Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pray, Hope, and Do Not Worry: The Eternal Legacy of Padre Pio: His Death, His Glorification, and His Living Intercession, Book 3, (Paperback)

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was a Capuchin friar and Catholic saint of San Giovanni Rotondo who bore the stigmata. When the wounds that marked him for fifty years vanished at his death, what remained of his teaching for the faithful who sought him?

In the early hours of 23 September 1968, the friars of San Giovanni Rotondo prepared the body of their brother and found his flesh completely smooth, the scars of half a century gone. This final volume traces the massive expansion of devotion that followed his passing, leading to Saint Peter's Square where Pope John Paul II elevated him before hundreds of thousands of the faithful. It distills the core of his spiritual instruction: the Mass as the axis of existence, the confessional as the bath of the soul, and suffering as a privileged path of sanctity. The record closes at the crypt where pilgrims gather, leaving the faithful with a complete spiritual program built on his enduring maxim to pray, hope, and do not worry.

• The final days: the physical deterioration of his last months and the spontaneous arrival of one hundred thousand mourners at his funeral.
• Road to canonization: the thirty years of gathering testimony that culminated in his canonization by the same pope who had once written to him for prayers.
• Sacramental medicine: his insistence on the Sacrament of Reconciliation as mercy and prayer as the absolute oxygen of the Christian life.
• Redemptive suffering: his theology of the narrow door and the necessity of uniting personal pain to the Passion of Christ.

Book Three of Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio. The Boy Who Saw Angels examines the youth of Francesco Forgione and his innate piety as a rural child communicating with heavenly spirits; The Wounds That Healed the World observes his reception of the physical marks of Christ and his decades of daily dedication to the sacrament of penance.

Readers seeking context for his canonization by Pope John Paul II, a closer look at his perspective on the sacrament of penance, and the core principles of his spiritual instruction.