a delicate choice (continued) ....
Or it could take a strictly materialist approach, quick to criticise and wilfully cynical. In art, it is undeniable that in our time it is cynicism and denigration which pay. The frantic desire to cut off any heads which might raise themselves too high does the rest. To say, 40 years after Padre Pio's death, that he fabricated his wounds with acid, will still find a public through a few Internet sites, even if we know today that this was not medically possible.
I therefore chose …. a third way. I admit that the mystery remains fairly opaque and I have infinite respect for the personality, which was good, pious and charismatic. But the life of Padre Pio, the testimonies which have been gathered, and his enormous personal correspondence also give as many indications which can nourish our hypotheses. Neither do I seek to hide the picturesque facts which surround the life of Padre Pio.
Were the exceptional manifestations experienced by Padre Pio of divine origin?
One may have some doubt about that (although I would have neither the vanity nor the stupidity to express any certainty). I would have liked it to be true.
Recalling briefly that ‘stigmatisation’ is not the exclusive property of Christian mystics and that certain Hindu mystics are said to have physical abilities which are in principle ‘impossible’ (such as walking on water or flying), I have ended up considering that Padre Pio could have been one of these exceptional beings capable of making continuous use of an outside force which is still unknown. This force is not necessarily of divine origin. The fact that Padre Pio always attributed the exceptional manifestations illustrated by his whole life to God is a separate question.
I have been granted the opportunity, once in my modest and not particularly Christian existence, to experience an absolutely inexplicable phenomenon of this type for about ten seconds. This encourages me even more to think that the great mystics possess a special capacity to provoke these exceptional phenomena (healings, moving objects, levitation, etc).
‘Man in black’
Finally, I would like to speak to you about a very special person: Padre Pio himself named him ‘the Man in Black’. It is he who brought him transverberation. He talked about him elsewhere many times as well.
We know that the whole life of Padre Pio was marked, from his youngest years, by ‘encounters’ as improbable as they were painful. When he was little, there were horrible black figures who came to strike him. When he was a monk, the devil often came to tempt him (wearing the features of a parishioner, or of the Virgin Mary - to whom the Padre Pio devoted a very filial cult -, or of the Provincial Father of the monastery). Sometimes naked women also came to dance before him, he said. So is Christ himself always who you think he is?
Not knowing the truth of the matter, I thought that this ‘man in black’ could be the central points of the enigma: and if not, a powerful dramatic spring… So in my story, he becomes the central pivot of the plot. Maybe a fairly ordinary projection of the mind (very possible according to what I perceive of Padre Pio's psychology), and one who will favour the designs of anyone who manages to give birth to him, the ‘man in black’ is the man of the first encounter; then he is Christ who brings the stigmata, before becoming the Provincial Father.
He is also the witness of Padre Pio’s work and its commentator. He is the one who denounces his incoherencies, such as the stigmata which do not really correspond to the wounds of Christ's agony (‘And the sign that God has given you? Everything is false! Everything is false! On the cross, his wrists were nailed and not his hands! Would God have cheated you?) He helps him, before abandoning him, discouraged, believing that Padre Pio has not been able to get to the bottom of his reflections on the power he wields.
But who is he truly? I have left him his mystery, of course. Is he, as I have him say, ‘a thought incarnate’? He asks the question himself!
The persons of the Opera and their voices
Padre Pio, baritone. (young in the first act; old thereafter).
"The Man in Black", tenor.
The Virgin Mary: soprano.
Padre Benedetti, bass (he is Padre Pio’s friend, confidant and confessor)
Mgr Gillardino, tenor. (The very dubious bishop I have mentioned above).
Canon Palladini, baritone. (The damned soul of the bishop. Also cynical and cunning).
Angela, soprano (a peasant woman who comes to Padre Pio to beg him to save her husband's life).
"The Temptress", soprano. As her name indicates.
Chorus of villagers
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