Catholics, above all people, have an antidote to sterile materialism of modernity. Sanctity, it turns out, unlocks the doors of perception, and weakens the grip of mono-materialism.
One of my favourite saints has become Padre Pio – partly because so many of the miraculous events surrounding his life took place under the scrutiny of 20th-century scepticism, which makes hagiography a good deal harder.
The first time I came across Padre Pio was when my stepmother’s eccentric slot-machine-addicted Irish Catholic diminutive elderly best friend planned a visit together to go and visit the blood-soaked glove of a friar who had recently died in Pietrelcina.
I had never heard of the phenomenon of the stigmata, and would not have known what to make of it if I had.
Iris, the friend, was a tiny woman. Didn’t make it any easier. It was hard to separate in her the complex mixture of piety, credulity and addiction. To start with the addiction, she could not walk past a slot machine without being overwhelmed by the certainty that on this day, that machine would, if fed cash, give her the long-dreamed-for maxi-bonus payout. I put the friar’s bloody glove into a credulity extension of the same category as the slot machine fantasy. I could not have been more wrong.
But moving out of the suffocating influence of raw empirical materialism is not a straightforward process.
I remember a seismic shift in my world view taking place when I first came across some archive material held by the Sir Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre. They had published the record of an extraordinary experience that happened to Rupert Brooke’s mother.
It took place at 4.45 on the Tuesday afternoon of April 23, 1915. Out of nowhere, whilst his mother was taking tea, Rupert suddenly appeared in the doorway of the room, in his army uniform, looking pale and careworn, standing entirely silently. His mother was deeply shocked and when her son equally suddenly disappeared, she realised this had been some kind of apparition.
And, unsurprisingly perhaps when the telegram arrived some weeks later notifying the family of his death from septicaemia on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli, the time of his death was recorded at 4.45 on the afternoon of the 23rd.
Brooke was neither a Catholic nor a saint, but for this to have happened, a secular view of life and death won’t suffice. And once that is given up, different scenarios begin to open up.
When Shakespeare, the alleged covert Catholic, has Hamlet present the challenge “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he does so in the name particularly of the power of sanctity in Catholic experience.
If you want a surfeit of more “strange things” than any materialist could be remotely comfortable with, the life of Padre Pio, a 20th-century saint, has plenty.
Leave aside for the moment the stigmata and the bilocation. When battle-hardened combatants make claims for the miraculous, they command attention.
During WW2 San Giovanni Rotondo, Padre Pio’s monastery, escaped the allied bombing as the area was fought over. Returning from a failed bombing raid, the combatants reported to their officers that “they saw a friar in the sky who forbade them to drop bombs there”.
Bernardo Rosini, a general of the Italian air force, was both furious and incredulous. He decided to take personal command of the bomber sortie whose mission was to destroy a German ammunition depot close to the monastery.
Rosini’s own account on his return reads: “As soon as they approached the target, he and his pilots saw the figure of a friar in the sky with his hands raised. The bombs dropped themselves, falling in the forests, and the planes turned around without any intervention from the pilots.”
Trying to make sense of what had happened Rosini, having heard rumours that a friar with the stigmata lived in San Giovanni Rotondo, and was thought to be responsible, made one of his first acts on the ending of the war a visit the monastery. He went with a group of some of the incredulous pilots.
The moment he crossed the threshold of the sacristy, he recognised the friar whose apparition had stopped his planes.
Padre Pio also appeared to recognise Rosini. He walked up to him, and taking him by the shoulder he said: “So, are you the one who wanted to eliminate us all?”
The various and multiple accounts of lives saved, lives turned around, souls converted and miracles experienced make Padre Pio a very attractive friend to have in the Communion of Saints. Sanctity and the accompanying supernatural help that flows from it is too compelling and useful to be wasted.
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