Padre Pio lived from 1887 to 1968. This modern saint appears to many serious Catholics as if he were the last non-martyr saint. Why? Because he seems to be the last with apostolic miracles, apostolic faith and only the ancient sacraments at his belt—not to mention heaven’s own approbation with extremely rare gifts like the stigmata, bilocation, healing and even raising the dead. Padre Pio is in a different galaxy of holiness than say, Carlo Acutis. (I’m sure that boy was a nice kid, but if all it takes to get “canonized” is to run a Catholic website, then even losers like me are going to be shoe-ins for the honors of the altar one day. Heaven forbid such a low bar.)
Again, note closely I wrote non-martyr saint. See how I have been recently posting even on Twitter about the many Christian martyrs in Middle East today.
We move on to the topic of this article: Vatican II was a pastoral council that trudged-on from 1962 to 1965. Notice that “the Council” (as people suspiciously call it) overlapped with some of Padre Pio’s last difficult years on earth. Many modernists like to connect Vatican II to Padre Pio by reminding their listeners how many bishops and Cardinals went from Rome to San Giovanni Rotondo during breaks from Vatican II to get advice from Padre Pio. (San Giovanni Rotondo is where Padre Pio lived from 1916 to his death in 1968.) In this way, modernists think they prove that both “the institutional Church” and “the charismatic Church” were behind Vatican II.
First of all, it is a Protestant notion that the “institutional Church” is separated from the “charismatic Church” (whatever that is.) Some Protestants claim this divide between those two imaginary things became more pronounced in AD 313 at the Edict of Milan. Secondly, I recently showed here that not even the true institutional Church was officially behind Vatican II. Rather, it was only a pastoral gathering containing no external marks of infallibility. Thirdly, we will see in today’s article that saints like Padre Pio is neither to be credited for the theological direction of Vatican II (as modernists claim) nor did he ever approve of the overturning of the ancient sacraments.
Before we go further, let’s review what most of you already understand: Catholics today attend Mass in one of three forms:
1) The Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) which uses exclusively the Roman Canon. The Roman Canon goes back to Apostolic times, as I recently proved on a video on a LifeSite interview. Unfortunately, only about 1% of Catholics across the globe attend this ancient Mass following Vatican II.
2) An Eastern Divine Liturgy. Even though this also houses the worship of only 1% of Catholics of the world, it accounts for 23 of the 24 rites of the sacraments in the Catholic Church. These too are Apostolic in origin and were less affected by “the changes” of the 1960s than the next category, but still somewhat affected by Vatican II and modernism (as I recently discovered traveling Egypt while comparing the unchanged Coptic Orthodox Divine Liturgy to the modernized Coptic Catholic Divine Liturgy.)
3) The Novus Ordo Missae (NOM) which was fabricated at Vatican II, and which 98% of the world’s Catholics attend, from Peru to Japan. It is modernism embodied in both theology and liturgy. The NOM is probably what you attend if you attend Mass in English or Spanish or Indonesian or whatever vernacular is not Latin (although there is that rare NOM in Latin, too.) During Vatican II, it is a non-disputable fact that Protestants and freemasons were invited by Catholic clerics to help write the NOM (and seven new Roman sacraments.) This is proven with countless footnotes on the freemason Bugnin in Dr. Taylor Marshall’s book Infiltration.
Where did Padre Pio fall on all this? As a mystic, he probably knew the dangers that were happening at Vatican II. However, even if all the modernist clergy who purport to have visited Pio for advice at San Giovanni in the 1960s were lying—lying either about their visit or Pio’s own approval of their attempted-destruction of the Church—we know for a fact that when Padre Pio heard he might have to celebrate the NOM, even that ultra-obedient friar balked. Why? Because he understood obedience-to-man can never trump obedience-to-God. The SSPX recounts: “When Cardinal Bacci came to see him in order to bring the authorization [of the NOM] Padre Pio let a complaint escape in the presence of the pope’s messenger: ‘For pity sake, end the Council quickly.'”
Thus, it is a fact that Saint Padre Pio never offered the Novus Ordo. I would encourage you to read the above two links outside this website after finishing this article. Nor did the stigmatized-saint ever preach modernist theology as found in documents like Lumen Gentium and Nostra Ætate. Here is Pio’s final Mass in which he was [unfortunately] forced to face the people, but he remained “attached” (as modernist heretics say of Apostolic Catholics) to the TLM until the end: