Padre Pio

Francesco Forgione was born in 1887 in Pietrelcina, a small farming town in southern Italy, to parents who worked the land and raised their children in a home with no electricity or running water. Even as a small boy, Francesco was known for an intense, almost unsettling seriousness about prayer — he later said he'd been seeing visions of Jesus and Mary since childhood, though he assumed for years that everyone did and simply never talked about it.

His father, Grazio, spent years working abroad in America as a labourer just to afford Francesco's early education and eventual entry into religious life, a sacrifice the family made because the boy had been asking to become a friar since he was ten years old, inspired by a visiting Capuchin monk.

He entered the Capuchin novitiate at fifteen and took the name Pio, and from his earliest years as a friar he was already marked by fragile health — fevers, fainting, and mysterious illnesses that repeatedly sent him home to recover, so much so that his superiors wondered if he'd ever be strong enough to be ordained at all.