The Stigmata of Padre Pio

On September 20, 1918, Padre Pio received permanent visible stigmata on his hands, feet, and side while praying in the choir loft after Mass. The wounds bled continuously for fifty years without infection or natural healing, were examined by multiple physicians and Vatican commissions, and disappeared completely at his death on September 23, 1968, leaving no scars. He was the first Catholic priest known to bear the stigmata.

On September 20, 1918, Padre Pio was making his thanksgiving after Mass in the choir loft of the Church of Our Lady of Grace in San Giovanni Rotondo. While praying before a crucifix, he fell into a state of ecstasy. When he returned to himself, he found that his hands, feet, and the left side of his chest bore open, bleeding wounds corresponding to the five wounds of Christ's Passion. He had experienced a transient, invisible stigmata two years earlier; this time the wounds were permanent and visible. He would carry them for fifty years, until the day of his death.

The wounds attracted immediate attention from Church authorities and physicians. Dr. Luigi Romanelli, chief surgeon at the hospital in Barletta, examined Padre Pio five times between May 1919 and July 1920. He described the wounds as "deep, bleeding, without infection or signs of healing" and stated: "I cannot find a clinical formulation that allows me to classify these wounds." Dr. Giorgio Festa, examining independently and later alongside Romanelli, found the wounds neither healed nor showed the ordinary signs of tissue decay; he concluded they were not self-inflicted and were medically inexplicable. Over the following decades, additional physicians were dispatched by the Holy Office and by Rome — among them Dr. Amico Bignami and Dr. Agostino Gemelli. No consistent natural explanation emerged from any examination.

The wounds bled continually and were associated with a pronounced floral fragrance that witnesses described as a scent of flowers or incense, which Padre Pio did not use and made no effort to explain. In 1925, a formal Vatican commission examined the stigmata and concluded that the wounds were not of natural origin.

On September 23, 1968 — three days after the fiftieth anniversary of the stigmata — Padre Pio died. At the time of death, witnesses and physicians noted that the wounds on his hands and feet had closed completely and left no scarring, no thickened skin, no residual marks of any kind. Physicians who examined the body found no trace that the wounds had ever existed.

He was the first Catholic priest in the history of the Church known to bear the stigmata.