Excerpt
PROLOGUE

As irony would have it, after I completed the final edit of Healing with Padre Pio I came across a telling little anecdote about the British novelist Graham Greene (whose novel The Power and the Glory was condemned by the Vatican), and whether it is apocryphal or not can’t be certain, but given the converted writer’s Roman Catholic conscience I tend to believe it’s true. I just don’t think he could fabricate a story like this about Padre Pio, who was considered to be a living saint when this story is supposed to have happened.
The story goes that Graham Greene waited almost three years to get a fifteen minute appointment with the living saint who suffered the holy wounds of Jesus (Padre Pio suffered the stigmata for fifty years, which mysteriously vanished just before he died), but before going to his appointment Greene attended a Mass by Padre Pio.
Padre Pio’s Masses had a reputation for their miraculous effect upon people (there are stories of men and women converting to the Roman Catholic faith after attending one of his Holy Masses); but the story goes that after experiencing Padre Pio’s Mass Greene could not keep his appointment with the living saint and returned to England. When asked by his friends why he did not keep his appointment after waiting so long to get it, he replied that he wasn’t prepared for the way Padre Pio would change his life—no doubt, if true, because of the effect that Padre Pio’s Holy Mass must have had upon him.
The celebrated novelist, whose fictional characters always struggled with moral dilemmas, knew in his heart of hearts that the power of Padre Pio’s redemptive grace would call him to higher service, which he wasn’t willing to commit to yet; so he missed his appointment with the humble servant of God, hoping to keep his faith the best way he knew how to mollify his troubled conscience; that’s what I think, anyway.
On September 23, 1968 Padre Pio died as he had lived, with his omnipresent Rosary in his hand (which he prayed up to forty times a day), and on June 16, 2002 in one of the largest liturgies in the Vatican history Pope John Paul II canonized Padre Pio; and he has become the most popular saint in the Roman Catholic Church’s history, with more people making pilgrimages to his tomb in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy than any other Christian holy site in the world, including the Holy Shrine of Lourdes.
“After death I will do more,” declared Padre Pio. “My real mission will begin after my death.” To which my novel attests, because on Monday, August 9, 2010 I had my first appointment with St. Padre Pio, who was channeled by a very gifted spiritual sensitive (she likes to call herself a Medical Intuitive) for my spiritual healing.
I was more anxious about meeting him (albeit in spirit) than I had ever been about meeting anyone in my entire life, including my first romantic date in high school; but I was equally excited by the prospect of talking with a saint on the Other Side.
If Graham Greene’s conscience kept him from keeping his appointment with Padre Pio, who had the gift of reading souls when hearing confessions (it is said that in his lifetime he heard up to five million confessions), so was my conscience still struggling with my past-life issues as “le salaud de Paris” in the mid 17th Century, and the only thing that kept me from changing my mind also was that I had to come to terms with my anger at the Roman Catholic Church once and for all; that’s why I went for a spiritual healing with St. Padre Pio, who is known throughout the world as the “Healing Saint.”
I was terrified, but I kept my appointment, which lasted an hour and a half; and I kept all of my other appointments, one per month for nine months; and St. Padre Pio dealt with my repressed guilt and anger issues with the Holy Mother Church for betraying my trust in my Parisian lifetime, which led to my sexual and moral depravity that fueled my rage at God and Jesus and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as my current-life issues with Christianity’s doctrine on sin, eternal damnation and salvation through Jesus Christ—because I believed in the ancient secret teachings of karma and reincarnation. And out of my ten appointments with St. Padre Pio came my novel Healing with Padre Pio.
My appointments were real to the point of acute embarrassment, but my narrative is a work of fiction. Or, to be perfectly fair to the genre, my story can rightly be called a novel memoir. As Francisco Goldman said in The Paris Review of his poignantly autobiographical novel Say Her Name (the story of his great love for his young wife Aura Estrada who was tragically killed in a surfing accident), “I made things up in order to be able to tell the truth,” I also had to make things up to tell the truth about my spiritual healing—which is the writer’s prerogative. As Padre Pio likes to say, “It is what it is.”
When I asked the Ascended Spiritual Master what he thought of my novel, St. Padre Pio replied, “I am content and satisfied with what we have created.”
I hope you will be, too.


Orest Stocco
Bluewater, Georgian Bay
March 16, 2012