WHEN PADRE PIO REVEALED A PRINCE OF THE CHURCH HAD BEEN ABORTED

 

I remember being a little shocked when Donal Enright disclosed to me that in the 1960s he had helped several women who were suffering during the aftermath of their illegal abortions.  Donal was a disciple of Padre Pio - Pio had given him a great role to be at the side of post-abortive women and guide them to realize the gravity of their sin. At the time abortion was not legal in Italy. Donal met these women when they were milling around San Giovanni Rotondo and hoping to confess to Padre Pio. But Donal was not the only spiritual child who knew post-abortive women who confessed to Padre Pio.

One woman had an illegal abortion and was distraught when Pio informed her that her baby boy could have been a great prince of the Church. The lady in question was a neighbor of Alberto Cardone who was a spiritual child of Pio's. Alberto had impeccable integrity. She told Alberto of her confessions with Pio which led to Pio revealing that her son could have been a cardinal. 

This was in the mid 1940s. The lady knelt in Pio's confessional and when she had given him an account of her sins which she thought was complete, Pio invited her, "Try to remember the other sin." She responded, "Padre, I think I gave you all the sins I know and I think this is it." Padre Pio was not satisfied, and he gave her a harsh penitential exercise; "Go to the cross and say 15 Ave Marias and 15 Our Fathers". The cross was at the top of the mountain, it was reached by going up a very bad road and was considered by all to be a dangerous expedition. But the lady did as Pio asked, and when she went back to him, hoping to get absolution, he said to her, "Do you remember all your sins?" Again she was adamant that she had previously confessed all of them, "Padre Pio, I've confessed everything." Pio was patient and blamed it on her memory, "No, you still don't remember all." Then he assigned the same penance as last time, "You've got to go to the cross at the top of the mountain again." 

When she returned from her perilous climb up the mountain, she still claimed not to remember the other sin, and Pio asked her to go to the cross for a third time. When she returned to his confessional, she was resolute that she did not remember anything else, but Pio questioned her, "What do you mean, you don't remember anything? Don't you know he could have been a good priest, a bishop, even a cardinal?" The woman was thrown into deep thought and as she remembered her abortion, tears welled up in her eyes and she defended herself, "Padre, I never knew abortion was a sin." Pio was not moved to soften his stance, "What do you mean, you didn't know this was a sin? That's killing."

The lady thought the cloak of secrecy had granted her immunity, "Nobody knows about this, only me and my mother, how could you say it could have been a priest or a cardinal?"

But Pio knew. The mere fact that Pio said the boy could have been "a good priest" is exceptionally telling because Pio rarely if ever said that a priest was good, he was harder on priests than he was on anyone else, he even denigrated himself so harshly it was hard for Pio's enemies to insult him worse than he insulted himself. This genuine account is not just the story of the mother's tragedy, but ours as well, because it follows that if he had been a good priest according to Pio, he'd have been a good prince of the Church, and they are in short supply. 

Pio ended the conversation with the woman of the dead son by saying solemnly, "It's [abortion] is a sin, a very great sin."

May I wish you and yours a very happy feast of St Padre Pio. 

UPDATE:  I have done further analysis and I believe that the baby boy would have been born circa 1946 and would be 76 years old now; he would be considered an older Boomer. The average age of a cardinal is 72, and the current Pope was 76 when he was elected Pope. 

His mother, the penitent, the post-abortive mother presented as someone who went to confession at least twice a year at Christmas and Easter. This is not as regularly as Pio advised, but had she been away from the sacraments for years, he would have sent her away without speaking to her and would have made her wait before any dialogue took place, or he would have stated her sin without trying to induce her to tell him. The mere fact that he first gave her penance tells us that it was a recent abortion, because otherwise Pio's concern would have been to make her feel how long she had been away from confession before her actual sins were voiced. 

The woman's surprise at hearing the wrongness of abortion indicates that she was among the first generation of Italians that needed to be instructed as to its evil. 

This confession took place just after World War II had ended and when the War was raging, destitute Italian women took to prostitution and the abortion rate rose. Before the War, abortion was exceedingly rare and thus there was little spoken catechism devoted to it; the woman had never heard it said that abortion was sinful, because before the War, abortion was genuinely something that was not at all common. The post-abortion woman was not a prostitute but when she confessed she was very young and she did not remember a time when abortion was so uncommon as to be unknown among ordinary Italians and she came of age when it was regrettably more accepted and thus she was aghast when Pio emphasized its evil. 

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This post was informed by my interviews with Donal Enright and most particularly C. Bernard Ruffin's Padre Pio: The True Story  which is available at the Spirit Daily bookstore.