Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, the Capuchin priest who carried the wounds of the crucified Christ, embodied truths that have been stridently denied by many who would tell us how to think and what to disbelieve during these times of overwhelming power and overwhelming impotence. This remarkable man bore witness to the essential truth carried in the Christian understanding of the Incarnation , of the human embodiment of the living Christ. As one who bore the stigmata , the five wounds of the crucified Jesus, Padre
He was particularly scathing in his attitude to the phenomenon of stigmatisation, which was first made manifest in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Berdyaev writes:
Berdyaev's curt dismissal of what is, in truth, a providential gift and in the case of many stigmatists, a willing participation in the sufferings of Jesus as a conscious act of co-redemption, is questionable. As self-nominated spokesman for the Eastern churches, Berdyaev may have deemed stigmata as "unacceptable" but this does not alter the fact that they are a part of spiritual reality. In the case of Padre Pio, the stigmata are a re-presentation of the truths lived and the miracles performed by Jesus dur