Padre Pio Paranormal Man

By MICHAEL GROSSO, PH.D

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During the Second World War the Americans had an airbase in Bari, about seventy-five miles from San Giovanni Rotondo, a village in Southern Italy that houses Capuchin friary. According to US intelligence, the Germans had a munitions facility in the hills nearby; an officer was assigned the job of bombing it. As the planes neared San Giovanni, the officer saw in the sky before him the figure of a monk waving him back.

Dumbfounded by this spectacle, the officer ordered the planes to turn back. When the war ended, he went to the friary and met the monk who had appeared in the sky. His name was Padre Pio (1887 – 1968).On a trip to San Giovanni Rotondo in 1979, I was unable to learn the officer’s name or any details confirming this fantastic story. According to Father Joseph Pius Martin, an American friar in San Giovanni, the pilot lives in Florida – the only additional lead I obtained.

Stories like the flyer’s are legion. The work of sorting out fact from fiction is still underway. Many incredible claims about Padre Pio are well-documented; but many are based on hearsay, part of the folklore growing around the monk. One extraordinary thing about Padre Pio was his ability to induce belief in the extraordinary. He had a gift for catapulting people into a fairyland of living mythic powers. In Padre Pio’s world, ideas of fantasy and creatures of mythology come to life: Madonnas, guardian angels, shapeshifting demons, bilocation, magical cures, time-travel, and a good deal more. However you rate the literal truth of particular claims, his story is bound to disturb our routine picture of what is possible. Around the Padre, the incredible became credible, the impossible became actual.

And yet, no matter how extraordinary the feats of Padre Pio, he was a human being. I assume therefore that his “miraculous” powers are latent powers of all human beings. I underscore this with reason. Some people will resist the claims about Pio because they might see them as meant to ratify church dogma. (The truth is that miracles have been used for propaganda.) However, while I grant that you cannot fully understand Padre Pio’s miracles apart from the symbols and archetypes of his Christian world, I also think they transcend that world and point to a universal human potential. Moreover, comparable phenomena from other traditions bear this out, the best contemporary example being the case of Sai Baba.1

These phenomena point to possibilities rejected by the custodians of the intellectual and moral establishment: by scientific materialists, who make up the rank and file of academia, and by liberal and fundamentalist Christians, who wear their own conceptual blinkers. Since, however, a critical review of evidence is impossible here, I will restrict myself to trying to give a rough idea of the man, the range of his unusual powers, and to noting their possible implications for human evolution.

EXTRAORDINARY ACCESS TO THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

From early childhood Francesco Forgione lived in a world of visionary hyper realities. At five he cried so much, especially at night, that his father once lost his temper and hurled him to the ground. Recalling these early years, Padre Pio said: “My mother would turn off the light, and a lot of monsters would come up close to me, and I would cry.”2 Padre Pio said of these early experiences: “It was the devil who was tormenting me.” Terrifying visions continued throughout his life, inseparable from his higher visions. Raptures, ecstasies, often lasting hours, in which his senses were suspended, occurred frequently. We know of these from his letters3 and from observations of his spiritual directors such as Father Agostino4 who eavesdropped on the Padre’s conversations with invisible beings. These included Jesus, Mary, Francis of Assisi, and his guardian angel. One has to read Agostino’s Diary to get a sense of the intense reality of Padre Pio’s visionary encounters.

Padre Pio’s internal environment was also infested with dark hostile forces. The higher visions were preceded by shapeshifting diabolic apparitions: huge black cats, naked women who danced lasciviously before him, an invisible entity that spat in his face and tortured him with deafening noises, an executioner who whipped him. According to one of his confreres: “Padre Pio was very alert to unexpected movements and sounds. He said that the devil appeared to him in all shapes. He had fear even of a mouse, because the devil would start out as a mouse and turn into a claw and go for his eyes.”5

STORY CONTINUED AT: http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/padre-pio-paranormal-man