There is a somewhat strange passage of scripture which by its very oddness marks it out as the ipsissima verba of Our Blessed Lord. It is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up and attributed to Him, simply because it is so strange. I mean Matthew 11:7-11:
As they were going off, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John, “What did you go out to the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? Then what did you go out to see? Someone dressed in fine clothing? Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces. Then why did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written: ‘Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way before you.’ Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
There are quite a few challenges in interpreting this passage, which I certainly do not intend to tackle. What brought this passage to mind, rather, was the thought of Padre Pio, whose feast we celebrated this week.
As is well known, Padre Pio was more or less exiled to San Giovanni Rotondo as a young friar, because the province of Foggia was considered the back of beyond. There is nowadays a fast train, but back in 1916 when Padre Pio was first sent there, it really was a remote spot, and little visited. Yet thousands upon thousands of people went out to this deserted place to see Padre Pio.
But what did they go out to see? What was the attraction? Some clearly sought out personal interviews with the holy friar, but, and this is the interesting point, a bit like John the Baptist, these people were not warmly welcomed. Indeed, Padre Pio was somewhat offhand with his fan base, and I remember hearing an Italian journalist who knew him well saying that he was “brusco, fino al punto di essere sgarbato” (brusque, even to the point of being rude).
So what did the crowds go out to see? They certainly did not go out to see a celebrity, someone who worked the crowds, someone who was eager to be liked. The vast majority, when they got there, saw what they could see in any Catholic Church – a priest saying Mass.
One of the priests who taught me at school was a seminarian in Rome in the early sixties and he had made the long journey to San Giovanni Rotondo, and I asked him about the miracle-working friar. What had the Mass been like? “It was just like any very holy priest saying Mass,” he replied. As for going to confession to Padre Pio, that had been just like going to confession to any other priest.
So what did the crowds go out to see? They went to see the Mass, and experience the sacrament of Confession, something they could have done much nearer to home. But perhaps Padre Pio enabled people to see the sacred mysteries more clearly than elsewhere. Perhaps he fulfilled his priestly duties in a way that made the miracle of the Mass and the miracle of the words of absolution seem transparent. Perhaps Padre Pio was like a pane of glass: people saw through him, and saw Christ through him.
There is something I very much like about the thought of Padre Pio giving his more enthusiastic devotees the brush off. It is an important corrective to a pattern of contemporary thought that tends to conflate the cult of the saints with the cult of celebrity and the cult of personality. Padre Pio, it seems to me, wanted to have no truck with the cult of personality. It wasn’t about him, it was about God. Nowadays the cult of personality seems to have entered the Church. This is dangerous. The more devotion we have to St Pius of Pietrelcina, therefore, the better, as this will remind us that there is only one personality who matters: the Son of God.
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