Canonization of Padre Pio. (News in Brief).

Vatican City -- On June 16, the Pope hailed the new saint as a model of prayer and charity, saying, "(he) invites us to place God above all." In a later homily, John Paul noted of Padre Pio, "In the course of his life, he participated in the mystery of the cross, including physically." This refers to the phenomenon by which Padre Pio is best known to the general public--the stigmata of the five wounds of Christ which appeared on his body from September 1918 until his death in 1968. This, with other spiritual gifts such as bilocation and the "reading of souls," brought much popular attention to the humble Capuchin friar. It also resulted in suspicion of fraud falling upon him on the part of church authorities. At one point he was even banned from saying Mass in public.

Padre Pio's canonization was celebrated around the world, including at churches in India, Argentine and the Philippines, but nowhere more intensely than at San Giovanni Rotondo in his native southern Italy, where 60,000 people gathered in his memory. It was at the Franciscan monastery here that he died, after spending the years of his priesthood there since 1916.

Padre Pio's legacy to the world is two-fold. On the precipitous mountainside above San Giovanni Rotondo isa building with the words in large letters "Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza," the House for the relief of suffering. It is a 1,000-bed hospital which he founded in 1956, a state-of-the-art charitable institution with many volunteer doctors and nurses on staff. No doubt more far-reaching than the hospital will be the Padre Pio prayer groups, the first of which he founded personally in the 1920s to pray for peace and the good of the Church. There are now 2,700 such groups in countries throughout the world.