Italian Saint Stirs Up a Mix of Faith and Commerce
【The New York Timesより、以下転載】こないだCNNの記事で知った聖人であり、聖痕者であるピオ神父に関するその後の記事です。
The only visible parts of Padre Pio are his fingers, blackened now 40 years after he died. The palms, which once provoked sharp debates over how they came to be marked with the same wounds as Christ’s, are covered by his famous half gloves (replicas of which can be bought here for $8, or for $4.75, a Padre Pio snow globe).
The face is made of wax, a convincing likeness, gray beard and all.
“It left me breathless,” said Rosa Michitelli, 60, a nurse who as a girl attended Mass celebrated by Padre Pio, then a Capuchin monk suspected of fraud and self-promotion by the Vatican but since his canonization in 2002, Italy’s most revered saint. “It was just like when he was alive.”
Ms. Michitelli spoke just after seeing Padre Pio’s body, which was put on display here Thursday. She was one of the first.
Some 750,000 people have made reservations to see him between now and December — a testament to his enduring popularity, a thirst for something immediately spiritual that the Roman Catholic Church often does not provide and, it cannot be ignored, the need to expand tourism in a town that while attracting eight million visitors a year has too many hotels and not enough tourists who actually stay the night.
“This is an opportunity we have to turn religious tourism into mass tourism,” said Massimiliano Ostillio, who is in charge of tourism for the region of Puglia, which makes up the heel on Italy’s boot.
Occupancy rates for the 125 or so hotels in this town where Padre Pio lived for more than 50 years are the lowest in Italy, Mr. Ostillio said. He said he hoped that the large number of people expected to come to see Padre Pio might stay longer, then explore the rest of Puglia (not to mention possibly buy more Padre Pio thimbles, statues, key chains, rosaries, alarm clocks, plates and candles), just as visitors to the shrine of St. Francis in Assisi spill over into the surrounding region of Umbria.
Holy places are always like this, a mix of money and real devotion, more so in recent years in Europe as an aging population flocks to shrines like Lourdes in France and Medjugorje in Bosnia in ever larger numbers. They represent, many experts say, a sort of concrete spirituality — a sickness to be cured, a favor granted — all unbound by the institution of the church.
The church, said Antonio Socci, an Italian expert on Padre Pio, “is the world of the human, for good or for bad.”
“But in the case of saints, it is the tangible presence of God,” he added.
And so the church has often looked with suspicion on modern miracles and their workers, perhaps most so in the case of Padre Pio, born Francesco Forgione in 1887 in the small southern village of Pietrelcina. Around 1911, as a young and exceptionally devout priest, he wrote that he began to experience something disturbing.
“Last night something happened which I can neither explain nor understand,” he wrote to a friend. “In the middle of the palms of my hands a red mark appeared, about the size of a penny, accompanied by acute pain in the middle of the red marks.”
The wound spread to his feet and his side. Soon his stigmata became famous, attracting huge numbers of pilgrims and enough money that he eventually built a hospital that was once the biggest in southern Italy. Popes had various opinions of him, however, the harshest being John XXIII, who, a recent book contends, considered him a fraud and a womanizer. In 1960, the pope wrote of Padre Pio’s “immense deception.”
A Vatican doctor called him “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity.” Many suspected that his wounds were caused by carbolic acid, which, one recently unearthed document contends, he once ordered from a pharmacist.
But Pope John Paul II, who had confessed to him in the 1940s and who canonized more saints than any other pope, had a different view. He canonized Padre Pio, who died in 1968 at age 81, before what had been reported as one of the biggest crowds that had ever traveled to Rome.
Padre Pio, now officially St. Pio of Pietrelcina, has since been accepted by the Vatican, and the crowd here seemed to have no doubt about the legitimacy of his wounds. (He has been credited with other powers, like levitation and bi-location, the ability to be in two places at one time.)
“He was suffering,” Concetta Crescenzi, 65, who visited Padre Pio with a German friend in 1966, said during a Mass on Thursday that marked the opening of the crypt with Padre Pio’s body in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. “He had blood coming out of his hands. If you saw it, you would believe it.”
With that, Brunella Pardini, 69, stood up from a chair nearby. “This is a demonstration of its truth!” she proclaimed, surveying the crowd that had come for the Mass. “Blessed are those who believe without seeing!”
The crowd, actually, may not have been the best test. Organizers and the Italian media expected a huge turnout — and no fewer than 16 satellite trucks were on hand to provide live coverage. But by no means all of the 10,000 seats that organizers set out were occupied. It was possible to get a sandwich at lunch, just a few yards from the sanctuary, without a wait.
“I thought you literally wouldn’t be able to walk,” said Brady White, an American actor and Padre Pio devotee who works part of the year doing Cartier commercials as a high-end Santa Claus and lives here the other part. “Maybe the Italians know to wait.”
In fact, several experts said they did not believe that the relatively small turnout represented any diminution of the popularity of Padre Pio, whose image protects gardens, restaurants and motor vehicles around Italy, especially in the south.
To see the body, reservations must be made — and the reserved tours do not start until Friday. Given the demographic of many Padre Pio devotees, which is to say thrifty pensioners, it seemed unlikely that they would come both for the Mass and then later to see the body.
And for those let in Thursday without reservations, the body itself was something to see.
When Padre Pio’s crypt was opened earlier this year, the head was described as partly skeletal, though the hands were reportedly in perfect shape, with no traces of stigmata. A wax mask was ordered from a London company that once supplied Madame Tussauds. The company’s employees worked entirely from photographs.
The result is spooky, his eyes closed and skin somewhere in complexion between life and death, in his brown monk’s robe and black slippers. It was, for many local residents, the same face they saw in 1968 when he died, a moment that did not end his veneration but, in some ways, put it on a more eternal trajectory.
“I felt my heart palpitating,” said Antonietta Ritrovato, 63, who first saw him when she was a child and attended his funeral. “He has performed so many miracles. He is a man who is just and saintly.”
死後40年経って、まさに今、遺体が公開されている訳です。この記事にも書かれていますが、当初は詐欺師ではないか、自己宣伝ではないかと疑われ、バチカンの医師が彼を無知で自傷の精神異常者とまで呼んでいたそうです。
こういった迫害の中、前教皇ヨハネ・パウロ２世になってようやく列聖されたそうです。う～ん、ルルドの場合もそうだったようですが、みんな当初は懐疑の目で見られ、むしろ迫害などの困難な状況に陥るようですね。
それが今では年間800万人の人が訪れ、今回の公開にあたって12月まででもう75万人が公開見学の予約をしているそうです。まさに巡礼ブームの様相を呈し、観光業が盛り上がっているようです。
さすがは、カトリックの国で今もなおエクソシストの需要が増える一方のイタリアだけのことはあります。あ～ＧＷ中、ヨーロッパ行きたかった！！ 飛行機取れなかったもんなあ、残念（涙）。夏は是非、行きたいもんです。
そうそう、先日メロンさんよりコメントで以下のサイトのご紹介を受けました。ピオ神父のことを取り扱っていますので合わせてご案内します。いつも皆さん、情報有り難うございます（お辞儀）。
http://therese.fc2web.com/
聖痕(stigmata)：ブログ内関連記事
十字架につけられたキリストの傷のすべて、あるいはそのうちのいくつかがある人の身体、すなわち手、足、脇腹、額に現れる現象。傷は外的な原因なしに自然に発生し、定期的に流血がある。
聖痕を受けた人(stigmatic)の中で最もよく知られているのはアッシージの聖フランシスコである。1224年9月17日にアルヴェルニア山上での脱魂状態の間にフランシスコは天使（セラフィム）が十字架につけられたイエズスの姿を示し、自分の身体に聖痕を刻み付けるのを見た。この時から、二年後にフランシスコが死ぬまでこの聖痕から血が流れ出た。フランシスコはこの現象を隠そうとしたが隠し切れなかった。この時以来、聖痕を受けた約320人について、学者による調査が行われ、そのうちの60人以上が列聖された聖人である。
真性の聖痕は脱魂状態に陥った人にだけ現れ、それに先立って鋭い感覚的苦しみと精神的苦しみが伴い、それによって聖痕保持者は苦しむキリストに似た者となる。苦しみを伴わない聖痕の場合には、聖痕の目的が十字架につけられたキリストとの象徴的一致とキリストの順境の一端を担うことにあることから、その真性について大きい疑いが持たれる。
何世紀にも渡る教会法上の手続きの後、教会は真性の聖痕と認めるためのある種の判断基準を定めた。キリストが受けたのと同じ場所に傷が現れているかどうかもその一つである。ヒステリーまたは催眠によって血の汗が流れる場合には、キリストの傷と同じ箇所に傷は現れない。一般に傷から鮮血が流れ、キリストの受難の日または受難と関連のある日、例えば聖金曜日またはキリストの祝日に痛みが生じる。傷は化膿することはなく、そこから流れ出る血はまじりけのないものである。これに反して、身体のほかの箇所にできたごくわずかの傷であってもそれは化膿する。
さらに聖痕の傷は通常の医療行為によっては治らず、長い場合には30～40年持続する。傷からは血が流れ出て、それは真性の出血であって聖痕を受けた最初だけでなく、何回も繰り返して出血がある。また、出血範囲も異常であって聖痕の傷は主要血管から離れて表層だけにとどまっている。それにもかかわらず真性の出血がある。
最後に聖痕を受けるのは徳を英雄的程度にまで実行し、十字架に対する特別の愛をもつ人だけである。（語源はラテン語stgma、ギリシャ語の「いれずみ」を意味する語から）
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