Padre Pio: Stories and Memories of My Mentor and Friend

“Do you understand who Padre Pio was?” Fr. Gabriele Amorth once asked a child. “Yes," the child answered, "He was a friar who told jokes.”

This colorful memoir offers a rare, close-up glimpse of the life and personality of St. Padre Pio, the greatly beloved modern saint who was blessed with many amazing spiritual gifts. The late Father Amorth—well-known as the chief exorcist at the Vatican—enjoyed over two decades of a close friendship with the holy and quirky Capuchin monk, whom he considered his spiritual father. Adding his own first-hand experience to a foundation of biographical research, Amorth gives an entertaining but illuminating account of perhaps the best known saint of the 20th century.

In this compact book, we learn how a young Padre Pio cured himself of a childhood disease by wolfing down all his mother’s fried bell peppers. We sense what it was like to go to confession with the friar, famous not only for reading consciences, but for his blunt, slap-like remarks to hardened penitents: “When are you going to quit being such a pig?” We hear first-hand accounts of his miracles, of his stigmata, of his long, moving Masses.

We also encounter the Padre’s warmth, with his Italian gift for mimicry, humor, and storytelling. We are told what he wanted most in his last hour: “When I appear before the Lord, I hope to be accompanied by two mamas: Mary, Most Holy and my mama.” 

Rather than a plaster image of a great modern saint, this book is a portrait of a fully human kind of holiness, proof that even the most transcendent graces can be lived out on earth with simplicity and joy.