Homily for the Mass for the Installation of the Relic of Saint Padre Pio

September 18, 2024
Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church
Fort Worth, Texas

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 126:1b-2ab, 2cd-3, 4-5, 6
Galatians 6:14-18
Matthew 11:25-30

Bishop’s homily in English begins at paragraph 5.

Hoy celebramos este ocaso importante en nuestra vida como la Iglesia particular en la diócesis de Fort Worth. Aceptamos la reliquia, primer grado, del Santo Pio de Pietrelcina, Padre Pio. Pero, más importante celebramos el sacrificio de la Misa, la que nos envuelve en el misterio de la Cruz que consumió la vida y el ministerio del Padre Pio.

El cuerpo del Padre Pio sufrió las mismas heridas que sufrió Jesús en Su Crucifixión. Estas heridas y la sangre que brotó de ellas, que incluye la reliquia que esta noche se encuentra presente para veneración en este templo, son más que un espectáculo de magia. Son parte de la gracia particular que recibió el Padre Pio para compartir íntimamente el sufrimiento de Jesús que nos ganó nuestra verdadera liberación del mal y del pecado.

Las heridas y la sangre del Padre Pio son recordatorios tangibles de la dignidad del cuerpo humano y nos muestran que el perdón no es simplemente una idea o pensamiento o una fuerza de la voluntad, sino más bien la acción real del amor de Jesucristo en la ofrenda de Su Cuerpo y Sangre para el podamos responder ofreciéndole todo nuestro ser en nuestro cuerpo y alma.

En las palabras de San Juan Pablo Segundo en el ocaso de la canonización del Padre Pio, “Quien acudía a San Giovanni Rotondo para participar en su misa, para pedirle consejo o confesarse, descubría en él una imagen viva de Cristo doliente y resucitado. En el rostro del padre Pío resplandecía la luz de la resurrección. Su cuerpo, marcado por los «estigmas», mostraba la íntima conexión entre la muerte y la resurrección que caracteriza el misterio pascual. Para el beato de Pietrelcina la participación en la Pasión tuvo notas de especial intensidad: los dones singulares que le fueron concedidos y los consiguientes sufrimientos interiores y místicos le permitieron vivir una experiencia plena y constante de los padecimientos del Señor, convencido firmemente de que el “Calvario es el monte de los santos.”

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In our first reading, the Israelites begged Moses, “We have sinned in complaining against the Lord and you. Pray to the Lord to take the serpents from us.” The Lord then responds to Moses’ prayer by ordering him, “Make a seraph and mount it on a pole, and everyone who has been bitten will look at it and recover.” Moses is obedient to the Lord’s command and makes a bronze serpent, mounts it on a pole, and whenever the serpent would bite someone, that person looked at the bronze serpent and recovered.

This story from the Book of Numbers foreshadows the mystery of Jesus Christ and His Crucifixion and Resurrection as revealed in John’s Gospel, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”

Whenever I read this passage from John’s Gospel, it jars me. John identifies Jesus with the bronze serpent from this story in the Book of Numbers. It is certainly not the metaphor I would have chosen for Christ, but I am not Saint John the Evangelist. The serpent brings back images of the Garden of Eden where the devil used the serpent to tempt and to manipulate Eve. Jesus who did not sin was made to be sin for us. Christ redeems all of God’s creation, including the serpent. The devil who is a thief, a liar, and a murderer, stole the serpent and God will not allow him to keep what is not his own. The devil owns nothing except his own existence for which, much to his rage, he is indebted to God for his being created.

The Israelites ask Moses to have the Lord take away the effects of their sinning, the consequences, the presence of the serpents and the bitter sting of their bite, but they do not repent of their disobedience and complaining. So, God in His mercy, offers them a remedy for their disobedience and its bitter sting. So, it is with all of us in our human condition, we regret the bitter consequences of our sins but not so much that we are willing to surrender our self-will and repent of our sins that truly grieve God. Jesus did not sin, but He took on the consequences of our sins and offered us a path, the only path to eternal life and freedom from sin: His Cross and our share in His Cross.

At his canonization in June of 2002, Pope Saint John Paul II said of Padre Pio, “In God’s plan, the Cross constitutes the true instrument of salvation for the whole of humanity and the way clearly offered by the Lord to those who wish to follow Him (cf. Mk 16,24). The Holy Franciscan of the Gargano understood this well, when on the Feast of the Assumption in 1914, he wrote: ‘In order to succeed in reaching our ultimate end we must follow the divine Head, who does not wish to lead the chosen soul on any way other than the one he followed; by that, I say, of abnegation and the Cross’.”

The life and priestly ministry of Padre Pio were humbly dedicated to the celebration of the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation whereby he administered the mercy of God generously to penitents and, because of his closeness to Christ through the particular and painful grace of the stigmata, was especially sensitive to those who entered his confessional only as a curiosity, or others who entered but were only remorseful for their sins but not truly penitent — regretful for the painful effects of sin, but not sorrowful for their ingratitude to Almighty God by embracing their sins with indifference to His love.

In this way, through the particular grace afforded Padre Pio of sharing the stigmata of the Crucified Christ, he faithfully witnessed to the words of Saint Paul to the Galatians, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world… From now on, let no one make troubles for me; for I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.”

The particular grace of the stigmata that Padre Pio suffered were compounded by the painful interior suffering of being rejected, misunderstood, and persecuted, even by members of the Church. At one time, the members of the Church would declare him to be authentic, then soon another group would denounce him as a charlatan and a fraud. At one time he would be forbidden to offer Mass publicly and forbidden to hear confessions, and then another time he would be encouraged to hear confessions and to offer Mass frequently in the presence mostly of those who only found him to be a curiosity or a spectacle. Yet, through all of this, Padre Pio never criticized his superiors; he never complained about them, nor did he manipulate or undermine his superiors in the Church. He offered a humble example of Christlike obedience by trusting in Jesus Himself.

Padre Pio said, “Where there is no obedience, there is no virtue; there is neither goodness nor love. And where there is no love, there is no God. Without God, we cannot reach Heaven. These virtues form a ladder; if a step is missing, we fall down.” This virtue of obedience is not well received by many of us in our contemporary times. We are suspicious of it and those to whom we owe legitimate obedience: fathers and mothers, teachers, priests, bishops, police officers, government officials, and even physicians. We prefer to cherish our own autonomy to the point that we demand our own private Catholic doctrine and presume that God and others should accept us on our own terms. On the other hand, this is in part because obedience can only be fostered when those entrusted with the duty to require obedience are themselves clearly accountable to the Truth. Where we find ourselves tortured by suspicion of those in authority within our souls, where instead we should find a docility and willingness to obey, we can turn to Padre Pio in prayer not only for ourselves but for those in legitimate authority to whom we owe respect and obedience.

At his beatification in May of 1999, Pope Saint John Paul II preached, “No less painful, and perhaps even more distressing from a human point of view, were the trials which he had to endure as a result, it might be said, of his incomparable charisms. It happens at times in the history of holiness that, by God’s special permission, the one chosen is misunderstood. In that case, obedience becomes for him a crucible of purification, a path of gradual assimilation to Christ, a strengthening of true holiness. In this regard, Bl. Pio wrote to one of his superiors: ‘I strive only to obey you, the good God having made known to me the one thing most acceptable to Him and the one way for me to hope for salvation and to sing of victory’.”

The interior sufferings of Padre Pio and the external sufferings of the wounds he experienced would have only been existential pain and hopeless anxiety were it not for his decision and willingness to accept the grace of Christ and transform these sufferings into love by his surrender to Christ and the will of the Father. It is in this way, that Padre Pio was most clearly configured to Jesus Christ and to the marks of His Crucifixion in his own life. This decision and willingness to love as Christ asked him to love is only able to come about through an honest and powerless recourse to daily prayer in the silence of our hearts.

As Pope Saint John Paul II said on the occasion of Padre Pio’s canonization, “The ultimate reason for the apostolic effectiveness of Padre Pio, the profound root of so much spiritual fruitfulness can be found in that intimate and constant union with God, attested to by his long hours spent in prayer and in the confessional. He loved to repeat, ‘I am a poor Franciscan who prays’ convinced that ‘prayer is the best weapon we have, a key that opens the heart of God’.”

In a few moments we will approach Christ’s altar of sacrifice which through His generous consideration of our humanity He has simultaneously transformed into the banquet table of the new and eternal Passover. What He offers us is Himself, His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, that we might become His Body as His Church — thinking not of ourselves but of Him, present in our neighbor, especially those who this world rejects, as this world rejected Him. In this perfect sacrifice and transformative meal, Christ is lifted up for us not as a spectacle but for our spiritual nourishment as the only fitting “Victim who offers Himself to Divine Justice, paying the price of our redemption,” the Bread of Eternal Life.