Miracle Maker

By 9 a.m., the sounds of booming business have spread across this southern hillside town. (Grazie, Padre Pio!) Jackhammers pound at pavement for a new sewer line extension, a yellow crane creaks above a massive church-in-progress, jam-packed tour buses huff up San Giovanni Rotondo's final slopes. But the real source of this runaway growth produces much softer sounds. Listen inside the shadows of the town's main sanctuary: a deep sigh from a bespectacled middle-aged man, muttered prayers from a pre-teen girl in a multicolored windbreaker, people choking back tears, others openly sobbing. It is this quiet rumbling of faith that has sprouted fruit in an otherwise unremarkable patch of the Italian region of Puglia. (Grazie, Padre Pio!)

Gianna Candida, 52, who makes an annual 450-km journey from her home near Rome, is still wiping away tears as she steps outside the Santa Maria delle Grazie basilica into the bright morning sunlight. "You can't explain it. The man is just indelible." The man of whom she speaks rests in the basement floor of the church, his remains in a black marble tomb covered by tossed flowers and euro banknotes. Born Francesco Forgione in the nearby village of Pietrelcina in 1887, he joined a Capuchin monastery here in 1918. With a brown robe and white beard, the monk had a disarmingly sweet half-smile that would become known across the Roman Catholic world — as would his name: Padre Pio. According to one of the many websites devoted to him, Pio possessed the powers of bilocation, prophecy, reading souls and healing the sick. He also bore the stigmata, bleeding from his hands, feet and chest just as Christ did during the crucifixion.

Among his early followers, who are today estimated in the tens of millions, was a young Polish priest, Karol Wojtyla, who traveled to make his confession to Pio in 1947. That priest, now known as Pope John Paul II, rose to become the authority for making Padre Pio a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, capping the fastest rise — 19 years — to canonization in Church history. As the process requires, the Vatican ruled the monk had lived a virtuous life and was responsible for miracles after his death. Hundreds of thousands of faithful gathered in Rome for Sunday's ceremony, called to mark the 462nd saint named by this Pope, far more than any of his predecessors.

The road to sainthood was not smooth for Padre Pio. The monk's claims of having the five stigmata led to a two-year sanction on his ministry in the 1930s. But Pio persisted, as doctors certified that the wounds had no natural explanation. In 1956, he helped open a hospital in town that would grow to become the best in the region, available to the entire local population. He died in 1968, almost 50 years after first receiving the stigmata.

Well before his death, waves of Pio followers travelled to the town to pay him homage and ask his blessings. The numbers have only increased since his passing. Bruno Zani, a retired auto-parts distributor from Brescia, said that doctors considered him "clinically dead" 25 years ago after three failed attempts to repair infected intestines. His wife begged Zani — half-conscious on an intensive-care bed — to pray to Padre Pio. "It was a flashing moment of lucidity," said Zani, 75. Overnight, the intestines miraculously healed. "They told me I was like Lazarus." Coming all the way from Thorold, Canada, Rita Pirillo said Padre Pio helped her through two bouts of colon cancer. "We prayed and prayed. And I said that if I ever came out of it, I'd come here to visit — so here we are."

Tucked beneath a pine forest 40 km from the Adriatic coast, all of San Giovanni Rotondo (pop. 26,000) is a shrine to Pio. A 15-by-12-m silkscreen hanging from the basilica dominates the town, but his image can also be found on statues of all sizes, refrigerator magnets, key chains and cigarette lighters — Elvis Presley's Graceland meets Bethlehem.

Gino Cipriano, who worked for years as a waiter, now owns the brand-new Villa San Pietro hotel, one of 71 hostelries opened since 1999, tripling the accommodation for the 7 million pilgrims who flock here every year. These and other followers are funding the town's 5,100-sq-m church, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, which is nearly completed.

The pilgrims go straight to the source — touching, stroking, hugging Pio's statues, the glass cases containing his robe and sandals, and anything else they think might pass along his powers. One elderly man spent five minutes feverishly rubbing various just-purchased Pio trinkets on the hand wounds of one of the monk's many statues. It's what the Church calls "popular piety," rising from local beliefs — and sometimes bordering on superstition — rather than being handed down through liturgical dictates from Rome.

Sister JoJean Cavalli of Portland, Oregon recalls how she was chided by fellow nuns back home when she told them she would come here during her month-long visit to Italy. Cavalli, 59, said she was trying to sort out just how much of the monk's legend she believes. "Personally, I don't pray to him. Though when I got here and was looking for a hotel, I said, 'O.K., Pio, do your thing.'" Just a few minutes later, she found the perfect room. And the price was right, too. Thank you, Padre Pio.