Posts by Padre Pio Devotions

Jesus has done ninety-nine percent of what is necessary to make us saints. He is quite prepared to do the other one percent, but we will not let him. What did he cry for over Jerusalem? How often I would have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but…

God stands at the center of our lives just as Jesus stands at the center of the Gospel story. Jesus is the source of the gift of healing, but he is easily forgotten. He does not force himself into the lives of the ten lepers. Only one of them makes the connection between his good…

  In all trouble, you should seek God. . . .God can only relieve your troubles if you in your anxiety cling to Him. Trouble should not really be thought of as this incident or that in particular, for our whole life on earth involves trouble; and through the troubles of our earthly pilgrimage we…

The contemplative life is not a life that offers a few good moments between the many bad ones, but a life that transforms all our time into a window through which the invisible world becomes visible. Contemplative prayer requires that we listen, that we let God speak to us when he wants and in the…

Many things are given to us through the Holy Spirit, but they are valueless if the chief gift of charity is lacking. . . Even if all the other gifts are lacking, charity will take us to the kingdom of God. Although faith can exist without charity, only the faith that works through love can…

To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not ‘coming to me.’ Heaven is here. We have simply not been able to realize that yet because, like King Arthur and his search for the Holy Grail, we look in all the wrong places, worship all the wrong idols, get fixated on all the wrong…

I don’t believe that my life is a long row of randomly chained incidents and accidents of which I am not much more than a passive victim. No, I think that nothing is accidental but that God molded me through the events of my life and that I am called to recognize his molding hand…

By justice, Jesus Christ once risen should have ascended at once to the glory of the right hand of the Father . . . And yet we know very well that for forty days he wanted to be seen as risen. And why? To affirm, as St. Leo says, by such an excellent mystery, the…

For me, there is no greater image than the Holy Face of Jesus because it embodies the physical and spiritual suffering of Christ, the Redeemer. In the Holy Face, the sick person sees how suffering can and should be accepted. By imploring the Lord to sanctify his suffering and make it similar to Jesus’, it…

If Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain. (I Corinthians 15:14) But he is risen. The tomb is empty. . .It is the emptiness that matters. He is not here. He has risen. All the chambers of my heart, of my being, need to be emptied, even of beautiful images, of holy images,…