love of God is so abnormal that his body begins to bleed. For, surely, every stigmatic represents an adventure in human love whose departure is here and whose destination is elsewhere? The rays ascend in love. The passion we witness is the passion of a man for the passion of a God. It is a token of this that stigmatics always bear the marks in the center of their palms, whereas in crucifixions the nails would have been driven not through the palms, which could not support the weight of the body, but through the bones of the wrists. The stigmatic records his own intense imagination of the tragedy. And this imagination is of a terrible intensity. A stigmatic’s wounds pain constantly. Padre Pio has been asked if his wounds hurt him, and he has replied: “You don’t think they were given to me as a decoration?” The reader need not doubt that Padre Pio does bear the five wounds. His hands are normally in mittens, with pads of linen to staunch the constant flow of blood, but during the Mass, at the moment of Consecration, his hands have been photographed. The case has been fully examined medically. 

I was more fortunate than many of those long-journeyed pilgrims. There resides in San Giovanni a Tyrolese Italian, educated at Ampleforth, Count John Telfener, whose regard for Padre Pio has led him and his wife to reside in this mountain hamlet. He was so kind as to lead me into the inner cloisters in order to waylay the exhausted priest on his return to his cell. While we waited we talked to an American Capuchin who acts as a sort of Public Relations Officer, dealing with the scores of letters and appeals that pour in here daily from all over the world. We were, I thought, an odd group: a Tyrolese, an American, an Irishman, clustered in a Capuchin cell on a bare mountain beside the Adriatic. Two men also waited in the corridor, bearing simple, crude-looking gifts from pilgrims: a holy-water font, a crucifix, Presently he came along the corridor. He was now pale and weary, but when I spoke to him he became jovial, almost hearty, laughed with pleasure when he heard that I was Irish and laid his two hands warmly and affectionately on my head in benediction. I was not the first Irishman he had met. During the war many had passed this way on the road to Ireland, or to Eternity. 

It is a pity that out of this man’s life a myth has begun to grow. Here is a truly saintly man. Thousands have spoken to him, found him, as I did, kindly and jovial, amiable and kind, and because his humanity is so evident his saintliness is all the more impressive. For even if we do not say that this man is a saint, nobody would find it difficult to believe that a saint could be such a man. What is always difficult to believe about the legendary saints is that they ever were men! And where is the pleasure of comfort of contemplating the saintliness of unlikely men? What would comfort us, and give us pleasure, would be the saintliness of a businessman, or a tap dancer, or a boxer, just as it comforts and delights us to discover heroism in a fishmonger or a journalist. It is, in fact, most likely that the actual saints were, likewise, ordinary men and women like ourselves, until the myth-makers began to spread their fantasies about them, as they have already begun to do with this modest, amiable, magnetic Italian.