Padre Pio: The first priest to receive the wounds of Christ on the cross

I’m still merrily digging up You Tube videos on Padre Pio. Some of the videos seek to discredit belief in Padre Pio. Such videos wreak of vinegary sourness. Photos of Padre Pio are presented with very bitter voice-overs with a syllogism such as there’s no one like Padre Pio in the Bible, so Padre Pio cannot be genuine. No One like Padre Pio in the New Testament? Truly – were not the wounds that supernaturally manifested themselves on Padre Pio first born by Christ? And was not Christ, True Man and True God? That is not to say that Padre Pio was the Second Coming. Rather, Padre Pio was worthy of the gift of Christ’s wounds.
This short documentary has a very wobbly picture, and is perhaps best watched on the small screen. The narrator, however does a splendid job of ably connecting the earliest life of this great saint to the stigmata he endured first at the age of 24 and then more publically and profoundly at the tender age of 31 in 1918. The documentary does not describe that for the next fifty years from 1918 to St. Pio’s death in 1968, the wounds would confound objective science. Key characteristics of Padre Pio’s stigmata were that the wounds ran with blood, often accompanied with the sweetest fragrance, this scent in itself came to be regarded as a miracle.