FIFTH COLUMN
Of Marcello Veneziani
Padre Pio's greatest miracle is still underway: it is to ignite faith and devotion in full irreligion and in full atheism. And still today, fifty years after his death. It is a miracle that is unprecedented and that the saint did not perform on anyone in particular, but to the entire people of his devotees, including those who are not believers and practitioners but who believed in Padre Pio's sanctity long before the Church certified it.
Il 23 September of 1968 a life went out and a light came on. That light still shines fifty years later and is linked to the name, all’immagine, to the bleeding hands of that Capuchin saint with his brusque ways, from rustic and dialectal Italian, by the spirit that shone in his seeing eyes.
Two powerful armies had to surrender to him: that of the skeptics, of atheists, of the desecrators and that of the priests, of ecclesiastical hierarchies, of the Church.
Padre Pio became a saint by the grace of God and the will of the nation. Saint by popular acclaim, saint already alive; there is no family, especially in southern Italy, who does not know a miracle of Padre Pio through witnesses or heard from the voice of a miracle worker.
His mystical and medieval figure clashes with our time, it is in glaring contradiction with the era which shuns and ridicules faith, expect miracles only from smartphones and technology, contrasts with the time of Bergoglio and his Church-NGO which pursues today, the media and its consensus.
Padre Pio is the symbol of the south, of the province, of the hidden but tenacious bond with our Christian matrices.
Right, the bulk of the devotion to Padre Pio travels between faith and superstition, sometimes the guys who display statues are impressive, images or holy cards of Padre Pio in their cockpits, in their homes, in their public places. Truckers, Camorra members, criminals flaunt their devotion to the saint. The business and junk that revolves around the Saint also irritates. And yet the devotion to him is transversal, touches different classes, males and females equally. It crosses Latin populations even in distant worlds, and not just children and grandchildren of our emigrants abroad. For many of them, Padre Pio is a reminder of their origins, the memory of mothers and fathers, of the distant country and of childhood, Ariadne's thread with Italy.
What is that spiritual fluid, as well as thaumaturgical, that emanates that figure and that still speaks of the sacred and the holy, of mystery and wonder, of God and the devil, in the midst of a cynical and nihilistic age?
To those who dismiss devotion to Padre Pio as an archaic residue of magical superstition I would like to remind you of three things.
At first, which are certainly not better or more rational and sensible, the superstitions of today, faith in horoscopes, in the zodiac signs, or in wellness programs, in miraculous ointments, in vegan diets, in animal rights cults or in rough translations of oriental spiritualisms; not to mention the new superstitions on a techno-financial basis, all that dark side, esoteric, ritual of our accesses to the cathedrals of finance or the sanctuaries of hi-tech.
The second, that superstition as the word says, and as the philologist and philosopher Vico recalled, not by chance Neapolitan, it is the last surviving trace of lost or forgotten truths, and a residue of that light is better than darkness. Better a superstition than "no faith", said the Catholic thinker.
The third, However, Padre Pio's clairvoyance remains a mystery, proven and witnessed a thousand times, his bloody stigmata, its multiple appearances and the olfactory signs it left, as well as his prodigious interventions which are told of. You can be skeptical as much as you want but there is something inexplicable that is linked to his figure, to his charisma, to the light it emanated.
The figure of Padre Pio rekindles the sense of mystery, calls into question the dominant certainties, opens life to the heavens, to the elementary relationship with life and death and to prayers.
Moving instead from the sacred to the profane, from saints to infantrymen, What is striking in this strange government is the thread that unites the very funny trinity that guides it, i.e. Conte, Di Maio and Salvini. Conte is devoted to Padre Pio not only for bell tower reasons and keeps his holy card in his wallet. Di Maio last year kissed the shrine of San Gennaro in the usual miracle of dissolving the blood and many say with wicked irony that the Saint performed the miracle of making him Minister of Labor without ever having actually worked. And Salvini, you will remember him with the rosary in your hand, and in his frequent calls to the Good God.
Smart, folklore, fetishism and idolatry, say what you want. But that thread seems curious to me, anomalous, surprising, I would like to say anti-modern, which binds the three government figures in a holy alliance, even though they are clueless, tweeting and quite young. An alliance founded on voting and ex-votos…
This convergence on pop devotions is strange, so incorrect, so little Bergoglian, so archaic. But I wouldn't underestimate its significance. Funny mystery.
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Antics, buffoonery capable only of making me sad…
Bad article.
Nevertheless, if you think about it, written by a non-believer has many interesting ideas. Because she says it makes her sad?
To see, many Veneziani articles are more objective. This is similar to the lucubrant mixtures that modernist agnostics use to make. The same swill of emotion mistaken for faith and miracle, if not for the same “Dio” which they do not believe. Lack of coherence of atheism or its natural slide into spiritualist sensationalism?
I cannot praise an inconsistent atheist just because at times he seems to realize that in the “”church”” there is something wrong. What seems to be going well, however, is his feeling (Heart) for Padre Pio. Nobody stops him from expressing it, God forbid, but it would make a better impression with articles of another nature.
I am saddened by the continued abuse of Padre Pio. From the exposure of his body, dipped in gold, to the misappropriation of his experience used to nourish and inflate the “Dio” feeling of atheists, gullible etc.
If you want to call it a miracle, go ahead. Io, simply, I'm sad.
@Pierino, in much of your speech you are right. Let's start by saying that no one here “loading” the article. It's done, also, present as a positive aspect, that the arguments on the crisis in the Church point to Padre Pio as the one who, Perhaps, in the last century he had the greatest intuitions, of the great saint, he is equally positive in this regard.
Then, we want to say that Veneziani is much more pleasant when he writes about politics? We can easily agree.
I believe in Padre Pio, to whom I give all my affection, but I think that his God does not exist or if he does exist it is very similar to what I feel for this friar. And here is the greatest miracle of faith! The atheist believers say that they were the artistic discovery of the "pope emeritus".
But the Catholic God of Padre Pio, the one knowable with sound reason, they will never want to grasp it. Yet only to Him, after meeting him, you owe every affection and all your heart… Yes, it must and is not optional, preferable as you can prefer one song to another.
Perhaps one feels limited in freedom in a duty imposed by objective knowledge? But luckily for some and great misfortune for others, the Catholic God cannot be seen nor heard because one believes him and to believe him one must know him. But who is still interested in the very first foundations of the Catholic faith?
Poor Padre Pio who believe we can make him do what best satisfies our religious sense, but above all poor we who love confusion and opinion more than objective truths.. what miracle can that friar perform in our miserable and vile conditions?
A non-believer, from his point of view, should deal with the demonstration of the non-existence of God and everything “corollary” which follows assuming that it exists. For him, even faith should be a silly invention of the human mind… If the Veneziani mixes, in this article, perhaps it means that he wants to change perspective? If you want to pick up the ladle, to see if you catch something good and substantial, he could be advised on the first rudiments of true Catholicism and the faith that follows from it(?)… He already writes interesting articles on politics.