Lessons From Padre Pio

Padre Pio seemed to know aspects of the lives of his penitents which they tried to hide from him or even from themselves. 

Albert Cardone first learned of Padre Pio in 1944, when he was eighteen, through the testimony of a neighbor, whose name he could not disclose because she may still have been alive at the time when he related the incident in March 1990:

 "She went to confession. Padre Pio, before giving her absolution, said, 'Try to remember the other sin.' The woman said, 'Padre, I think I gave you all the sins I know and I think this is it.' Padre Pio said, 'Then, for your penance, go to the cross to say fifteen Ave Marias and fifteen Our Fathers.' 

Now the cross was at the top of the mountain. The penance was not the Aves or the Our Fathers, it was the journey to get there, as it was a very bad road... So she did that and said the prayers and went back to Padre Pio for a second confession and Padre Pio asked, 'Do you remember all your sins?' She said, 'Padre Pio, I've confessed everything.' 

Padre Pio said. 'No, you still don't remember all. You've got to go to the cross at the top of the mountain again.'


She went for the second time and when she still did not remember he sent her for the third time to the cross on the mountaintop. When she returned for the third time for confession, Padre Pio asked, 'So, do you remember everything now?' She replied, 'No, Padre, I don't have anything more to confess.' Then Padre Pio said in a loud voice, '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?' She started to think and then began to cry, 'Father,' she said, 'I never knew abortion was a sin.' 

'What do you mean,' he said, 'you didn't know that this was a sin...Abortion is Murder!'  

Then she said, Nobody knows about this, only me and my mother. How could you say the baby would have been a priest or a cardinal?'  Padre Pio responded by saying, 'It's a sin, a despicably evil sin.' 

Padre Pio On Abortion of Children
with Possible Disabilities

The following was told by Mary Pyle to author Dorothy Gaudiose: 

One morning, Mary met a distinguished-looking woman who asked Mary to pray for her. The woman was accompanied by two of her daughters, one fourteen years old and the other four. The older daughter was deaf and dumb, but the younger one was normal. The woman had left her other two children at home-a girl and a boy, both deaf and dumb. 


Between spells of sobbing, the woman told Mary why she was there. On her third pregnancy, when she already had two deaf and dumb daughters and was feeling the same symptoms she had experienced during her first two pregnancies, she feared that the third would also be born deaf and dumb. Both she and her husband felt that they would not be able to stand the suffering of seeing most of their children deaf and dumb. 


The struggle was great, but finally, with her husband’s consent, the woman made the decision to have an abortion. From that moment on, she had no peace. The woman went to confession. The priest who heard her confession, after sharply rebuking her, extracted a promise from her that she would do no such thing again, and absolved her. Still, she did not feel calm. 

As her uneasy continued, she decided to go to Padre Pio.  With trepidation she approached Padre Pio’s confessional. He had no sooner opened the shutter than he shouted at her: "Assassin! You have murdered your child!" And he closed the shutter of his confessional and left. 


Pierced by suffering, the woman returned home and told her husband everything that had occurred. They were both distraught and spent several days wondering what they had done and about what they had been told. 


The woman became pregnant again. This time a boy was born; and he too was deaf and dumb. The woman returned to San Giovanni Rotondo. In the confessional, Padre Pio said to her only these words:

 "Do God’s will." 

The woman had still another child. This one was a beautiful little girl. Padre Pio, after blessing the oldest of the woman’s daughters, placed his hand on the newborn girl’s head and, looking into the mother’s eyes, said: 

"You see what comes of doing God’s will? This little girl will always be good, beautiful, clever. She will always remain beside her mother."