Word: pio
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...young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla made the pilgrimage to a small town in Puglia to have his confession heard by Padre Pio, the mysterious Italian monk with the Christ-like stigmata wounds on his hands. It was that encounter - along with Wojtyla's belief that a prayer by the Capuchin monk had cured a friend's cancer in 1962 - that helps explain why Padre Pio was fast-tracked for sainthood once Wojtyla had risen to the papacy as John Paul II. But some may now wonder if the current Pope, the cerebral and professorial Benedict XVI, has the same...
...issue emerges as as tearful pilgrims and television crews flocked this week to the friar-saint's final resting place, San Giovanni Rotondo, a kind of Las Vegas-meets-Bethlehem hilltop pilgrimage destination. They were there to see the exhumed corpse of Padre Pio, which had been put on display in a glass casket, with a special silicon mask - beard, bushy eyebrows and all - created by London-based wax museum artisans. Everyone knows what John Paul II felt about Padre Pio. But how can Benedict, the intellectually rigorous theologian, dubbed "the Pope of Reason," sanction such widespread belief in faith...
Some may even note a snub of sorts. John Paul visited San Giovanni Rotondo in 1987 to mark 100 years since Padre Pio's birth. But Benedict is making his second papal visit to the Puglia region in June, and has left the town off his itinerary both times...
Those who know the current Pope and have worked with the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cannot recall in his extensive writings anything specific about Padre Pio. The only apparent reference to the miracle worker in the three-year papacy of Benedict XVI is a rather straightforward 2006 discourse Benedict gave in Rome to mark the 50th anniversary of a hospital founded by the monk. "Emulate him," the Pope told worshipers in St. Peter's Square, "in order to help all to live a profound spiritual experience, centered on contemplation of the Crucified Christ...
...makeshift area for producing cheese offered the sour smell of turned sheep's milk and a scene strewn with strainers, aluminum buckets filled with blocks of Pecorino cheese and a large bag of salt. Hanging on the wall were pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic saint Padre Pio, and four 2006 freebie calendars, none of which had yet been turned to April. The squalid conditions were "evidence of [Provenzano's] dedication to pure power," Interior Under Secretary Alfredo Mantovano told TIME. "He had acquired this perverse charisma, a figure who appears to take nothing for himself...