ITALY:FORTY YEARS after his death, Italian saint Padre Pio remains a highly controversial figure. Even as his body was being exhumed from his tomb in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Rotondo, Puglia, southern Italy, on Sunday night, a group of devotees was taking legal action to try to stop the exhumation process.
Despite that legal action, at 23.19 on Sunday night, eight Capuchin friars, acting under the supervision of the papal delegate, Msgr Domenico D'Ambrosio, Archbishop of Manfredonia, opened Padre Pio's tomb. A subsequent statement claimed the body was in a "fair condition" despite problems of humidity in the tomb.
Msgr D'Ambrosio said there was no sign of the "stigmata". But he said, "Padre Pio's fingernails are as if he had just had a manicure."
The most recent saga in the polemical life and death of St Padre Pio came about when the Vatican's Congregation for the Cause of Saints recently gave the go-ahead for the exhumation.
The Capuchin monks at San Giovanni Rotondo, where Padre Pio served as a friar, are keen to mark the 40th anniversary of his death this year by preparing the body for public veneration, due to begin next month. Among those present at the exhumation on Sunday night was Nazzareno Gabrielli, a Holy See specialist who has worked on the preservation of the bodies of at least three popes.
Padre Pio devotees objected to the exhumation, saying the saint should be left to "repose in peace" and expressed fears the Capuchin friars would want to put his body on permanent exhibition in an adjacent ultra-modern church designed by architect Renzo Piano. Over the weekend, however, it emerged the body will be exposed in the much smaller church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which houses his tomb.
St Padre Pio is one of the most popular saints in the Catholic Church, with an estimated seven million pilgrims visiting the San Giovanni Rotondo shrine every year. His devotees suspected the friars might come under pressure from hotel and retail lobbies to move the body into the new church to increase visitor turnover.
During his life, St Padre Pio prompted much controversy because of the "stigmata" - the wounds of Christ's crucifixion - which formed on his hands, feet and side. He was subjected to many Holy See inquiries into his "condition". A recent book by historian Sergio Luzzatto revealed documents in the Vatican archives suggesting that St Padre Pio may have faked his stigmata with acid and may have had "intimate and incorrect relations with women".
The Congregation for the Cause of Saints dismissed all these accusations in the lengthy procedure leading to St Padre Pio's canonisation in 2002 by Pope John Paul II.