WHEN PADRE PIO WAS NEARLY ASSASSINATED

 

The heinous murder of Charlie Kirk has left me deeply shaken. I have been turning over in my mind a chilling incident when Padre Pio was nearly assassinated at the altar and how his death was prevented because people in the congregation wrestled the gun-wielding man to the ground. I ask myself if I had been there at the moment Charlie Kirk was assassinated would I have had the courage, even the physical strength to manhandle the assassin to the concrete underfoot? 

Pio's near assassination came as the crescendo to a series of sensational events. 

It was 1922, just 3 years after Pio had become a national celebrity in his native Italy, and he was the subject of great controversy.  He was only 35. 

The Vatican were ordering that Pio be removed from San Giovanni Rotondo, the town in the mountains where he had received the visible stigmata and which was quickly becoming one of the hottest pilgrimage destinations in the world. Pilgrims were flooding in, it was raining letters and people were donating money while neglecting to give money to the priests in the hinterland. Pio was gaining ardent friends and in proportion, energetic enemies. 

Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val issued a directive that Pio be taken away from San Giovanni, and the Cardinal could not have foreseen the bedlam which was unleashed. The people of San Giovanni violently rejected this; under no circumstances would they allow for their Saint to be pinched from them by order of Vatican prelates! They kept an armed guard around the monastery day and night and a mob nearly burned down the house of one of the priests who was an influential detractor of Pio's. 

At the height of the standoff between the Vatican and the local people, one balmy Thursday, August 10, Pio was at the altar offering Vespers, about to turn and bless the crowds when he saw Donato pointing a gun at him. Donato was a man who lived nearby, he worked as a bricklayer and in that frenzied moment, he cried out, "Either dead or alive, you're going to stay with us." Before Donato could shoot, the other people seized the gun, wrestled him to the ground and the police came to arrest him. 

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I researched this account (and myriad others) when I wrote, Padre Pio and You which is available at the Spirit Daily Store.