Padre Pio relics touch those who touch them

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press  

STURBRIDGE/FISKDALE - Dana Babcock didn’t have time to go venerate Padre Pio’s relics.  
But, “I’m here,” she noted, after the Mass Bishop McManus celebrated Tuesday at St. Anne and St. Patrick Parish/St. Anne Shrine.  

The Mass was part of a stop on a national tour of relics of St. Pio of Pietrelcina. Displaying the relics and speaking about the saint Monday evening was Joseph Santoro, external program coordinator for the National Centre for Padre Pio in Barto, Pennsylvania. His talk followed a Mass celebrated by the Assumptionist Father Luc Martel, temporary administrator of St. Anne and St. Patrick, and fellow Assumptionists.  

On Tuesday Bishop McManus, joined by other priests, celebrated Mass, after the relics were available for veneration throughout the day in the parish center’s St. Joachim Chapel.
The chapel opened at 9 a.m. for veneration, but people started coming at 8:45 a.m., said Thomas Haney, parish sacristan.  

“It was constant all day,” Peter Mimeault, who volunteers here, said of the stream of visitors. Both men estimated that about 400 people came, and Mr. Mimeault said it was moving to watch how they honored the relics.

“I watched person after person come and touch the relics,” said Michael Matondi, another parishioner who helped guard the relics. He said it reminded him of the woman who was healed when she touched Jesus’ garment.

“I feel healing in myself,” Mr. Matondi added. “I have a sense of well being.”  

“It leaves me speechless – God’s gifts come through his saints,” commented Beckie Galonek, of St. John Paul II Parish in Southbridge, who also worships at St. Anne and St. Patrick.

“My devotion to the saints grew as I grew older,” said Mrs. Babcock, of St. Paul Oratory in Warren. “The devotion to the saints wasn’t a big part of our family devotions in the 1970s. It came back as we children grew older ... [and] when I had my children.” She said her mother got a Padre Pio relic in Rome and the family attached it to her father’s wrist when he was dying.

Mrs. Babcock said she’s had a devotion to the saint, but it wasn’t convenient to visit his relics in Sturbridge on Tuesday.

“I’m a public school teacher,” she explained. “I think I have 25 finals to grade tonight.” But, she said, “I felt it very important to come – for three reasons.”

She’d heard a friend’s cancer returned.  

“I should go for my friend,” she reasoned.

Another friend “gave me this big bag” of religious items to touch to the relics. Working three jobs, that friend couldn’t come.

But, Mrs. Babcock said, the main reason she herself came was to pray for her children. She recalled a story Mr. Santoro told Monday.  

He had started his talk explaining different kinds of relics.

First-class relics are part of a saint’s body. One he displayed was skin from Padre Pio’s stigmata (wounds like Jesus bore during his passion). Second-class relics are things used by saints. Mr. Santoro said visitors could make third-class relics by touching their own objects to the relics displayed.  

He told about the life of Padre Pio: born in 1887, displaying extreme piety by age 5, joining the Capuchin Franciscans as a youth, levitating, bilocating, accepting the pain of the stigmata and the devil’s attacks, hearing confessions for hours and bringing people back to church.
Mr. Santoro said the National Centre for Padre Pio houses the largest collection of the saint’s relics outside of Padre Pio’s friary in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy.  

Mr. Santoro told the following story of the center’s founders, Vera Calandra and her husband, Harry, who lived in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and have since died.

Mrs. Calandra asked the intercession of various saints when their daughter Vera Marie suffered health problems, but the child did not recover. Opening a book about Padre Pio, the mother smelled roses and received an interior message from Padre Pio to bring him her daughter without delay.

Dr. C. Everett Koop, later U.S. Surgeon General, disapproved. He told her the child was dying.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Calandra took Vera Marie and two of her other children to San Giovanni Rotondo. They were told to get in line; everyone was there to see the holy man. The mother pleaded – her child was about to die – and was told to go to the 4 a.m. Mass the next morning. There the ailing Padre Pio gave a general blessing and was wheeled away in a wheelchair.

Angry at not being able to see him personally, the mother banged on the friary door. She was granted a rare private audience with Padre Pio, who touched Vera Marie and her other children, locked eyes with her and gave her his hand. She kissed his stigmata.

Upon their return to the United States, Dr. Koop showed her an x-ray which showed how her daughter’s bladder, which he had removed, had started to grow back.  

Soon afterward, Padre Pio died.

Determined to make him known, Mrs. Calandra established Padre Pio prayer groups, shrines in other countries and the National Centre for Padre Pio in her home state.

Recalling this story from Monday’s talk, Mrs. Babcock marveled, “Imagine being alive when he was alive and being able to go to San Giovanni Rotondo.” She said she would have done that for her children’s needs if she could have.

“But here he came – to the next town,” she said, referring to the relics’ visit. “I came here because I can do it.”

In his homily Tuesday, Bishop McManus said veneration of relics began in the early Church in Rome, when people soaked garments in martyrs’ blood. The veneration is also tied to the Theology of the Incarnation, he said. He called for keeping in mind the gift of human life, noting that Christ humbled himself to share in our humanity and that Catholics respect the body and oppose what destroys it, including abortion and euthanasia.