Selections of St. Padre Pio on the Jews

Francesco Forgione (25 May 1887 – 23 September 1968), known in religion as Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, was an Italian Capuchin Franciscan friar, priest, stigmatist, and mystic. Beatified by Pope John Paul II on 2 May 1999 and canonized on 16 June 2002, he is venerated worldwide and is one of the most popular Catholic saints of the twentieth century. Born to a peasant family in Pietrelcina in the Kingdom of Naples, he entered the Capuchin order at fifteen and was ordained in 1910. He received the visible stigmata on 20 September 1918 — the first priest in the history of the Church to bear the wounds of Christ — and retained them until his death fifty years later. He spent virtually his entire priestly life at the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo in Apulia, where he was renowned for his hours in the confessional, his reported gifts of bilocation, prophecy, and reading of hearts, and his founding of the hospital Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (Home for the Relief of Suffering). He was canonized together with a declaration of his heroic virtue and the confirmation of miracles worked through his intercession.

Preface: The Shape of the Corpus

Padre Pio’s surviving written corpus is considerably narrower in theological scope than those of the Doctors of the Church. His Epistolario — collected in four volumes and edited by Fr. Gerardo di Flumeri, O.F.M. Cap. — consists almost entirely of letters to his Capuchin spiritual directors (chiefly Fr. Benedetto Nardella and Fr. Agostino Daniele), letters to his many spiritual children, and a small body of letters to family members, together with a handful of early student essays (Componimenti scolastici). The letters are overwhelmingly concerned with mystical suffering, spiritual direction, the Passion of Christ, prayer, and the battle against the devil. Padre Pio was not a polemical theologian, and the Epistolario contains no sustained treatment of the Jews, Judaism, or the Mosaic Law of the kind found in the writings of Chrysostom, Aquinas, or even contemporaries such as Fr. Denis Fahey.

One significant passage attributed to Padre Pio survives in a biographical source: the 1978 account by Giuseppe Pagnossin, a devotee who recorded personal conversations with the stigmatist in Il Calvario di Padre Pio (Padova: Pagnossin, 1978). This passage, reproduced below, is the primary evidence for Padre Pio’s views on the Jews as a theological subject.

The document that follows reproduces the Pagnossin passage in the original Italian with English translation, together with an analytical note. A closing observation addresses the evidentiary status of the passage and what its partial indications, taken together with Padre Pio’s formation in pre-Vatican II Capuchin theology, allow and do not allow us to conclude.

I. Deicide, Theological Enmity, and Anti-Masonic Warning: The Pagnossin Account

Il Calvario di Padre Pio, Vol. I, p. 91

(Giuseppe Pagnossin, Il Calvario di Padre Pio, 2 vols., Padova: Pagnossin, 1978. Passage reported in Italian; English translation below.)

Original Italian:

“Padre Pio, con il volto improvvisamente fattosi grave e quasi trasfigurato dal dolore, mi guardò fisso e disse: ‘I Giudei sono i nemici di Dio. Essi sono quelli che Lo hanno ucciso. E ora vogliono uccidere la Sua Chiesa attraverso la Massoneria.’ Poi, dopo un breve silenzio, aggiunse con voce ancora più ferma: ‘Ma non prevarranno! La Chiesa è di Cristo e Lui la difenderà sempre, anche se deve passare per il Calvario. Noi dobbiamo pregare e fare penitenza, perché il fumo di Satana è entrato nel tempio di Dio.'”

English Translation:

“Padre Pio, his face suddenly turning grave and almost transfigured by pain, looked at me fixedly and said: ‘The Jews are the enemies of God. They are those who killed Him. And now they want to kill His Church through Freemasonry.’ Then, after a brief silence, he added with an even firmer voice: ‘But they will not prevail! The Church belongs to Christ and He will always defend her, even if she must pass through Calvary. We must pray and do penance, because the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.'”

Note: This is the sole extended passage attributing explicit theological hostility toward the Jews to Padre Pio. It contains three distinct elements that place it within the classic Adversus Judaeos tradition: (1) the deicide charge — “they are those who killed Him” — assigning corporate moral culpability to the Jews for the death of Christ, in the manner of Acts 13:27 and Matthew 27:25 as read by the pre-Vatican II Church; (2) a declaration of enduring theological enmity — “enemies of God” — which echoes formulations found in Chrysostom, Aquinas, and numerous saints of the patristic and medieval periods; and (3) a conspiratorial linking of Jewish religious opposition to the Church with Freemasonry, a connection that was standard in traditional Catholic apologetics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated with figures such as Pope Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus (1884) and the anti-Masonic literature of Fr. Edward Cahill, S.J., and others. The framing of the statement — “the Church will pass through Calvary but will not be destroyed” — situates it within Padre Pio’s broader mystical worldview, in which the Church’s suffering is understood as participatory in the Passion of Christ.

Caveat on Source and Provenance: This passage requires careful evidentiary qualification. It is reported speech, recorded by a devotee in a 1978 biography, not a text written by Padre Pio himself. It therefore lacks the documentary certainty of the Epistolario. Two specific concerns bear noting. First, Padre Pio died on 23 September 1968. The closing phrase attributed to him — “il fumo di Satana è entrato nel tempio di Dio” (“the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God”) — is famously associated with Pope Paul VI’s homily of 29 June 1972, delivered four years after Padre Pio’s death, in which the Pope used almost identical language. Whether Padre Pio and Paul VI independently employed the same phrase from the common stock of traditional Catholic imagery, or whether Pagnossin’s 1978 account was unconsciously coloured by Paul VI’s by-then widely circulated expression, cannot be determined without independent corroboration. Second, Pagnossin’s work as a whole represents an admiring devotee’s personal recollections rather than a critical historical record. None of this necessarily renders the passage false — Padre Pio’s Capuchin formation in pre-Vatican II theology would have made the deicide charge and the identification of Jews as “enemies of God” entirely standard positions, and the anti-Masonic connection to Jewish power was a commonplace of traditionalist Catholic thought in his milieu. The passage is reproduced here as Pagnossin reports it, with these caveats transparently stated.

Closing Observation: The Testimony of Silence and Formation

The thinness of the documented record on this subject is itself historically significant and must be stated plainly. Unlike St. John Chrysostom, who devoted eight homilies to the Jews, or Fr. Denis Fahey, who made the Jewish question a central preoccupation of his published work, Padre Pio left virtually no written trace of systematic thinking on Judaism. His Epistolario, running to thousands of pages across four volumes, treats the Passion of Christ in the most intense and personal terms — he described feeling the physical sufferings of Christ’s crucifixion throughout his priestly life — yet in all those pages he never names the Jews as the agents of that Passion in the way that Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, or John of Avila do, even in passing, in their own mystical writings.

What can be said with confidence is contextual rather than textual: Padre Pio was formed entirely within the pre-Vatican II Capuchin theological tradition, which taught supersessionism as a matter of course — the Mosaic covenant had been superseded and fulfilled in Christ; the Church was the new Israel; the Jews‘ continuing rejection of Christ constituted a theological condition of “unbelief” to be mourned and prayed for, not affirmed. The standard Capuchin curriculum of his novitiate (1902–1904) and seminary years would have included precisely the supersessionist theology encoded in the writings of the Spanish Carmelite Doctors reproduced elsewhere in this series. That Padre Pio held these views as background assumptions is highly probable; that he elaborated them in writing is not evidenced.

The Pagnossin account, taken on its own terms and with its caveats acknowledged, testifies to a Padre Pio who expressed the deicide charge, the language of enduring enmity, and the anti-Masonic connection in oral conversation — consistent with the standard theological formation of a devout pre-conciliar Italian friar, and consistent with the anti-Modernist and anti-Masonic atmosphere of his San Giovanni Rotondo circle. It does not testify to a systematic thinker on this subject, and the document above makes no claim beyond what the evidence warrants.

Sources

Primary Biographical Source:

Padre Pio’s Primary Writings:

  • Epistolario, 4 vols., ed. Fr. Gerardo di Flumeri, O.F.M. Cap. San Giovanni Rotondo: Edizioni “Padre Pio da Pietrelcina,” 1984–1992. English editions: Padre Pio’s Letters, Vols. I–IV, Padre Pio Foundation of America / National Centre for Padre Pio: https://padrepio.com/product/letters-i-book/

On Paul VI’s “Smoke of Satan” Phrase (for the provenance caveat):

  • Paul VI, Homily for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, 29 June 1972. The phrase “il fumo di Satana è entrato nel tempio di Dio” was publicly delivered four years after Padre Pio’s death. Reference and context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre_Pio

On Padre Pio’s Corpus and Life:

On Pre-Vatican II Catholic Supersessionism and Anti-Masonic Teaching (background context):

  • Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus (1884), on Freemasonry. Full text: https://www.vatican.va
  • Cahill, Fr. Edward, S.J. Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement. Dublin: Gill, 1929. Standard pre-conciliar Catholic work on Masonic-Jewish connections in traditionalist apologetics.