The Miracle Man

During his life, Padre Pio, the Italian monk, was accused by the Catholic Church of heresy and having sex with female followers. He was even banned from saying Mass. Yet this Sunday he will be beatified. So how come he qualifies for sainthood? Could it be the multi-million pound industry that has grown up around him, selling everything from miracle cures to snowstorms?

IT'S 10AM on Sunday and San Giovanni Rotondo is buzzing. The queue for the Padre Pio experience stretches 50 yards from the church door to the back of the main piazza. Many have travelled by coach all night. They clutch packed lunches and pictures of the man they venerate, with his high forehead, bushy grey beard, and intense black eyes, his face framed by the cowl of his brown robe. Each year, around seven million people visit his sanctuary at San Giovanni Rotondo. Some turn to him for minor requests such as selling the house or finding their son a job. Others seek cures for disabilities and terminal illnesses. All are convinced that Padre Pio can put things right.

Last Thursday, the parents of a 22-year-old Sicilian student gave their authorisation for the donation of their son's organs. He was in a coma after a car accident, and doctors said his condition was becoming irreversible. But when the hospital chaplain dangled a lock of Padre Pio's hair in front of the lad's face, relatives say he began to cry. Embarrassed doctors reported signs of improvement. Padre Pio fans hailed it as further proof of the miraculous powers of the Franciscan Capuchin monk and staged a candle-lit thanksgiving vigil.

The "miracle" couldn't be more timely. This Sunday, Pope John Paul II will beatify Padre Pio, putting him one step short of full sainthood. Italian television features daily specials on the Capuchin monk and Rome is preparing for an influx of more than a million people for the event.

The drive for the canonisation of Padre Pio began shortly after his death in 1968, but at the time seemed a lost cause. His blend of medieval mysticism and his immense popular following did not endear him to the curia. Two Popes actively disliked him. His old-fashioned grass roots appeal was at odds with the times; the secular world was rocked by the 1968 student uprisings, and the Roman Catholic Church was dealing with the unsettling modernisation of the Second Vatican Council.

"I'll make more noise after I'm dead than when I'm alive," Padre Pio once prophesied. Next weekend's ceremony is expected to attract the biggest crowd ever seen for a beatification ceremony. 150,000 places in St Peter's Square sold out within 48 hours, so they opened up the square of San Giovanni in Laterano, which can hold a further 200,000. But more than a million people are expected to descend on Rome. Civil protection authorities are on red alert.

When he died at the age of 81, Padre Pio was famous for what appeared to be stigmata wounds on his hands, feet and side, like those suffered by Christ. Today, he is as much a cultural icon as Elvis or Che Guevara. Just walk into a deli, take a taxi, or get a haircut in Italy, and chances are you'll find him glaring down at you. At newsagents you can buy Padre Pio magazines, videos, comic strips and CD-roms. The weekly magazine Gente, similar to Hello!, features him in every issue. Television specials about the Padre always guarantee top ratings.

The friar's followers include mafia godmother Pupetta Maresca, footballer Beppe Signori, variety-show presenter Alberto Castagna, and Interior Minister Rosa Russo Jervolino.

Critics of Padre Pio are much harder to find now than when he was living. He is just the ticket for a culturally Catholic country that's sold out to consumerism: part mystic, part folk-hero, part Good Samaritan. Anyone expressing perplexity about his supernatural powers, the tacky souvenirs (holograms, snowstorms and phosphorescent statuettes), the astute use of the media by the Capuchin friars, or the huge business that's grown up around the monk, are seen as spoilsports. Even Roman Catholic clergy or theologians uncomfortable with the phenomenon say that the important thing is that people should be drawn to the faith.

Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgione, to a peasant family near Naples in 1887, and showed signs of deep religious devotion from an early age. Ordained a priest in 1910, he was sent to San Giovanni Rotondo, then just an impoverished village. He used to "fight with the devil" in his cell at night, and woke his fellow friars with his screams. One day as he sat praying before a crucifix in the choir loft, he had a vision and received the Christ-like stigmata. His wounds, which oozed blood for half a century, baffled the medical experts who examined them. They found no evidence that he had been cut and, more puzzling still, when he died the wounds disappeared, leaving no scars. It was suggested that by focusing intensely on Christ's passion, the monk caused the wounds himself. "Tell them to stare at a cow for a while and see whether they grow horns," was Padre Pio's retort.

Word of the stigmata spread fast, as did reports of the monk's exceptional charisma, his capacity for bilocation - being in two places at one time - and for emitting a scent of violet and roses perceptible from a long distance. People came to confess to him, plead for his intercession, and ask for his blessing. One of those was a young Polish priest, Karol Wotyla, who asked the Capuchin friar to pray for a friend who was battling with cancer.

Many people reported miraculous recoveries. But while his popularity grew, the church hierarchy was wary; it feared fanaticism as much as a personality cult. The Vatican subjected him to a number of investigations. One of the doctors sent by the Vatican to San Giovanni Rotondo did not even meet Padre Pio or examine his hands, but diagnosed him as hysterical. He was banned from saying Mass in public for 11 years, his correspondence was opened, and he was ordered to cover up his bleeding hands. His superiors were forced to spy on him after anonymous letters alleged he had been sneaking women into his rooms at night. Microphones were hidden in his confessional where he used to hear people's sins for 14 hours at a stretch, and the tapes were then handed on to the Vatican authorities.

That same confessional is today part of the Padre Pio tour at San Giovanni Rotondo. Inside the friary, where Padre Pio spent most of his life, he is everywhere. In mosaics, lace hangings, watercolours, photographs, oils and patchworks adorning every spare inch of wallspace.

The tour proper begins in the crypt. Despite a wrought iron barrier and signs urging the faithful not to throw things, the tomb is surrounded by bank notes. A guard asks the crowd to keep moving as the devout shuffle past Padre Pio's cell, untouched since his death in 1968. A pair of huge brown sandals to accommodate his swollen feet are displayed in a glass case. Sepia photos of his parents hang above his desk. The bed, armchair, and bedside cabinet are all covered by plexiglass. A nearby display case contains the cup from which he supped his last coffee, a bottle of his cough medicine, and a rusty metal device that monks traditionally beat themselves with. The next stop is the choir loft, where he received his stigmata. Visitors cross themselves earnestly before heading on to the tiny chapel where he was obliged to say Mass alone, every day, for two years.

The visitors are mainly Italians, but there's a large, boisterous family from Philadelphia, an Indian man whose wife finally gave birth to a son after entreaties to Padre Pio, and a Chilean grandmother who says praying to the monk saved her husband from lung cancer.

Sociologists and anthropologists struggle to explain the extent of Padre Pio's fascination. Father Joseph Pius Martin, an Irish American who nursed Padre Pio in his final years, says there are two simple factors. "People today are searching for something religious and in today's secular culture that's not easy to find. Tapping in to Padre Pio, people find the connection to the supernatural that's lacking. The other reason is that they get what they ask, and that's the bottom line."

No task is too big or too small for the famous friar. On the Letters page in the The Voice of Padre Pio magazine, a child asks him to stop his mother and grandmother bickering, a man asks for help in giving up smoking, and a woman thanks him for his intercession in curing her son's stutter. There are more than 2000 Padre Pio prayer groups worldwide, and an initial search on the Internet produces 4,000 documents on the friar.

This Sunday's beatification is an unspoken act of contrition for the Catholic Church's persecution during his life. But how did the man who was once viewed as, at best, idiosyncratic, and at worst, a charlatan, become a saint?

Those dedicated to Padre Pio's cause lobbied in every way possible, and many of those who secretly admired him came out of cover as the climate began to swing in his favour. Vatican watchers say Pope Paul VI was more kindly disposed than his predecessors. There was a generational change in the hierarchy, when many of Padre Pio's most bitter enemies passed away. The election of Pope John Paul II was also a key factor. The Polish Pope had met Padre Pio, and respected him. He was also conscious of the immense pull the Capuchin friar exerted and, in an era when church attendance and vocations were plummeting, realised the Vatican couldn't afford to isolate or ignore it. The first clear sign that things were changing was when he came to pray at Padre Pio's tomb in 1987. But to elevate Padre Pio beyond mortality required more than a discreet change of tack by the Vatican; it needed a miracle.

The current Pope, who has created more than a thousand saints, has streamlined the procedure considerably. Only one miracle, instead of four, is now required for beatification. Padre Pio's healing of a 42-year-old woman from Salerno was put forward as an exemplum in the long and rigorous procedure. The woman, who is still alive today, was due for emergency surgery in 1995 after a build-up of lymphatic fluid in her chest. After she prayed to Padre Pio, several litres of fluid disappeared and the operation was not needed. Doctors were unable to explain the occurrence.

Sceptics say Padre Pio's only real miracle is the million-dollar industry that has sprung up around him and San Giovanni Rotondo, which attracted an estimated seven million visitors each year. (The figure is reached by complex calculations involving the number of tour group leaders who sign in, the quantity of communion wafers consumed, and the vehicles registered by the traffic police.) Annual revenues from property bequeathed to Padre Pio, indulgences, merchandising, and the sale of products from two farms, are estimated to generate more than pounds 20m. The new church being built, designed by Renzo Piano, is expected to cost around pounds 12m and will be wholly financed by donations.

In an otherwise depressed area, the 26,000 inhabitants have one of the highest pro capita incomes in the region. The magnificent hospital called The House of Relief of Suffering, set up by Padre Pio in 1957, employs 3,000 people, and there are jobs to be filled in the old folks home as well as bars, hotels and restaurants. The landscape is dotted with cranes for the construction of a new church with a 60,000 capacity. Current accommodation, which ranges from the three-star Hotel California to a more modest pension run by the Sisters of St Joseph, is insufficient, and another 80 hotels are planned. "We'll need them," said one hotelier, "for when he becomes a saint and we overtake Lourdes as Europe's principal shrine."