On September 20th, 1918, a young Capuchin friar named Padre Pio was praying in the choir loft of a small monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. He had just finished celebrating Mass. He later described entering a state of absolute stillness. When he came to, his hands, his feet, and his left side were bleeding from open wounds.

The wounds corresponded to the five wounds of the crucifixion. What was unusual was that they did not heal. They bled, on and off, for the next fifty years.

Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgione in 1887 in the village of Pietrelcina, in southern Italy. He entered the Capuchin order at fifteen and was by all accounts unremarkable until the morning the wounds appeared.

Over the following decades, a succession of doctors examined him. Dr. Giorgio Festa observed the wounds over years and reported that they neither healed nor decayed. They never became infected, which is medically unprecedented for open wounds persisting over decades. Physicians reported that the wounds emitted a floral fragrance rather than the smell of decomposing tissue.

The skeptical position was advanced by Dr. Amico Bignami, who suggested the wounds were self-inflicted using carbolic acid. Other physicians countered that chemical burns heal. Padre Pio's wounds never did. The Vatican itself placed restrictions on his public ministry at various points, not entirely trusting the phenomenon.

He continued to celebrate Mass daily, always wearing fingerless gloves to absorb the blood. Photographs from every decade of his ministry show the same wounds in the same locations, unchanged.

Then, shortly before his death on September 23rd, 1968, the wounds vanished. The doctor present at his deathbed examined his body and found the skin completely healed. No scarring. No residual marks of any kind. Fifty years of open, bleeding wounds, gone without a trace.

The medical files, the photographs, and the testimony of the physicians who examined him are part of the canonical record. Padre Pio was canonized in 2002.

Five wounds appeared on a morning in 1918. They bled for fifty years. They never healed. They never infected. And when he died, they disappeared. The files are still in the archive.

Witnessed. Subscribe.