Padre Pio Under Glass

In February the bodies of two long-dead Catholic saints, the extraordinarily popular Padre Pio and the lesser-known Padre Leopoldo, were driven across Italy, and then paraded through the streets of Rome in glass coffins for viewing and a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Francis is a big Padre Pio fan, and wanted the veneration of the saint’s remains to be one of the highlights of this Jubilee Year of Mercy, with its emphasis on the forgiveness of sins. The Capuchin friar, famous for bearing the stigmata, was a world-class marathoner when it came to hearing confessions, which he did for hours on end, day after day, year after year. He was supposed to possess an uncanny ability to divine what sins were burdening a penitent’s soul, which doubtless kept the line to the confessional moving. Graham Greene and his mistress, the story goes, once attended Pio’s early-morning Mass, but declined to visit the confessional afterwards. When it came to certain sins, the author of The End of the Affair notoriously did not possess a firm purpose of amendment.